Cognitive aspect of the problem of universals in late Scholastic tradition

Abstract

In this article, the author examines the shaping of universal notions in the 17th century scholastic theory of the soul. The respective concepts found their immediate origin in the typology of universals as elaborated by Francisco Suárez in his books On the Soul and Metaphysical Disputations. According to Suárez, there are three types of universals: physical, metaphysical and logical; but only the latter two are pertinent to the problem here discussed. Suárez, and most of scholastic philosophers after him, believed that universality as such does not exists in extramental reality, but rather is produced by the intellect on the basis of similarity between things, which makes it possible to group things into species and genera. Scholastic writers provided a thorough analysis of the mechanism of generating universal concepts not only from a logical, but from a cognitive point of view as well. The present paper follows them in their comprehensive approach to the problem of generation of universals, including the cognitive aspect of this process and the kind of abstraction employed in it. It can be shown that the place of priority belongs to the metaphysical universal which comprises the general specific and generic characteristics of things and makes predication in natural languages possible; it is also the origin from which the logical universal is generated, indispensable for scientific knowledge but useless in daily life. On the whole, the doctrine of the generation of universals in 17th century scholasticism is derivative from the basic ontological principles of this school of thought.