Table Of ContentTHE ASCENT FROM NOMINALISM
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
Editors:
WILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh
KEITH LEHRER, University of Arizona
Board of Consulting Editors:
J ON A THAN BENNETT, Syracuse University
ALLAN GIBBARD, University of Michigan
ROBERT STALNAKER, Cornell University
ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University
VOLUME 37
TERR Y PENNER
Department of Philosophy,
The University of Wisconsin at Madison, U.S.A.
THE ASCENT
FROM NOMINALISM
Some Existence Arguments
in Plato's Middle Dialogues
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
~~
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER . ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHTj BOSTONj LANCASTERjTOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Penner, Terry, 1936-
The ascent from nominalism.
(Philosophical studies series; v. 37)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Plato. 2. Aristotle. 3. Metaphysics-History.
4. Nominalism-History. I. Title. II. Series.
B395.P347 1987 111'.2'0924 86·31641
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8186-3 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3791-8
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3791-8
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much of this work was conceived and executed between 1971
and 1975, though some of it was done much earlier, and a few
bits are quite recent. My greatest intellectual debts, other
than to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, are first to my
teach~rs in Gr~ek philosophy, Gilbert Ryle, G.E.L. Owen and
John Ackrill, and, perhaps most influential of all, my for
lIer colleague Gregory Vlastos; second, to the wr i tings of
Frege and Quine; also to related writings of Geach, Church,
Goodman, Carnap and Kaplan; third, to writings in philosophy
of mathematics by Godel, Bernays, Church, Hilbert, Weyl,
Gentzen, Goodstein and Boolos; .fourth, to writings of such
modern causal theorists as Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and
Stampe; fifth, to conversations with Gilbert Harman (on
Quine), Montgomery Furth, Mark Steiner, Richard Kraut (on
Aristotle's universals vs Plato's Forms). Alan Code (on
Quine's attitude to the paradoxes), Dennis Stampe and Berent
Ene;; and also to a conversation (for so I call it) that I
overheard between Richard Rorty and Fred Dretske on whether
or not the world was we 11 lost. Readers who know Putnam's
'On Properties' and Sellars's 'Grammar and Existence' will
recognize how lIuch lowe to those important papers. Two
books that I read in the early 1970's encouraged me to con
tinue on this Platonist venture once I was embarked on it:
Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (in spite of its
Wi ttgensteinianism) and Cudworth's Treatise on Eternal and
ImlRutable Moral ity (in spite of its Cartesianism and its
idealism) .
Various different versions of the essential arguments of
§§1-7 and 9 of 'The Nominalist' were presented at the Uni
versity of Minnesota in Fall i973; to the Western Division
of the A.P.A. in April 1974 (to which Marc Cohen read an ex
tremely helpful reply); and in the spring of 1975 to Simon
Fraser Uni versi ty. The material of §8 was presented at a
Plato conference at the University of Marquette in Spring
1976, and, in an improved version, as a last minute substi
tute paper at the A.P.A. in May 1985. Except for §6, 'Aris-
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
totle's Dilemma' was written for my graduate seminars at the
University of Calgary in spring 1975. Clarifications II and
III were written for my students at Wisconsin in the later
1970's, in order to introduce them to certain views of Pla
tonic passages which were in opposition to my own. (But the
objections to Shorey and Hackforth in the former go back to
my graduate seminars at Princeton in the 1960's).
Clarification VI, on the 'Third Man Argument', is really
a separate story. For an account of my debts in that work
see p. 404, n. 2.
To all the audiences I mention, for questions and diffi
culties, my thanks.
lowe a huge debt to Joan Kung, who selflessly and gen
erously took the time to give me a mass of extremely helpful
detai led comments on the penul t imate draft. Many improve
ments in the present draft lowe to her suggestions. She
also attended some of the seminars in the mid 1970's from
which this book grew, and there too forced me to improve
what I was saying. Robert Turnbull also read the entire pen
ultimate draft and gave me much good advice. Valuable com
ments of Keith Lehrer's pushed me to clarify my attitude to
Russell as a Platonist in the Introduction.
