ABSTRACT
The universals that realists invoke confer a common nature upon their instances because they are genuinely shared by the different instances that partake of them. So universals are not “divided” amongst their instances. The realist may simply deny that the universals he or she posits are located in space and time, assigning them instead a purely abstract form of existence. But this threatens to be an ill-advised jump from the frying pan into the fire, making a mystery of how transcendent universals drawn from an abstract realm can confer a nature upon concrete particulars drawn from a realm of space and time. Moderate realists claim that both particulars and universals are required to account for repetition and order. Extreme realists disagree because whilst they affirm there are universals, they deny there are particulars, concrete things being merely bundles of universals.
