Nominalism Sentence Examples

Nominalism was a doctrine of sceptics and suspected heretics, such as Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus.

It may be held that they exist merely as conceptions in our minds; this is Nominalism or Conceptualism.

It was the rith century which gave Nominalism to the world."

This cautious compromise sanctioned by the Church does not represent the extremest reaction against nominalism.

On the question of universals he endeavoured to steer a middle course between the pantheistically inclined realism of Duns Scotus and the extreme nominalism of William of Occam.

Prantl has professed to find the headstream of Nominalism also in Scotus Erigena; but beyond the fact that he discusses at considerable length the categories of thought and their mutual relations, occasionally using the term voces to express his meaning, Prantl appears to adduce no reasons for an assertion which directly contradicts Erigena's most fundamental doctrines.

The real germs of Realism and Nominalism are to be found in the 9th century, in scattered commentaries and glosses upon the statements of Porphyry and Boetius.

Taken strictly his words state the position of extreme Nominalism; but even if we were not forbidden to do so by other passages, in which the doctrine of moderate Realism is adopted (under cover of the current distinction between the singular as felt and the pure universal as understood), it would still be unfair to press any passage in the writings of this period.

As Cousin says, " Realism and Nominalism were undoubtedly there in germ, but their true principles with their necessary consequences remained profoundly unknown; their connexion with all the great questions of religion and politics was not even suspected.

But this is precisely an instance of the hypostatization of abstractions in exposing which the chief strength and value of Nominalism lie.

It is not to be supposed that the full scope of his doctrine was present to the mind of Roscellinus; but Nominalism would hardly have made the sensation it did had its assertions been as innocent as Haureau would make them.

Like most innovators, Roscellinus stated his position in bold language, which emphasized his opposition to accepted doctrines; and his words, if not his intentions, involved the extreme Nominalism which, by making universality merely subjective, pulverizes existence into detached particulars.

William of Champeaux (1070-1121), who is reputed the founder of a definitely formulated Realism, much Y as Roscellinus is regarded as the founder of Nominalism, was instructed by Roscellinus himself in dialectic. Unfortunately none of William's philosophical works have survived, and we depend upon the statements of his opponent Abelard, in the Historia calamitatum mearum, and in certain manuscripts discovered by Cousin.

In this list are included of course all shades of opinion, from extreme Nominalism to extreme Realism.

The doctrine of indifference as it appears in later writers certainly tends, as Prantl points out, towards Nominalism, inasmuch as it gives up the substantiality of the universals.

The concessions to Nominalism which such views embody make them representative of what Haureau calls " the Peripatetic section of the Realistic school."

By these distinctions Abelard hoped to escape the consequences of extreme Nominalism, from which, as a matter of history, his doctrine has been distinguished under the name of Conceptualism, seeing that it lays stress not on the word as such but on the thought which the word is intended to convey.

But he modifies his Nominalism so as to approach, though somewhat vaguely, to the position of Aristotle himself.

The last stage of Scholasticism preceding its dissolution is marked by the revival of Nominalism in a militant form.

But the name with which the Nominalism of the 14th century is historically associated is that of the " Invincible Doctor," William of Occam William of who, (q.v.),, as the, author of a doctrine which came occam to be almost universally accepted, received from his followers the title Venerabilis inceptor.

Nominalism was at first met by the opposition of the church and the constituted authorities.

In 1339 Occam's treatises were put under a ban by the university of Paris, and in the following year Nominalism was solemnly condemned.

As has been said it classifies universals as predicates of individuals and thus involves the difficulties which gave rise to the controversy between realism and nominalism.

Faith in the infallibility of the scholastic system was thus shaken, and the system itself was destroyed by the revival of philosophic nominalism, which had been discredited in the 11th century by the realism of the great schoolmen.

But nominalism was powerless to inspire theology with new life; on the contrary, its intervention only increased the inextricable tangle of the hairsplitting questions with which theology busied itself, and made their solution more and more impossible.

The extreme nominalism of some of the Cynics also, who denied the possibility of any but identical judgments, must be similarly regarded as a solvent of knowledge.

He thereby gave the signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning work of his life, the Consolatio Philosophiae (524), was repeatedly expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe.

