Dear John, lists, It may not be extreme, but I think that most current realist metaphysicians (ones who accept universals as real, like myself and David Armstrong, for example) take a line closer to the Duns Scotus one. The more extreme view seems to most to be difficult to distinguish from Platonism (e.g., my otherwise hero Bertrand Russell, who came to reject particulars entirely). This isn't to say that universals are not open-ended at any time, and that something can come to fall under a universal.
I think the crux about P's realism is exactly this: that universals are "open-ended at any time". He does not himself identify this with Platonism. But what is Platonism exactly, other than a pejorative which many positions use to profile themselves against? However, Frederik, there are two slippery terms in your answer that I would like more elucidation on, "contracted in" and "comprise". My understanding of Armstrong, for example, does not have universals comprised of instances, but their reality does depend on their instantiation. Myself, I take a view slightly weaker than Armstrong in one sense, but stronger in another, and think that universals are made necessary only by logic (including 2nd order logic) or instantiation, in which case they are identical to natural kinds. I would not use the word "comprise" to describe this. Funnily, you address the same terms in my short summary as did Jon Awbrey. "Contracted" is just referring to Peirce - to his late revision of his diamond example from "How to make our ideas clear": "Even Duns Scotus is too nominalistic when he says that universals are contracted to the mode of individuality in singulars, meaning, as he does, by singulars, ordinary existing things. The pragmaticist cannot admit that." (1905, 8.208) Interestingly, a bit later in the same paper he addresses your issue about things, here understood as absolute individuals which he takes not to exist: "For I had long before declared that absolute individuals were entia rationis, and not realities." As to "comprise", I shall not insist on that term, the important idea is just that P takes universals to be continua and so to exceed any possible amount of individual realizations. Best F
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