Abstract
The reasons why, as a follow-up to the lecture on semiotics and ontology (2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021), dedicated to elucidating the relations between mind, language and reality, are presented, we consider it necessary to revisit the classic question of the universal, and to include it in an examination - not only historical, but also metaphysical - of the quarrel over universals, in which the identity of metaphysics - and therefore, since metaphysics is at its heart, of philosophy - clearly emerges. Indeed, ifphilosophers since Antiquity have put so much energy into the richly-charged examination of the status of the universal, and therefore of universals, it's because the complex relationships between words, concepts and things are at stake.
After recalling the difficulties surrounding the concept of "universal" in its logical, epistemological and metaphysical dimensions, we presented the lecture plan and recalled the steps that will be required to follow the metaphysical approach claimed and specified in the lectures devoted to the metaphysical knowledge of nature (2011-2012) and the metaphysics of natural species (2012-2013 and 2013-2014): begin by clearing up misunderstandings about the term and concept of "universal", sorting out real and pseudo-problems (to avoid being accused of practicing a weightless metaphysics and taking shelter behind an "overhanging universal") ; explain why the treatment of the universal is part of the history of the quarrel over universals, and recall many of the valuable achievements of this history; analyze what it means to hold the universal to be a thing, and show why such reification is wrong; ask, conversely, whether the universal can be reduced to a concept or a name; explore the difficulties of recent nominalist approaches, which believe that the universal can be backed up by the idea of resemblance; put forward arguments in favor of the reality of the universal, and explain what it consists of; finally, outline some strategies for dealing with the issues (notably ethical) raised by the universal and universalism. We then focused on the first stage, pointing out the persistence of misunderstandings: we confuse universal with general, universal with essence, we slip from fact to value, we confuse the opposition between absolutism and relativism with the opposition between universal and particular. Finally, we notice that the very people who denigrate the universal and universalism, whose abstract, formal, overhanging, global, vertical, nowhere character and supposed neutrality they denounce, are in no hurry to claim another universal (the good one), renamed, local", "lateral" or "splintered", coming "from all sides", and "pluralist", so difficult would it be to agree on the true "place" where the universal dwells, but even more difficult to renounce it. The question, then, is what remains of the universal in such a particularized, localized, lateralized, horizontalized and relativized universal, and whether we are not rather dealing with a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
