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Proof of the Existence of Universals—and Roman Ingarden’s Ontology

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Metaphysica

Abstract

The paper ends with an argument that says: necessarily, if there are finitely spatially extended particulars, then there are monadic universals. Before that, in order to characterize the distinction between particulars and universals, Roman Ingarden’s notions of “existential moments” and “modes (ways) of being” are presented, and a new pair of such existential moments is introduced: multiplicity–monadicity. Also, it is argued that there are not only real universals, but instances of universals (tropes) and fictional universals too.

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Notes

  1. Recent English-speaking exceptions to the rule are J. Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (1997), and A. Chrudzimski (ed.), Existence, Culture, and Persons. The Ontology of Roman Ingarden (2005). In the footnotes that follow, Mitscherling’s book will be referred to simply as Mitscherling. Recent German-speaking exceptions are Chrudzimski, Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden (1999), D. v. Wachter, Dinge und Eigenschaften (2000, chapter 2), and K. Rynkiewicz, Zwischen Realismus und Idealismus (2008). The last book is a very long and detailed introduction to Ingarden, which I guess will be the classic non-Polish introduction to Ingarden for a long time to come. Its bibliography covers English, German, and Polish books and articles; missing is, though, M. Rosiak (2003). Let me add that I cannot read Polish at all.

  2. The German version written by Ingarden (1964, 1965a, b, 1974) consists of three parts and four books: Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt I, II/1, II/2, and III, with a title of its own, Ǖber die kausale Struktur der Realen Welt. They will be referred to as Streit I, II/1, II/2, and III, respectively. Large parts of volume I have been translated from Polish into English (by H. R. Michejda) and published as Times and Modes of Being (1964); it will be referred to as Modes. When possible, I will use her translations of Ingarden’s terms. An exposition of some other translations is presented in footnotes 5 and, in particular, 22.

  3. It should however be noted that Ingarden did not like to be called a Platonist. In a footnote, not included in Modes, he explicitly mentions “The objection of being a so-called Platonist, that is often made against me” saying that his formal investigations go much farther than anything to be found in Plato, and that Plato’s view that knowledge about ideal entities is obtained through recollection is him quite foreign (Streit I 260, note 11).

  4. See Mitscherling chapters four and five. Ingarden’s (1973) classic in this respect is his The Literary Work of Art; in what follows referred to as LWA.

  5. “Seinsweise” (modes of being) has even been translated as “kinds of being” (see Wachter, “Roman Ingarden’s Ontology”).

  6. The concepts of “ideal entities” and “real entities” are Ingarden’s, but that of “fictional entities” is not wholly so. In Modes (159, 160, 161) one finds the three headings: “B (Extratemporal Being, Ideal?)”, “C (Temporal Being, Real?)”, and “D (Purely Intentional Being)”, but in the original Polish edition there is neither “ideal?” nor “real?”. In the German Streit I, B and C look the same (259, 260), but D says (in English) “D Purely Intentional Being, Possible Being?” (262). Why this confusion exists, and why, furthermore, Ingarden adds question marks, I do not know. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that he sometimes identifies the present with the real (Modes 39–40, Streit I 76), whereas in the headings mentioned, the real embraces also the past and future. Be that as it may, I will interpret him as if the question marks can simply be deleted. He does not speak of fictional objects when he introduces the notion of “purely intentional being”, Modes 162–163, Streit I 262–263, but now and then he talks of such beings as fictions; see e.g. Streit II/1 215 and LWA lxxxii.

  7. For more details about these distinctions, see Mitscherling 84–88.

  8. He writes, for instance, that “Whether either of these varieties of ‘absolute’ being really occurs anywhere, whether both of them are possible or only one–these are all questions which must still be clarified”; Modes 157, Streit I 257.

  9. Modes 159, Streit I 259. I leave out of account Ingarden’s distinction between two kinds of universals: ideas (Ideen) and pure qualities (reine Qualitäten); about this, see (Streit I 39f, Wachter 2000; Rynkiewicz (2008).

