A Phenomenological Argument for Property Realism

Property realism is the view that there are mind-independent universals. In this paper, I present a distinctive argument for property realism, partly inspired by Edmund Husserl, which has not appeared in the contemporary literature and has only a spare few precedents in the history of philosophy. The argument is phenomenological: it shows that universals must exist because we have experiences as of universals which are accurate and whose contents cannot be reduced to representations of particulars.