ABSTRACT
The Principle of Instantiation should be interpreted as ranging over all time: past, present, and future. People call the view that there are uninstantiated universals the Platonist view. It appears to have been the view held by Plato, who was also, apparently, the first philosopher to introduce universals. Plato, apparently, had to introduce what he called the Mathematicals. Like the mathematical Forms they were perfect and thus were unlike ordinary things. But unlike the Forms, there could be many tokens of the same type, and in this they were like ordinary things. There is one subtle variation of the argument to uninstantiated universals from their empirical possibility having more weight. It has been developed by Michael Tooley. However, it depends upon deep considerations about the nature of the laws of nature, which cannot be discussed here. It is interesting to notice that conjunctions of universals escape the two criticisms leveled against disjunctive and negative universals.
