(From the Latin nominalis meaning relative to a name.)
philosophical doctrine. The nominalists were medieval philosophers and their main emphasis was on holding that “universals” have no substantial reality in themselves, but are created by reason. Nominalism was opposed to ® REALISM. In reality, nominalism was a reaction to realism.
One of the supporters of nominalism was Abelard, who tried to achieve a middle position. The first frankly nominalist system was established by William of Ockham (1280–1349). In nominalism faith itself becomes the basis for belief and essences have no independent reality of their own.
Source: Dictionary of Religions Denominations and Sects
Term that alludes to the medieval controversy about the reality that exists under the words (names). It is identified with the “problem of universals” or the real existence of general terms such as justice, humanity or wisdom. Some will say: yes, there are general realities. Others will say: what really exists are just people, concrete men, and wise individuals. And both will be right.
At the time of the great discussions, four opinions were proposed:
– Total realism. These concepts exist insofar as they are formed by the set of all that are housed under the term. Humanity exists, as a population resulting from the sum of all individuals, and there is a bouquet, the sum of all the flowers.
– Nominalism. It indicated the opposite. There is only the name. A collective reality does not exist; the house is only the sum of the bricks that form it. Many words, general or particular, are only sounds, not realities.
– Conceptualism. He was close to nominalism, but he recognized a certain existence of ideas in the mind of the thinker. There are concepts. They are not mere words, just like fantasies, qualities or relationships.
– Relativism. It is moderate realism, insofar as it recognizes that a house, the sum of its parts, exists, like a population. There are different ways of existing: individual and collective, material or physical and mental or ideal, past, present, future.
The question may seem like mere dialectical talk, but it has some importance in moral and doctrinal matters or issues. Concepts like justice or virtue, like sin or grace, Church or baptism, are more than just words. However, they are not tangible, physical realities that occupy a place. To understand these concepts, one must place oneself between materialism and spiritualism, between exaggerated realism and pure nominalism. However, they were issues that worried Abelardo (1079-1142) and Pedro Lombardo, Juan de Salisbury and San Anselmo, and finally Sto. Tomás de Aquino, to S. Buenaventura and Juan Duns Scoto.
Sto. Thomas formulated the theory of moderate or intelligent realism in precise and serene language: what exists in reality exists in the mind, but what exists in the mind does not always exist in reality.
The mind’s way of existing is different, although not univocally analogous, to the way of existing in reality. Abstract terms have a real existence: there is humanity, justice and peace. And they exist because there are just, peaceful and real men.
William of Occam would later defend a conceptualist interpretation and would highlight the value of “signs” as a way to understand realities. In the middle of both, concepts and realities, are the terms.
That is why vocabularies are so important to understand and explain life, reality, humanity.
Pedro Chico González, Dictionary of Catechesis and Religious Pedagogy, Editorial Bruño, Lima, Peru 2006
Source: Dictionary of Catechesis and Religious Pedagogy
With the term “nominalism” is designated a philosophical doctrine according to which universals or general concepts are simple abstract terms that designate more or less vast sets of individual realities.
Nominalism denies, therefore, that universals can subsist as prior or independent realities, situated in things or outside of them, and – to the extent that it tends to consider only concrete individualities as real – calls into question the same possibility of universal concepts.
The term nominalism was used by historians of philosophy to indicate a particular solution to the dispute over universals, which raged during the twelfth century among scholastic thinkers; however, the problem of universals represents one of the constant issues in the history of philosophy; the first debate between nominalist and realistic solutions took place between the Sophists (Gorgias and Antisthenes) and the Platonic school. In the field of ancient philosophy, the main contribution to the elaboration of nominalism is due to the Stoic school with the definition of the meaning of the terms -meaning that is distinguished from the simple sensible sound- as something abstract, incorporeal, that does not exist properly talking.
In medieval thought the problem arose again with the study of the lsagoge of Porphyry (232-303), in which the problems of the real existence of genera and species were raised but left unsolved, of whether it is about corporeal or incorporeal entities, whether or not they are separate from sensible things. In the field of nominalist solutions, the most extreme position is that commonly attributed to Roscelin (t 1125), which is difficult to interpret given the scant amount of reports we have on him and the cloud of controversy he aroused. Roscelino would have maintained that the universals are pure names, flatus vocis, while the true, concrete reality belongs only to the individuals we know. A more moderate form of nominalism is that held by Abelard (1079-1142), whose doctrine presents, however, quite complex aspects that have led some historians to deny him the qualification of nominalist.
