Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
Is Mathematics for Real?
By Martin Gardner
The Mathematical Experience
by Philip J. Davis, by Reuben Hersh
Birkhäuser, 440 pp., $24.00
In precisely what sense do universals (such as blueness, goodness, cowness, squareness, and threeness) exist? For Plato they are transcendent things, independent of the universe. Aristotle agreed that they are outside human minds, but he pulled them down from Plato's heaven to make them inseparable from the world. During the Middle Ages the nominalists and conceptualists shifted universals sideways from the outside world to the inside of human heads.
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