Nominalism

Nominalism

The great revival of philosophical and theological study which the thirteenth century witnessed was conditioned by the influence of Aristotle. The theory of the universe propounded by the Stagirite had to be reconciled with the traditional Platonic-Augustinian realism. This Thomas Aquinas undertook to do, following, Aristotle as closely as possible. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, attempted to maintain the ancient realism, while supporting it by modern or Aristotelian methods. Interests and tendencies, however, came up in his work which drove his disciples away from his position. The growth of empirical research and psychological analysis together with the new activity of the reason in the epistemological field on the one side, and the recognition of the fact that the specific and the particular was the end of nature on the other, led to results widely divergent from those of Scotus. Here was Ockham's work ready to his hand. He was the leader of the nominalists, the founder of the "modern" school. Science has to do, he maintains, only with propositions, not with things as such, since the object of science is not what is but what is known. Things, too, are always singular, while science has to do with general concepts, which as such exist only in the human mind. Scotus had deduced the objective existence of universals from the concepts originated under the operation of the objects. Ockham, on the other hand, asserts that "no universal is a substance existing outside of the mind," and proves it by a variety of keen logical reasons. He rejects even the milder forms of philosophic universalism, such as the theory that the universal is something in particulars which is distinguished from them not realiter but only fo...

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...ing to exist; and suppose this contingent universe has existed from eternity, i.e., that it has already existed through an infinite time. Then by now all possibilities must have occurred, including the simultaneous non-existence of everything.

The fourth argument, from grades of being, is Platonic; it should remind you of Anselm's argument in Monologion, chapter 4, Readings, p.22.

The fifth is like the argument from design, except that the evidence offered for the existence of an intelligence behind the universe is not the orderliness of the whole universe, but the apparently purposive activity of each and every part. Recall Aristotle's teleological view of nature, that a natural process is for the sake of some end. Aristotle's God did not appoint the ends, they just were! But Thomas Aquinas says that there can't be purposiveness without a guiding intelligence.