The positions of Roscelino and Abelardo provoked strong reactions on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities, who feared the negative consequences that these ideas could provoke in the theological content.
In effect, the risk that nominalist doctrines would empty the key terms of Christian theology and metaphysics of ontological density was intuited; in particular, nominalism endorsed the tritheistic heresy, which was in fact defended by Roscelin.
The positive aspects of the various positions on universals found a harmonious synthesis in the moderate realism of Saint Thomas, but then, in the late Scholasticism, nominalism regained vigor with the logic of Occam’s terms. The union between nominalist and empiricist tendencies in Occam’s thought resulted in an accentuation of the separation between logical-philosophical thought and the contents of faith, and his philosophical approach exerted a decisive influence on later thought.
In modern philosophy, nominalism was supported with different emphasis by Hobbes (1588-1679), Locke (1632-1704) and more radically by Berkeley (1685-1753), who denied the very existence of general and abstract ideas, affirming that there are only particular ideas, expressed by means of common names. Thus, the empiricist current, reducing the concept or idea to being a sensitive image, always individual, leads to a more radical denial of universal concepts.
Finally, nominalism has been re-proposed in contemporary thought in the neopositivist program of a radical reform of logic which, by resolving general or abstract terms into ultimate, individual elements, believes it is possible to definitively overcome metaphysical “pseudo-problems”. In this neo-empiricist program, the anti-metaphysical potentialities of nominalism that progressively emerged throughout modern philosophy find full expression.
To Paris
Bibl.: E. Gilson, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Gredos, Madrid 1972, 197-242; A Dempf, Metaphysics in the Middle Ages, Gredos 1987, 268-284; E, Vilanova, History of Christian theology, Herder, Barcelona 1987 821-8S6: PP Gilbert, Introduction to medieval theology, Verbo Divino, Estella 1993.
PACOMIO, Luciano, Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary, Divine Word, Navarra, 1995
Source: Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary
The best way to adequately describe the set of problems of the n., both in the objective aspect and in the dynamic and historical aspect, is to start from the historical genesis and then expose the position that can be adopted today.
1. The term n. refers to the dispute over the ontological or metaphysical qualification of the universal concept during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (cf. dispute of the -> universals). In these disquisitions a question was raised again that Porphyry (+ 304) had left open in his Isagoge to the categories of Aristotle, a work accessible to the Middle Ages in the translation of Boethius (cf. PL 64, 84): Does the genus and the species exist as independent realities or are they only in the intellect, are they separated from the sensible or are they in the sensible? It is easy to recognize that in this question the whole problem of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy is condensed in its confrontation with the various forms of skepticism. Although in the discussions before Roscelin de Compigne, as well as in this one and, above all, in Abelard, the problems of logic and language appear in the foreground, it must be recognized, however, that the ontological or metaphysical question, which represented a fundamental critique of the philosophical and theological tradition, was felt to be truly dangerous and surprising.
About Roscelin we are not informed with historical certainty. The current idea according to which he defended the view that universals are nothing more than flatus vocis (mere voice), is conveyed by his adversary Anselm of Canterbury (De fide Trinitatis 2: PL 158, 265 A). Thus, although this is by no means a reason to consider Roscelin as the main representative of a n., nevertheless, his “anti-realism” can be understood as the initial attack within scholasticism against the réalisme outré of the “Platonists” ( in the broadest sense of this characterization). a no. In the style of the radical theory of flatus vocis, Abelard, who was a disciple of Roscelin, did not defend it either (cf. above all his work Nostrorum petitioni sociorum, ed. B. Geyer). Its formula: universale est sermo o nomen (but not vox), signifies a distancing from crass sensualism and already points to a “conceptualism” (thus Reiners, Vignaux, Gilson), that is, to a logic and theory of knowledge, still founded ontologically, in that the active and productive role of the human intellect in the discovery and knowledge of ideas and of truth itself is granted more space than in the “realism” of orientation…