William of Ockham · Philosophy
Ockham’s claim that nothing universal exists out in the world: there are only individual things, and universals such as ‘humanity’ or ‘redness’ are concepts, signs in the mind that stand for many individuals at once. What this dissolves, and what it still has to explain.
One of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy hides inside the humblest sentence. When you say ‘Socrates is a man’ and ‘Plato is a man,’ the word ‘man’ applies to both. Does that word name some single thing - a shared human nature, a universal - that Socrates and Plato both possess? The realists said yes: universals are real features of the world, somehow one-in-many, and it is because Socrates and Plato both really share the nature humanity that the one word truly applies to each. Ockham said no. For him, the world contains only individuals: this man, that man, and no third thing called humanity in which they both partake. Universality is not a way of being; it is a way of signifying. The word and the concept ‘man’ are universal because they stand for many individuals - not because there is some universal object out there for them to name. This is nominalism: only individuals exist, and universals are names and concepts, not things.
To make nominalism work, Ockham needs an account of how a mere sign can do the job realists assigned to real universals. His answer runs through his logic. A universal term, he says, does not name a universal object; it has the function of standing for (in Latin, supponere pro) the many individuals it signifies. In the sentence ‘every man is mortal,’ the term ‘man’ stands, one by one, for Socrates, for Plato, for every individual human - and the sentence is true just in case each of those individuals is mortal. There is no need, anywhere in this, for a shared nature. The concept is a natural likeness that the mind forms in response to encountering individuals; the word is a conventional mark subordinated to the concept. Universality, in short, is a property of reference, of how signs point to things, and it lives in the mind and in language, never in the world of things themselves.
Nominalism buys a dramatically leaner world. Gone is the whole realm of common natures, the universal objects that realists had to place somehow both in every individual and yet numerically one. Gone are the puzzles about how one nature can be wholly present in many separate things at once, or how it can be both universal in the mind and individual in the man. The razor of the previous lesson is at work here: Ockham thinks realism posits entities we neither need nor can render coherent. But the economy is not free, and Ockham knows it. Having banished shared natures, he now owes an explanation of the very facts realism was invented to explain. Why do individuals fall into stable kinds at all? Why does the concept ‘cat’ latch cleanly onto cats and not onto a random scatter of things? If there is no common nature that cats share, what grounds their real resemblance? Answering that debt is the hard, unfinished work of every nominalism since.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Ockham denied the reality of universals: everything that exists is a singular individual, and a universal is only a concept (a natural sign) that signifies many things, standing in for them in our thought and speech. Explain what nominalism dissolves (the shared ‘common natures’ of the realists) and w…
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.