Ockham's Nominalism and Unreal Entities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10695500 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marilyn Mccord Adams (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 86 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 144 |
| Publication date | 1977-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2184004 |
| OpenAlex | W2325044736 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 25 |
A BELIEF that there are entities that do not really exist is not normally associated with William Ockham. On contrary, he is remembered for his ontological parsimony: for his denunciation of realism about universals as the worst error in philosophy,2 and for his insistence that only particular substances and qualities-not quantities and relations-are distinct real things. Nevertheless, a careful examination of Ockham's own theory of universals shows it not to be so ontologically innocent as label nominalism would suggest. According to Ockham, primary names with which universals are to be identified are not spoken or written words of any conventional language, but concepts that signify naturally by means of relations that obtain or not independently of human will.3 And he began by holding that concepts have a nonreal mode of existence as objects of thought. (I shall label this objective-existence theory, because Ockham usually dubs nonreal mode of existence objective existence.)
Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Nominalism · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy
Calvin and the Resignification of the World
Was Ockham a Humean about Efficient Causality?
Modal logic
Humanism and the teaching of logic
Ancient scholastic logic as the source of medieval scholastic logic
From the beginning to the early fourteenth century
Ockham on Identity and Distinction
Can God Make a Picasso? William Ockham and Walter Chatton on Divine Power and Real Relations
The semantics of terms
Medieval philosophical literature
The origins of the theory of the properties of terms
Syncategoremata, exponibilia, sophismata
Free will and free choice
Abelard and the culmination of the old logic
Happiness
Aristoteles latinus
Changes in the approach to language
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
The reception and interpretation of Aristotle's Ethics
The medieval interpretation of Aristotle
Ockham on Judgment, Concepts, and The Problem of Intentionality
Thomas Aquinas on human action
The Oxford and Paris traditions in logic
The potential and the agent intellect
Théories de la pensée, de ses objets et de son discours chez Guillaume d'Occam
| Unique citing works | 25 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 1976 - 2019 (44) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 25 |