Aristotle denied that exemplifying a universal is anything like copying it.
At a time when it is almost impossible to attach a universal meaning to anything, the crossroads linking satire to its target can be very hard to find.
"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.
We speak of whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same nature as things given in sensation, as a particular; by opposition to this, a universal will be anything which may be shared by many particulars" (ibid., 93).
"It doesn't reflect any views that I am aware of in the government I work for and it's certainly not a universal Nato plan or anything," he said.
And here's the formulation of the categorical imperative that we got in our reading for today: "Never act except in such a way that I can also will that my act maxim should become a universal law". Never do anything that you couldn't will everybody else to do at the same time.
But their reception, even from the most prominent members of society, has been anything but a universal embrace.
Such generalizations are rules of thumb that hold only for the most part, and require, for their application to a given case, detailed contextual supplementation that cannot, by its nature, be included in anything like a universal generalization.
Here was a "universal computing machine" that would do anything it was programmed to do; curiously, the machine proper remained untouched.
By contrast, anything that is a universal (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) is unreal; at most it is a conventionally recognized fiction needed for thought and language.
