universals and humanness

I still feel that there is some clarification to be had in respect to the latter part of the above statement, so let's take it further. Let's assume that all human beings died. Nowhere in the universe would there be such a thing as a human, nor would there be any trace of humans left. Does this mean that humanness itself would vanish as well? To answer this, we must look into the nature of universals. If universals were independent of objects, if they were something else altogether and on another plane of being, then they would be considered transcendent. That being the case, the answer to the question above would be no. Humanness wouldn't disappear, because it is something independent of humans. If universals were contained within, then they would exist on the same plane of being that humans exist on; they would be immanent. If that were the case, then humanness would disappear along with humans because of the interconnectedness of the two. Of course, we could eliminate all this unpleasantness by denying the existence of universals altogether, thus eliminating humanness as well. I feel that this is not a path we should dwell on because it does not seem plausible to eliminate universals altogether (which is really a discussion for a different paper altogether) because of the flaws that are incurred in the process of attempting to do so.

from the individual things; it must be another thing.

We are left then, with transcendence or immanence in regards to the nature of universals. A good place to begin here is with what gives me the most trouble- transcendence. First of all, it seems that there is a problem of clarity here. I am human, Bob is human and we have this thing (humanness) in common. Ultimately, we are left with this thing floating around out there in some mystical wonderland. So how is it that this thing, which is distinct in every possible way, can be known in any useful way? Great, there's humanness floating around out there, but it gives no explanation of what it is. If we have something that is red, and we have another thing that is red, we would say that they have redness in common, but what is redness? It makes matters less intelligible rather than more so, this independent redness.

And finally, perhaps the most damning criticism of this theory- the 'third man problem'. Probably the philosophy that embodies the notion of transcendent universals is Plato with his notion of the Forms. In his philosophy, the empirical world would consist of things. The many things sometimes have something in common with one another. In the case of things red, they would share the thing redness. These things gained this commonality by copying them from some other thing, which had the commonality. So, red and red share redness, whic

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