But my greatest debt by far is to several generations of
undergraduate and graduate students at Wisconsin--far too
many to mention. Jor special and numerous contributions to
this manuscript, I must however mention David Ring, Tony
Chu, George Rudebusch, Ruth Saunders, Lila Luce, Alan Code,
Harry Nieves, Paul Warren, Marty Barrett, Melinda Hogan and
Donna Rae McCormick. The last three undertook to proofread
the manuscript for me, and ended up making so many useful
suggestions for small changes resul ting in vast improve
ments, that the original final version became a penultimate
version, and I' ended up being responsible for my own proof
reading. Finally, I must also single out, as a prime source
of learning for me, working on the passages discussed here
in undergraduate tutorials. I consider myself fortunate
indeed to have worked with so many most extraordinarily tal
ented young people. This book is certainly the better for
that good fortune.
The earliest financial support of this work came from a
summer research grant from the American Council of Learned
Societies in 1973, for some work on identity and the rule of
substitution of identicals as applied to thinking about Pla
to's parts of the soul doctrine and Freud's mature doctrine
of the ego, id and super-ego. This work took a more general
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
turn, and became a study of Fregean attitudes to ontology
(connected with this work on ipentity in psychological con
texts) and the effect of such ettitudes on our understanding
of Plato. [See p. 339f of the present volume for some in
dications of my treatment of Pireud and Plato on parts of the
psyche.] The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin
also supported the very beginning of this work in a research
grant for the fall of 1974--a study of Plato's Forms and the
paradoxes of logic, semantics and set theory. [Work done
then is embodied in the present volume especially in Clari
fication VI as well as in p. 346, n. 43 and p. 358, n. 53.]
The Graduate School also gave me a grant for technical help
in preparing the manuscript in the academic year 1985-86.
Both The Ascent from Nominalism and the next volume I shall
be publishing, Plato and the Philosophers of Language, in an
important sense grew out of the work supported in the early
1970's by the ACLS and by the Graduate School, and I am ex
tremely grateful to those two bodies for the essential part
they played in the (eventual) appearance of this work.
In preparation of the camera-ready manuscript, I have
principally to thank Janet Holt, Scott Berman and, especial
ly, Donna McCormick; and for related technical help, Anne
Gunther, Dave Dean, Ginny Krohn, Read Gilgen, and, especial
ly, Don Crawford and Berent En~.
I was also assisted in countless ways, both large and
small, by John, Jane and Louise Penner; and especially by
Rosemary Penner, to whom this work is dedicated.
PREPACE
When I started out as a teacher of Greek phi losophy, I
wasn't clear on exactly how it was that Aristotle differed
from Plato on the existence of universals. But I felt sure
that, with his greater subtlety and greater feel for what we
now call the 'logical form' of statements about things and
attributes, it was Aristotle, of the two of them, who was
the more likely to be right. So too with Plato's infinite
regress argument known as 'the Third Man', which Aristotle
thought fatal to the theory of Forms: without being clear
exactly how, I felt sure Aristotelian universals would be
more defensible against such infinite regresses than the
Platonic Forms. Not only were Aristotle's positions more
moderate and sensible-looking, and based upon a wider range
of logical and grammatical distinctions--of a sort that stu
dents of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and Ryle would be sen
sitive to; it was also the case that Plato's rather extreme
views seemed all too emotionally surcharged with mystical
and ascetic longings brought on by epistemological and even
political disappointments with the world of temporal flux.
The philosophical errors were deep, it is true; but they un
doubtedly called for patient and detailed diagnosis from a
logically and linguistically discriminating standpoint.
I was aware of intellectual currents running against
the Aristotelian passion for simply getting the logical form
right and then letting the ontology look after itself. Even
Frege, the first and greatest modern master of logical gram
mar, showed an ontological candor that kept Plato before
one's mind. The same was true of early Moore and, by fits
and starts, Russell. And some few more recent masters--one
thinks immediately of Quine and Davidson--showed that same
unblinking attention to one's ontological commitments, how
ever unwelcome. But I was not shaken from my Aristotelian
complacencies till the late 1960's when Mark Steiner intro
duced me to Hilbert's great paper on the infinite. At the
time I was working on an annotated translation of Aristo
tle's complex and subtle account of continuity and infinite
viii
PREFACE ix
divisibility in Physics VI. I had been assuming at that time
that Aristotle's elimination of reference to the infinitely
large in his account of the potential inf inite--like the
elimination of the infinitely small from nineteenth century
accounts of limits and continuity--gave us everything that
was important in a theory of the infinite. Hilbert's paper
showed me that this was not obviously so. Suddenly other
certainties about Aristotle's (apparently) judicious toning
down of (supposed) Platonic extremisms began to crumble. The
upshot of work I had been doing earlier on Plato's 'Third
Man Argument' began to look different from the way it had
before. I was confronted with a possibility I had not till
then so much as entertained. What if the more extreme posi
tions of Plato on these issues were the more likely to be
correct?