  10. Modes 161f, Streit I 260f. The sub-modes of the present, past, and future might also be called phases.

  11. Events are necessarily punctual, and processes have necessarily duration; Modes 102, Streit I 194. According to Ingarden, events such as the starting- and end points of something are punctual, but, as far as I know, he never takes a definite stand on the question whether the punctual is necessarily infinitesimally punctual or not; compare G. Haefliger and G. Küng (2005) “Substances, States, Processes, Events”, pp. 30–33. Ingarden’s tripartition can be compared with the bipartite distinction between endurants (Ingarden’s objects) and perdurants (processes) made famous by David Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), pp. 202–205. Lewis’s distinction is more or less the same as W. E. Johnson’s bipartition between continuants and occurrents; see his Logic part III (1921). Endurants/continuants have no temporal parts and are in this sense identical through time, whereas perdurants/occurrents persist by unfolding temporal parts. My sympathies are with Ingarden. Both objects (endurants/continuants) and processes (perdurants/occurrents) persist, i.e., they are extended in time, but a complete ontology must also take account of what is non-persisting, i.e., what is punctual. There is however a complication in this comparison. It seems to be the case that all universals that can exist in the objectual sub-mode can also exist in the event-sub-mode, and vice versa, whereas universals that exist in the processual sub-mode cannot exist in any other sub-mode. This complication is discussed in I. Johansson (2005), “Qualities, Quantities, and the Endurant-Perdurant Distinction in Top-Level Ontologies.”

  12. This may be taken to imply that the distinction between object, process, and event is applicable in all the modes of present, past, and future, but Ingarden is forced to say something else. According to him, the mode of the future (and also that of the purely intentional) contains only a bipartition, not the tripartition object, process, and event; see Modes 161, Streit I 260–261. The sub-mode of objects in the future is deleted, since the existential moment of “self-dependence”, which objects must have, cannot be combined with the moment of “heteronomy”, which the future must have; the terms within scare quotes are explained in the pages to follow.

  13. Modes 141–156, Streit I 232–245. He has also written some pages about the subsystems of the human body; see Ingarden, Man and Value (1983), pp. 84–100.

  14. Modes 37, Streit I 74.

  15. In my opinion, this can only be done by allowing some kind of relation to bridge the gap between the sub-modes of the present and the past. The chair I was sitting on two minutes ago, which now exists in the sub-mode of the past, cannot be identical with the chair I am sitting on now, which exists in the sub-mode of the present; but the “pastly” existing chair must of course have some kind of relation to the presently existing chair.

  16. Modes 52, Streit I 87.

  17. Here he writes: “In the mere intentional state of ‘having’ determinations ‘assigned’ to it, the purely intentional object contains in its content nothing that could give it its own ontic foundation. It is in a true sense ontically heteronomous (LWA 122).” Heteronomy is presented in Modes 43–52, Streit I §12. Very relevant is also Streit II/1, chapter IX.

  18. LWA §38, Streit II/1 §47b, and Mitscherling 104–109. A fictional character that lacks spots of indeterminacy would be a figure defined as in all respects being exactly like a specific real person (the example comes from Pierre Grenon).

  19. Note that, for Ingarden, this does not exclude the possibility that a metaphysical investigation might show the physical world to be deterministic.

  20. Modes 80, Streit I 113.

  21. In the otherwise very good book Fiction and Metaphysics (1999), A. L. Thomasson mentions Ingarden but neglects his concept of “heteronomy”, this making fictional characters look, in Ingarden’s terms, much too autonomous. However, in her paper “Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects” (2005), she gives heteronomy its due. I would like to state in passing that I regard D. Lewis’s analysis of fictional objects—as objects existing actually in possible worlds—as completely mistaken; see his “Truth in Fiction”, reprinted in Lewis, Philosophical Papers vol. 1. But, of course, Lewis is a dedicated one-and-only-one-mode-of-being thinker.

