1. 987a29–b14. This characterization is borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (South Bend: Dumb Ox Books, 1995), 153. See also Summa Theologica, Q 84; Article 1.
2. One possible solution—the solution imputed to the Schoolmen by modern thinkers—is the doctrine of innate ideas. Aristotle unequivocally rejects the idea that there might be innate ideas of forms already in the mind (De Anima 430a1). Socrates claims that a science conversant with universals is derived from the memory and that teaching a person merely means awakening in her the remembrance of what she used to know suggests that he understood some variation on the theme that universals are innate. Consider Meno 82b–85c and Adam Smith, “The History of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 124–5.
3. Frederick Copleston, Aquinas (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), 81.
4. Consider also Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 461 (Chapter 46): “The naturall Philosophy of those [Greek] Schools, was rather a Dream than Science, and set forth in senselesse and insignificant Language; which cannot be avoided by those that teach Philosophy … I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, that that which now is called Aristotles Metaphysiques.”
5. René Descartes, “Optics,” in Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 62 (Discourse 5).