The Problem of Universals: A Conversation with Gyula Klima

In this episode, Sam Bennett speaks with Gyula Klima about the medieval problem of universals and the philosophical issues that arise when we try to explain how universal cognition of singular things is possible. Klima begins with his intellectual background and then walks through the problem as it develops from Plato’s ideal objects and the challenge posed by the Third Man argument, to Aristotle’s account of abstraction and universal concepts. He discusses Augustine’s placement of universals in the divine mind, Boethius’s and Abelard’s efforts to explain how features separable in thought need not be separable in reality, and Aquinas’s account of common natures and universal concepts as the shared objects of individual acts of understanding.