On learning

These matters I shall decline to discuss, such a subject being very deep and demanding another and a larger investigation.

— Porphyry, after describing the problem of universals in the Isagoge (Barnes trans.)

I do not find it absolutely essential for the beginning or for the practice of the art of thinking to decide the question whether there are ideas and truths born with us; whether they all come to us from without or from ourselves; we will reason correctly provided we observe what I have said above, and proceed in an orderly way and without prejudice. The question of the origin of our ideas and of our maxims is not preliminary in Philosophy, and we must have made great progress in order to solve it successfully.

— G.W. Leibniz, On Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1696),
in: G.W. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, transl. A.G. Langley (London: Macmillan, 1896), page 15. [itself from Erdmann, Leibnitii Opera Philosophica, pp. 136-139.]
(This quotation added 2022-06-10.)

I have much to read on the subject, still, but it seems to me that philosophical schools are described as having had the following sort of difference regarding the knowledge of universals.

• Plato thought that, when you see material things, the mind recollects universal ideas from its premortal existence.
• Aristotle thought that, when you see material things, the mind takes universal ideas from the things, in a process which is called abstraction.
• Kant thought that, when you see material things, the mind’s faculty of understanding imposes its own innate universal ideas upon the things.

If these descriptions are accurate, the important question, to me, is as follows. If in all cases the same main things happen – you see material things and understand them, with your mind, by universal ideas – who can possibly care what imaginary motions you use to describe the process? How is this difference anything other than verbal?

In my post on metaphysics, I have said that the objects of understanding, which I called forms, are being, and are, therefore, immutable. So, you ought not to construe such objects as coming to be or passing away. For example, triangularity, unlike triangles, never began to exist – which is to say that it was never unintelligible.

This, however, is only to take a side on the question of universals if you make certain assumptions about how it is that our understanding should be imagined – 

• whether our understanding of triangularity is identical to triangularity, or a copy of it
• whether our understanding is constructed by our mind, or comes into the mind from outside, or already existed in the mind and we somehow become more aware of it
• whether our understanding should be regarded as in ourselves, or as something out there that we are aware of
• whether our understanding of triangularity is taken from triangles, is put into triangles, or never touches the triangles

In all these differences, what seems to be happening is that people are imagining little figures which they call “the idea”, “the thing”, “the mind”, and so on. The dispute is then about the details of where to imagine these little figures and what we should imagine ourselves to be doing to them when we understand. Since imagination has no place in philosophy, neither does any of this stuff. It is idle talk.

Yes, if we admit at the same time that forms are immutable, that they are in our minds, and that our minds could not perish without the ideas in them perishing, then it will follow that the human soul is immortal. Here we see an important metaphysical consequence. It is still a consequence of one way among many of imagining the relationships of little figures. Again, whether forms are in our minds or out of them is a question of where, in the picture of our imagination, we should imagine that the little forms are living. Remember that neither forms nor minds are spatial – they are not truly in or out of anything! This cannot possibly be productive thought, and taking a side on the question is stupid.