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Lewinter Widulski The Saga of Mathematics A Brief History The Saga of Mathematics Lewinter Widulski Greeks Bearing Gifts Chapter 4 Ideas or Forms This doctrine asserts a view of reality consisting of two worlds: The everyday world perceived by our senses, the world of change, appearance, and imperfect knowledge. The world of Ideas perceived by reason, the world of permanence, reality, and true knowledge. Justice is an Idea imperfectly reflected in human efforts to be just. Two is an Idea participated in by every pair of material objects. Universals A common concern among Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, was the meaning of universals, or forms. A universal can be defined as an abstract object or term which ranges over particular things. The classic problem of universals involves whether abstract objects exist in a realm independent of human thought. Realists argue that they do. Plato and Aristotle Plato (ca. 428-348 BC), the first and most extreme realist, argued that universals are forms and exist in their own spiritual realm lying outside space and time. Individual objects, such as a dog, then participate in the universal form ‘dogness’. A universal can only be known by the intellect, and not the senses. They are timeless perfect patterns of Being, whose blurred shadowy copies constitute the deceptive phenomena of the world around us. Plato and Aristotle Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology centered around the concept of the universal: to have knowledge of a particular object, we need to access the unchanging universals. The particulars, for Plato, are only manifestations of the forms. Plato’s theory is subject to the problem of explaining how universals are represented in their particulars and how a universal can reside in a particular. Plato and Aristotle Aristotle (ca. 384-322) criticizes Plato’s theory for introducing an aspect of separateness to the universal which was unneeded. He also attacks Plato for holding that a universal was a pr