absurdity, did a great service: they were the reductio ad absurdum of extreme nominalism. They showed that if you radically give up universals, you necessarily have to give up language, because language moves in universals. And if you read one of the Dadaistic poems, you will find that there are indeed no universals, but there's no sense either! [some laughter] And this was the necessary implication.

Now against this kind of nominalistic radicalism, the philosophical argument taken from the meaning of universals is valid as a philosophical argument and has always been defended by rationalist idealists or, in the Neothomistic school, realists in the medieval sense. This definition, I would say, is valid. Even those who attack this definition use universals in a way which they cannot defend from their own presuppositions.

Now this is the inner philosophical struggle. Here the theologian, or the religious observer, can sit in the ranks and look down into the arena where the philosophers fight with each other – he is not concerned about this, or at least not necessarily except if he is a philosopher himself.

But then the nominalists answer, and although they cannot defend the attack against their dadaistic implications, they can attack realism with the same fundamental argument which Aristotle^h used against Plato,ⁱ namely that if you give to the universals an ontological standing of their own, besides the individual things, that you then reduplicate reality. Aristotle called this argument the tritos anthropos, which means that here is the individual Paul and there is the individual John, they have something in common: both of them are men. Now man himself becomes