  22. As I have said (footnote 2), I am using Michejda’s translation in Modes. She translates “Unabhängigkeit”–“Abhängigkeit” as “self-dependence”–“contingency”, but in Mitscherling it is mostly translated as “independence–contingency” (the exceptions are Mitscherling viii and 95), and P. Simons translates it as “independence”–“dependence”; see his “Editorial Note” (1982), p. 263. Also, Simons translates “Selbständigkeit”–“Unselbständigkeit” not as “separateness”–“inseparateness” but as “self-sufficiency”–“non-self-sufficiency”. He uses these translations also in his paper “Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence” (2005), and the same goes for D. v. Wachter’s paper “Roman Ingarden’s Ontology” (2005).

  23. Modes 90, Streit I 122.

  24. With respect to Aristotle, compare also the quotation from Armstrong referred to in footnote 35.

  25. See the preceding footnote.

  26. Armstrong Universals & Scientific Realism vol. II (1978), section 18.1.

  27. This is a simplified version of Armstrong’s formulation: “For each n-adic universal, U, there exist at least n particulars such that they are U.” See Universals & Scientific Realism vol. I (1978), p. 137.

  28. Armstrong, Universals. An Opinionated Introduction (1989), p. 75.

  29. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (1997), p. 208. “Friends of Independence” believe that states of affairs are logically independent of each other.

  30. In fact, Ingarden uses the term monadicity (monadisch) a couple of times when he discusses the essence of individual objects (e.g., Streit II/1, p. 419); and he does so in such a way that I have no qualms in adopting the term.

  31. I will argue in Section 5 that tropes are complex since they contain a universal.

  32. See A. Półtawski, “Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die Welt” (2005); in particular the quotation from Ingarden on p. 211.

  33. This is true also of tropes or “abstract particulars” (G. F. Stout, K. Campbell); about the meaning of the latter notion, see e.g. E. J. Lowe’s remarks in A Survey of Metaphysics (2002), pp. 366–367.

  34. This means that the view presented does not suffer from the problem that S. Mumford in his book David Armstrong (2007) finds in “the late” Armstrong (chapter 11), who is not discussed in this paper, and who holds that instantiation is not contingent but necessary. Mumford claims: “The difference between particulars and universals now looks to be a very uncertain matter” (p. 193).

  35. Armstrong, Universals. An Opinionated Introduction (1989), p. 17.

  36. This Ingarden interpretation is supported both by Wachter, Dinge und Eigenschaften (2000, pp. 25, 66, 94, 176), and Rynkiewicz, Zwischen Realismus und Idealismus (2008, pp. 444, 451–454).

  37. Baxter, “Instantiation as Partial Identity” (2001).

  38. The notion of “logical part” is used in the sense in which, following Brentano, “color” is said to be a logical part of “red”.

  39. For elaborate defenses of such a relation of constitution, see Simons, Parts (1987), chapters 4.7, 6.1, and 6.5; L. R. Baker, Persons and Bodies. A Constitution View, (2000), chapter 2, and The Metaphysics of Everyday Life (2007) chapters 8–9; E. J. Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics, (2002), chapter 4. The relation of constitution is used also in, for instance, I. Johansson, Ontological Investigations (2004), pp. 134–136, and B. Smith, “On Substances, Accidents and Universals” (1997).

  40. Armstrong Universals & Scientific Realism vol. I (1978), p. 115.

  41. The classic contemporary defense of the existence of universals is of course Armstrong’s Universals & Scientific Realism. He argues, rightly in my opinion, that predicate nominalism and concept nominalism are involved in two vicious infinite regresses, and that class nominalism and resemblance nominalism are involved in one such regress.

  42. The fact that boundaries are of utmost importance in ontology has been stressed in contemporary philosophy mainly by B. Smith. Going further back, there are R. M. Chisholm and Brentano. Smith writes: “In order to arrive at a definition of substance, then, it is the notion of boundary which we shall need to take as our guiding clue (something that has not been done in standard treatments of substance in the literature of analytic metaphysics—”; from “Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Ontology” (2001). For the distinction between ‘bona fide’ and ‘fiat’ boundaries, see Smith, “Fiat Objects” (2001).

