>The category of particulars includes what the nonphilosopher typically thinks of as “things” – familiar concrete objects like human beings, animals, plants, and inanimate material bodies; and the realist tells us that what is peculiar to particulars is that each occupies a single region of space at a given time. Universals, by contrast, are construed as repeatable entities. At any given time, numerically one and the same universal can be wholly and completely exhibited or, as realists typically put it, exemplified by several different spatially discontinuous particulars. Thus, different people can exemplify the same virtue at the same time; different automobiles can simultaneously exemplify the same shape; and different houses … Continue reading >Michael J. Loux