ABSTRACT
The philosopher is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the passage which has been paraphrased here, odd though it may seem, is among the most famous in twentieth-century philosophy, from his posthumous work Philosophical Investigations.1 The problem that can be found to be raised in it is the ancient problem of universals, the problem of the One and the Many, of Unity and Diversity: Must all instances of a general term or concept have anything in common, over and above the fact they are all instances of the same concept? Must all firms have anything in common, over and above the fact they are all firms? Must all red things have anything in common, over and above the fact they are all red things? Certainly we know there to be individual red things like red poppies and red roses and red corpuscles and redheads and Red Square, and we know there to be individual firms like General Motors and Mitsubishi and Kodak and the corner grocery-store. But how is each individual red thing related to the general concept ‘Red’? How are General Motors, Mitsubishi, the corner-store etc. each related to the general concept ‘Firm’? Should we think of red poppies and red corpuscles and redheads as each sharing or partaking of some transcendental property-a universal-called ‘Redness’? Should we think of General Motors and Mitsubishi and the corner-store as each sharing or partaking of some universal called ‘Firmhood’? Would it be because they do that we call a red thing red or a firm a firm?