The present work is the first instalment of the result
ing reassessment of Plato's metaphysics, and especially of
his theory of Forms. It has occupied much of my teaching and
scholarly time over the past fifteen years and more.
The central question wi th which I concern myself is,
"How does Plato argue for the existence of his Forms (if he
does )7" The idea of making this the central question is that
if we know how he argues for the existence of Forms, we may
get a better sense of what they are. Starting here in our
inquiries lAay restore some needed distance to our view of
the Forms. It may make us stop thinking in terms of 'Plato's
well-known Forms' and lead us to wonder a little, in Socra
tic fashion, "Well, what are they anyway?"
The answer I come up with to the question how Plato
argues for the Forms is this. In his middle dialogues (to
which the present work restricts itself), Plato takes it
that to establish that there is a Form of beauty (or of
equality or similarity or health)--or a Form of the shuttle
(or of the real nature of cutting), or a Form of whatever it
might be--he needs to show that nominalism is false about
beauty, equality, cutting or whatever. That is, he needs to
show the failure of a nominalist program like the following:
to explain what we are talking about when we use gener
al words I ike 'beauty', 'equality', 'the shuttle' or
'cut' without referring to anything other than particu
lar spatio-tellporally locatable objects (beautiful
sights and sounds, equal sticks and stones, particular
aaterial shuttles or acts of cutting at particular spa
tia-temporal locations).
x PREFACE
We can put this program in slightly more modern-looking garb
as follows. Suppose that for various reasons we want to, or
need to be able to, assert certain sentences containing
these general words. Then the program is to show how these
sentences can be thought of as true without our having to
suppose those general words stand for anything other than
such concrete objects as sights, sounds, sticks, stones and
the like. The challenge to the nominalist is: if you claim
that beauty doesn't exist, then stop talking about it. To
paraphrase Parmenides: what we (f ind ourse I ves constrained
to] think and speak of (we should admit] must be.
This account of how Plato argues for the Forms is rath
er unusual. And indeed there might seem to be serious reason
for questioning it. For it may seem to make the Forms and
Plato's ways of arguing for them too unspecific. For exam
ple, if anything is clear about Plato's Forms, it is surely
this: that they are discovered rather than invented. That
is, Plato's Forms are not just creations of our linguistic,
conceptual or cultural activities (as some would say that
laws of a state are, for example). Rather, Plato thinks of
his Forms as things which would have existed whether or not
any human had ever thought or spoken of them. But if on my
view Plato argues for the Forms by arguing simply that nomi
nalism is false, he will have entirely omitted to give us
any reason for thinking that what there is lIIore to beauty
than beautiful perceptibles is something we discover rather
than merely create.
And there is a related difficulty. What good will it be
to show nominalism false if one is attempting to establish
the existence of (transcendent) Forms as opposed, say, to
immanent universals? After all, Plato is surely only half
way to where he wants to go when he has shown that there are
things and properties, qualities or whatever. He still has
to show that beyond these properties or qualities that we
all believe in, there also exist these super-objects, the
Forllls.
So if Plato argues for the Forms in the way I say he
does, I need to explain why he omits to show that these
Forms are more than mere conceptual constructs; and I also
need to explain why he omits to show that the Forms are more
than mere immanent universals.
My explanation of these two difficulties flows from a
suggestion of Vlastos and others, that the theory of Forms
is the first systelllatic theory of abstract objects in the
history of Western thought. I do not, as is often done, take
Description:divisibility in Physics VI. I had been assuming at that time that Aristotle's elimination of reference to the infinitely large in his account of the potential inf inite--like the elimination of the infinitely small from nineteenth century accounts of limits and continuity--gave us everything that wa
