The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Aristotle's contention against Platonism was that the abstract must be somehow embodied in the concrete. But if this contention is sound, what we mean by an abstraction is something somehow embodied or housed in concrete actuality (if only by being thought about). And this is so even though no particular concrete actuality or set of concrete actualities is required to house it. An abstraction as such is always neutral as to the particular concrete actuality in which it is or may be somehow actualized, and this is inherent in the very meaning of "abstract" and "concrete."

The distinction between "abstract essence or idea" and "concrete actuality" is (or exactly parallels) the distinction between "the logically weaker (less definite)" and "the logically stronger (more definite)."

5 February 1998

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