  43. Such a particular could be either completely homogeneous or perfectly continuous. Neither homogeneity nor continuity can give rise to a bona fide boundary. When we say, for example, that some colors continuously shade off into each other, we are saying that there are no boundaries between these colors. A boundary is a discontinuity.

  44. There are other attempted proofs of the existence of tropes, too. The first might be Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina’s), which is discussed and improved on by Mertz, Moderate Realism and Its Logic (1996); see also his Essays on Realist Instance Ontology and its Logic (2006). Both Avicenna‘s and Mertz’s proofs are further discussed in Svennerlind, Moderate Nominalism and Moderate Realism (2008, chapter V).

  45. A. Stroll, “Two Conceptions of Surfaces” (1979).

  46. Armstrong, Universals & Scientific Realism vol. I (1978), p. 113.

  47. The view that tropes are simple is defended by Anna-Sofia Maurin in If Tropes (2002) and “Same but Different” (2005). If I am right, then tropes are complex; each trope has at least one universal as a constitutive part. More criticism of the view that there are only tropes can be found in Herbert Hochberg, “A Refutation of Moderate Nominalism” (1988) and “Relations, Properties and Particulars” (2004), as well as in Christer Svennerlind, Moderate Nominalism and Moderate Realism (2008).

  48. Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. 2, section II, §4, last paragraph (1901); Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, chapter 9, eleventh paragraph (1912); Armstrong, Universals & Scientific Realism vol. I, chapter 5: vi (1978); Hochberg, “Russell’s Proof of Realism Reproved” (1981).

  49. Compare Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (2006), section 329.

  50. I do not know who introduced this kind of predicate into the problem of universals, but it is used by D. Lewis in “New work for a theory of universals” (1983); see his Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999), pp. 14–15. The attempt to block Russell’s argument with the help of “paradigms” is discussed and rejected by G. Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Paradigms and Russell’s Resemblance Regress” (2004). For other problems with nominalistic resemblance classes, see E. J. Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics, (2002), pp. 355–365.

  51. The essence of the argument that now follows was first put forward in section 2 of my “Determinables as Universals”, I. Johansson (2000).

  52. About the distinction between “instantiation” and “exemplification”, see E. J. Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology (2006), and my review of the book, I. Johansson (2006).

  53. See Armstrong, Universals & Scientific Realism vol. II, chapter 19: vi (the quotation is from p. 93).

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Acknowledgments

The present paper was written under the auspices of the Wolfgang Paul Program of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Network of Excellence in Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine of the European Union, and the project Forms of Life sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. I would also like to thank, first, Kevin Mulligan, Barry Smith, and Peter Simons for making me aware of Roman Ingarden’s philosophy, for discussions, and for some comments on this paper; Peter of course also for letting me publish his drawing. Second, I would like to thank Marek Rosiak of the University of Lodz, Poland, for several discussions about the interpretation of Ingarden, including important comments on this paper. Third, for some comments, I would like to thank the participants of the conferences (a) “Logic, Ontology, Aesthetics. The Golden Age of Polish Philosophy”, Montreal, Canada, September 23–26, 2004, where the ideas of this paper was first presented, and (b) “The Philosophy Days”, Uppsala, Sweden, June 9–11, 2005, where section 5 was extensively presented. Fourth, I would like to thank three (once) co-workers at IFOMIS, Saarbrücken, Pierre Grenon, Daniel Novotný, and Katherine Munn: Pierre for comments and earlier discussions that led, in a common unpublished manuscript, to the introduction of the notion of “instantiative parthood”, Daniel for discussions about the distinction between kinds and modes of being as well as some other issues, and, third, Katherine for improving my English and at the same time noting some obscurities. Also, fifth, thanks to Ghislain Guigon, Geneva, for pinpointing some defects in the first version of section five.

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Johansson, I. Proof of the Existence of Universals—and Roman Ingarden’s Ontology. Int Ontology Metaphysics 10, 65–87 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-008-0040-0

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