He was one of the first to attack the realist doctrines of Duns Scotus, and is interesting mainly as the precursor of William of Occam in his revival of Nominalism.

His views imply a cultivated intelligence well versed in practical affairs, opposing to the extremes of both nominalism and realism a practical common sense.

The Schoolmen, however, gradually came to realize that the result to their logic was to make it a sermocionalis scientia, and to their metaphysics the danger of nominalism.

This extreme of nominalism for which predication is impossible is, however, compromised by two concessions.

His influence on his successors has rather lain in the general stimulus of his enthusiasm for experience, or in the success with which he represents the cause of nominalism and in certain special devices of method handed down till, through Hume or Herschel, they affected the thought of Mill.

Hobbes developed the nominalism which had been the hallmark of revolt against scholastic orthodoxy, and, when he brings this into relation with the analysis and synthesis of scientific A notable formula of Bacon's Novum Organum ii.

Drawing upon Gassendi for his psychological atomism and upon Hobbes for a thoroughgoing nominalism, he reproduces, as the logical conclusion from Locke's premises, the position of Antisthenes.

They could concede the triumphant achievement of science only with the proviso that it must be assumed to fall within the framework of their nominalism.

His free use of relating concepts, that of sameness, for instance, bears no impress of his theory of the general notion, and it is possible to put out of sight the fact that, taken in conjunction with his nominalism, it raises the whole issue of the possibility of the equivocal generation of formative principles from the given contents of the individual consciousness, in any manipulation of which they are already implied.

It is a curious commentary on the theories of Duns Scotus that one pupil, Francis, should have taken this course, while another pupil, Occam, should have used his arguments in a diametrically opposite direction and ended in extreme Nominalism.

The common account of his philosophical position, that he reintroduced nominalism, which had been in decadence since the days of Roscellinus and Abelard, by teaching that universals were only flatus vocis, is scarcely correct.

He has left on record that it was his aim and hope to reconcile realism and nominalism in the interests of theological peace.

Such an interpretation enables us to understand how it was possible, at a later date, for Aristotle to be regarded as the father of Nominalism.

Roscellinus, the famous canon of Compiegne, is mentioned by himself as his teacher; but whether he heard this champion of extreme Nominalism in early youth, when he wandered about from school to school for instruction and exercise, or some years later, after he had already begun to teach for himself, remains uncertain.

This is the true view of the scientific or inductive universal (as opposed to that of nominalism or pure empiricism).

The latent nominalism of Aristotle only came gradually to be emphasized through the prominence which Christianity gave to the individual life, and, apart from passing notices as in Abelard, first found clear enunciation in the school of Duns Scotus.

In short, when it comes to individual identity, Buddhism takes a similar position to philosophical nominalism.

Just as in logic the inevitable result was the purest nominalism, so in ethics he was driven to individualism, to the denial of social and national relations, to the exclusion of scientific study and of almost all that the Greeks understood by education.

Fully a century later, when the system of scholasticism was gradually breaking up under the predominance of Occam's nominalism, Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1425), and his more famous scholar John Gerson (1363-1429), chancellor of the university of Paris, are found endeavouring to combine the doctrines of the Victorines and Bonaventura with a nominalistic philosophy.

In speaking of the origin of Scholasticism - name and thing - it has been already noted that medieval speculation takes its rise in certain logical problems. To be more precise, central theme of Scholastic debate (see Nominalism, Realism).

There is more, however, in Hobbes, than the paradox of nominalism.

He revived nominalism by collecting and uniting isolated opinions upon the meaning of universals into a compact system, and popularized his views by associating them with the logical principles which were in his day commonly taught in the universities, He linked the doctrines of nominalism on to the principles of the logic of Psellus, which had been introduced into the West in the Summulae of Peter of Spain, and made them intelligible to common understandings.

The former Realism and Nominalism were lifted into a higher phase by the principle of the universalizing action of intellect - Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem.

When nominalism was revived in the 14th century by the English Franciscan, William of Occam, it gave evidence of a new tendency in thought, a distrust of abstractions and an impulse towards direct observation and inductive research, a tendency which had its fulfilment in the scientific movement of the Renaissance.

M de Remusat characterizes his view on the Eucharist as a specific application of Nominalism.