Universals in Medieval Philosophy How Essay

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"In modern terms, we would argue about whether universals are objectively real or only social constructs."

The idea that experiential faith is more valid than a rational, deductive proof of God's existence has come to more prominence in modern thought, given that science has largely subsumed the disciplines of mathematics and the use of mathematical 'proofs' about the divine favored by theologians in the middle ages like Aquinas. But within the social sciences, the debate about what is objectively knowable rages on. Postmodernists, for examples, suggest that there are no universal categories of knowledge or gender, what constitutes 'great literature' is subjective, and the idea that Western literature has 'classics' is usually defended in a tautological manner: Shakespeare is great, we should read great literature, therefore we should read Shakespeare. Postmodernists also point to the subjective nature of the category of gender in a cross-cultural fashion.

In politics as well, the question of what constitutes universal human rights still often perplexes the international community.

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'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Many Americans have taken it to be a self-evident truth that democracy is a value universally embraced by all peoples, even though the reality of American politics contained many perceived exceptions to this notion of liberty as a universal right, such as the continued existence of enslaved Americans within the new nation. The United Nations has tried to uphold universal standards of human rights, but the question remains of what rights are indeed universal, and what are culturally contextual remains. For some Islamic countries, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law regarding women's rights is their society's universal truth. The question of the existence of universal laws and substances remains in debate, as few moral questions have the neat certainty of a Pythagorean Theorem in terms of their answers.

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