Individual objects and entities can have many features in common. A football and an orange are both spherical, the Eifel Tower and the Statue of Liberty are both tall, and so on. But what are these features like tallness and sphericality, and in virtue of what can singular characteristics be possessed by many different things? Explaining this has become known as the ‘one over many’ problem, and the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427–348/7 BC) is known for his theory of Forms, offered in solution to it.
For Plato, there are ideal forms of characteristics like yellowness and beauty, which do not exist in our universe, but are instead non-spatiotemporal. Particular things, like humans, are yellow because they stand in a certain kind of resemblance relation to the perfect Form of humanity (call this ‘participation’), and their standing in that relation to this one thing is what explains their commonality. But if the Form of mankind, call this ‘Man’ is perfectly humanlike, then we need to explain how it itself gets to be human, and how it gets to have something in common with the other (less-perfectly) human things like you and I. Now, since Plato has said that two or more things share a common feature by standing in a resemblance relation to a Form, then we need to posit the existence of a third ‘man’ thing – a second Form, call this ‘Man*’. Man and individual human things will then stand in a resemblance relation to it. However, and this is a problem that Plato himself raised against his theory, we now seem to be off on an infinite regress. For Man*, Man, and the more ordinary human individuals will also have something in common, and so for the same reasons as before, we need to posit another Form, ‘Man**’, which Man*, Man, and the other human things stand in a certain relation to! | |||