t was battled for the thousand years from Porphyry to Aquinas between realists and nominalists.
This problem of Universals is: does whiteness, or fatness, or roundness, or anything that can be predicated of a number of things, really exist separately, apart from white things or fat things or round things? . . .
If your reply is that whiteness exists, quite separately and substantially, then philosophically you are a realist [after Plato]; if you believe whiteness is only the mind's idea of the sum of the things that are white, then in philosophy you are called a nominalist [after Aristotle] (Fremantle 19-20).
Mind-body tension was not resolved by the medieval philosophers, although Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Dominican whom the Roman Catholic Church takes to be its authoritative theologian, "omnivorously" accepted Aristotle, characterizing his mind-body discourse as a statement that all human knowledge "is derived from sense experience, but . . . that thought has its proper activity" (Fremantle 150). This formulation did not prevent Renaissance/Enli
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