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Nominalism - Wikipedia
In medieval philosophy, the French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus (c. 1050 – c. 1125) was an early, prominent proponent of nominalism. Nominalist ideas can be found in the work of Peter Abelard and reached their flowering in William of Ockham, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist. Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism, which ...
Nominalism in Metaphysics - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Nominalism is an exclusionary thesis in ontology. It asserts that there are no entities of certain sorts. Precisely which entities it excludes depends on the relevant variety of nominalism, but nominalist theses typically deny the existence of universals or abstract entities. For those who accept nominalism, a central challenge in metaphysics is to make sense of phenomena that anti-nominalist ...
Nominalism | Medieval Philosophy, Ontology & Metaphysics | Britannica
Nominalism, in philosophy, position taken in the dispute over universals—words that can be applied to individual things having something in common—that flourished especially in late medieval times. Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word (e.g.,
William of Ockham - Wikipedia
William of Ockham was a pioneer of nominalism, and some consider him the father of modern epistemology, because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental ...
Nominalism in Metaphysics - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Nominalism comes in at least two varieties. In one of them it is the rejection of abstract objects; in the other it is the rejection of universals. Philosophers have often found it necessary to postulate either abstract objects or universals. And so Nominalism in one form or another has played a significant role in the metaphysical debate since at least the Middle Ages, when versions of the ...
NOMINALISM Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of NOMINALISM is a theory that there are no universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term.
Nominalism - Philopedia
Nominalism is the medieval and modern view that universals are mere names, not real entities, reshaping metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language.
Nominalism - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
‘Nominalism’ refers to a reductionist approach to problems about the existence and nature of abstract entities; it thus stands opposed to Platonism and realism. Whereas the Platonist defends an ontological framework in which things like properties, kinds, relations, propositions, sets and states of affairs are taken to be primitive and irreducible, the nominalist denies the existence of ...
Nominalism - New World Encyclopedia
Nominalism is best understood in contrast to philosophical or ontological realism. Philosophical realism holds that when people use general terms such as "cat" or "green," those universals really exist in some sense of "exist," either independently of the world in an abstract realm (as was held by Plato, for instance, in his theory of forms) or as part of the real existence of individual ...
Nominalism - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Ockham’s nominalism extends beyond a concern with universals and the distinction between common and discrete terms. He is also interested in the distinction between concrete and abstract terms, between terms like ‘man’ and ‘humanity’, ‘courageous’ and ‘courage’, and he is concerned to undermine what initially appears to be a ...
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