ABSTRACT
Recent philosophers have—sometimes unwittingly—inverted the Parmenides/Aristotle “Third Man” argument against Platonic forms to serve not as a refutation of ideas/universals, but as a basis for their necessity. This line of thought issues from the efforts by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to show that any nominalistic attempt to dispense with universals (or “ideas”) in favor of resemblance (or “participation”) must fail. For Russell held that resemblance itself was internally regressive in that whenever items are invoked to a resemblance group, then the resemblance-feature at issue must be added as yet another member of the group. 1
