The Tree of Universality

Thought it would be nice to share a picture of Aristotle, since we seem to chat about him a lot during class. So there he is, The Father of Logic. Should I keep that lower case? I don't know...

Some quick history on him that we covered is that he lived in Macedonia, ca. 384 BC-322 BC. His dad was a physician to King Philip II. He was a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Wow. Even though we know these things its still pretty impressive to realize that. History lesson over.
Definition is what we were trying to discuss, despite all of the necessary digressions that always end up taking place! Definition is a method of classification or categorization. While Plato's teaching/belief was that all we can truly know are mathematical essences, ideal things, moral values, Aristotle that came up with the idea that we CAN understand natural reality, by thinking using universal terms, void of all particulars. In fact, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas all say that this ability, to step back from the word and look at it in ever more general/universal terms, is the mark that distinguishes man from beast. It is the reason we can think! I think Dr. said it was Thomas who went so far as to say that our ability to know universals is proof of the immortality of the soul, because we have the ability to transcend everything material, and therefore a part of us must transcend everything material as well.
So how do universals help us to make definitions? Using the tree of universality, and the hierarchy of being, we can make a statement , including a subject and a predicate, that states that S is P. When you predicate P of S, there is a certain order of universality. You can only predicate a term of equal or greater universality of a term of equal or lesser universality.

Below I have added a "tree of universality" that is pretty similar to the one we took down in class. Substance is the broadest, or most universal division, because everything that is, IS, or has substance. Then comes Body, and here we had one small addition, that body was either natural or artificial. Natural was divided into living, non living etc... all the way to the individual men, Peter and Paula! :) ( We needed to have both a man and a woman...) The funny thing is, the individual men are the only really existing things of the whole tree. All of these more universal divisions, universalities are ideas that man has created in order to be able to define.

An example of this system of universalities is very simple. A trout is a fish. An unmarried man is a bachelor. An example of equal universality is that Man is rational. The key is that you cannot predicate an individual substance of another individual substance. One cannot say that Peter is Paul. One can only say that Peter is a man and that Paul is a man. And so you cannot define any individual. Divisions between universalities include exhaustive and non exhaustive. Anything that negates, as I just have, is considered an exhaustive division.  You can start with a big universal, and define using lesser and lesser universals before you arrive at any particular.

Homework was to come up with your own tree of universlaities, going form most umiversal to lesser and lesser universals. And also to comment on this article that was published in a student newspaper of Gonzaga's. A pretty frightening reality.

http://www.gonzagabulletin.com/news/article_5f700a42-fd3a-11e1-a2f2-0019bb30f31a.html

See ya after!
Thanks for reading.

Dani