The Problem of Universals

A Meinongian Way out of the Polish Proofs Against General Objects

“…It is in his 1913 Critique of the Logical Principle of the Excluded Middle [20]/ [23] that Leśniewski first tried to prove, per reductionem ad absurdum, that no object is a "general object" (przedmiot ogólny). 5 Since the passage in which he sets out his proof is rather confusing, I quote it in its entirety: 6 I will assume that there is an object o g which is 'general' and corresponds to the 'individual objects' o 1 , o 2 , o 3 , ..., o n ; for every 'individual object' o k , one can always find some property 7 P k which is not common to all the 'individual' objects o 1 , o 2 , o 3 , ..., o n . On the basis of the above, the 'general object' o g does not possess the property P k (I).…”

“…Second its presence does not demand any specific premiss in order to carry out the proof. I will thus drop this requirement here and reformulate (5) in the following way:…”

“…32 See [21, n. 1, p. 183]/ [24, n. 6, p. 198] and also [5]. Strictly speaking, in Leśniewski's Ontology, it is possible to use predicative expressions, but a sentence containing a predicate can always be replaced by another sentence that do not contain any predicate.…”