![]() ![]() Yes, it's a complex idea but the consequences are very real. Historian and Benedictine monk David Knowles, in The Evolution of Medieval Thought, wrote that nominalism holds that "there is no such thing as a universal, and it is nonsense to speak of the thing known as present in an intelligible form in the mind of the knower." In other words, nominalism is a philosophical system claiming that everything outside the mind is completely individual: Reality cannot be comprehended through the use of universal and abstract concepts but only through the empirical study of specific, individual objects. Hence, the name of his system, nominalism, for the Latin nomen, 'name.'" Dog is merely a name we apply to particular things that happen to look alike. As Benjamin Wiker observed in Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity, 2002), Ockham believed that "when we use the word dog there is really no universal entity, essence or dog-ness that we perceive. ![]() Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) had taught that man can know the true, objective essence of things, Ockham denied it was possible. It may sound like a lot of ivory tower irrelevance, but the denial of universals has had deadly consequences in our society. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience." The English Franciscan, Weaver wrote, "propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. Decrying the modern assault on language and objective truth, Weaver laid the blame for such attacks at the foot of William of Ockham (c. Weaver (1910-63), a professor of English at the University of Chicago, published Ideas Have Consequences. ![]() If there was ever a poster child for the remark that "ideas have consequences," it is nominalism. It is an idea that has had a deep influence on Western thought and has helped shape Christian theology and Western thought for six hundred years. Yet the common intellectual source of the three statements is one of the most powerful ideas that nobody talks about. The last is the essential position of postmodern deconstructionists. The second captures the heart of classical Protestant soteriology (the theology of salvation see sidebar). What do these statements have in common? Apparently little: The first was the belief of a fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian. Words have no meaning but are merely text. God justifies man, but man remains as sinful inwardly as before. God could have redeemed us by becoming a donkey. ![]()
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