I better understand the older Platono-Aristotelian handling of the issue. Do scholastics consider conceptualism as a particularly good halfway house between nominalism and realism? It seems, at least superficially, to take on the most troubling difficulties of both positions: 'Well universals are these *sorta special kind of real* mental entities that *we make up* on the basis of a kind of *likness* that doesn't require appealing to something like universals as the explainers for that likness.'

I take it that the claim that universals are present in God's mind is just a kind of realism, since they are not arbitrary but follow necessarily from his nature.

To begin it's worth noting that standard Conceptualism is dead as a philosophical standpoint; in fact most modern intros to the problem of universals don't even cover it - when examined it just collapsed into a 'weak realism' or one form of Nominalism or another. 

EDIT: May as well throw this in. The notion of universals or concepts fulfilling the role of universals existing in the Divine Mind forms part of a much neglected argument for God's existence, namely the Augstinian-Leibnizian Proof from Eternal Truths. Since it’s not often mentioned I’ll include a run-down of some references on the subject:
 
Chapter 7 of R.M. Adams’ Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist
 
E.J. Lowe – A Modal Version of the Ontological Argument
 
(Ignore the title. The argument Lowe gives is Aristotelean Realist in form)
 
Quentin Smith - The Conceptualist Argument for God's Existence
 
(Smith develops the argument in a Nominalist vein.)

Bharat wrote:

Hi everyone, my first post here - just finished reading The Last Superstition and had a question on the debate over universals, numbers, and propositions.

Does a view of conceptualism that includes God in the picture firstly, make sense, and secondly, does it dodge the objections Feser raises against "normal" views of conceptualism?

It escapes at least some of the difficulties. You may be aware of it but such a view has been proposed by a number of modern philosophers, particularly with regards to mathematical objects, under the unsurprising name of ‘Divine Conceptualism’. Unfortunately spelling out what this theory or family of theories actual amount to proves very difficult – it’s usually contrasted with Theistic Activism, the view that Abstract Objects are grounded in or ‘created by’ the Divine Nature, and one which I think has more to say for itself than it’s often given credit for (probably because it needs Divine Simplicity to solve its main problem, the Bootstrapping Objection, and it's original proponent, Thomas Morris, is a noted critic of that theory). For my money both are obviously attempts to recapture the Augustinian idea of universals being Divine Exemplars.

Despite its being mentioned a fair amount literature dealing with this subject is relatively hard to come by. The fullest treatment is probably Greg Welty’s Master Thesis: An Examination of Theistic Conceptual Realism as an Alternative to Theistic Activism. As one might expect it’s repetitive and laboured in tone, but does a fair job of presenting the position as understood in modern Protestant circles (see how he concludes that certain tenets of the theory implying Divine Simplicity is a devastating mark in its disfavour).

Brian Leftow has also written on the subject in his paper 'God and the Problem of Universals', which is unfortunately impossible to find online (of course if you do find it let me know!).

Bharat wrote:

An objection he raises against conceptualism is that when we entertain propositions (e.g. "snow is white"), we all are entertaining the same propositions. But if such a proposition was already contained within God's intellect, couldn't this explain our ability to think about the same propositions (we are grasping the "same" idea since we all grasp it through God).

Here lies one of the chief difficulties with it at least as proposed by the moderns. If Divine Concepts are to be thought along the same lines as human concepts, which it would seem they must be if we are to preserve the central idea of Conceptualism, how do we have access to them (and if we do it means we to an extent think God's thoughts)? Is my experience of Blue a direct intuition into the Divine Essence? The scholastic realist who considers universals to be immanent to their possessors and the mind that grasps them has an answer to this - we first become acquainted with universals through encountering their instances.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (10/08/2015 6:53 pm)