Abstract
Gyula Klima has argued that the disagreements between Nominalists and Realists in the middle ages, as exemplified in the views of John Buridan and Thomas Aquinas, centered less in semantics and metaphysics than in epistemology and philosophy of mind. This paper suggests that in the light of Prof. Klima’s arguments, the disagreements in these areas cannot easily be separated and raise a number of issues that remain of philosophical importance.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
What are apparently the last references to the twelfth-century Nominales as an extant school are found in a text of Jacques de Vitry reprinted as text 53 in Iwakuma and Ebbesen 1992, 202. This text was originally brought to my attention by Professor Christopher J. Martin.
- 3.
I do not know who were the earliest post-twelfth-century medieval thinkers to be called “Nominales” or “Nominalistae” by themselves or their contemporaries. What is clear is that by even as early as 1340 there are references to Ockhamistae, by 1400 some were being called Nominales, and by 1474 some not yet precisely identified soi-disant Parisian Nominales, replying to an edict of the French king seizing their books and outlawing the teaching of the renovatores who inspired them, were claiming Ockham as a founding father. They did not exactly claim Buridan (who is mentioned by name in the king’s edict but not in the reply), but they did not seek to distance themselves from him either, and in the first quarter of the fifteenth century we find references to the “via Buridana” and the “seculum Buridanuum.”
- 4.
Here we are all indebted to the extensive work of Zenon Kaluza and in particular to Klauza 1988. Several scholars, including Prof. Klima, have pointed out that we can see battle lines drawn, for example, in the 1473 edict of Louis XI forbidding the teaching of the followers of these “Nominales” and contrasting the teaching of these doctores reales. See Normore 2017a, b and the references therein.
- 5.
The situation with concrete terms is somewhat more complex than I here let on. The neuter form of at least some Latin adjectives, for example album (pale/white), is frequently used alone as a noun where in English it would now be customary to supply a “dummy” noun such as “one” or “thing.” Thus “currens est album,” which has the participle “currens” as subject and the neuter adjective as predicate, might well be translated as “Some runner (or running thing) is a pale thing.”
- 6.
In the sense of “humanity” or “human nature,” as this term would serve as the abstract counterpart of the term “man,” differing from it only in casus, as is the case with homo and humanitas in Latin.
- 7.
Because, in Buridan’s view, these terms are absolute terms, lacking any extrinsic connotation, whence they cannot have appellation, and thus cannot be predicated denominatively either.
- 8.
Robert Holkot, II Sent., q. 3 (Oriel fol. 159ra), quoted and translated in Tachau 1988, 249.
- 9.
“Socrates is a humanity” would be a more intuitive example except for complications induced by the Incarnation.
- 10.
The proviso that neither the faith nor physics requires otherwise is necessary, of course. Neither Ockham nor Buridan would have thought that if Justin’s justice were a being different from Justin, its existence would be sufficient for Justin’s being just. Both thought that, for example, God could bring it about that a whiteness existed without anything being white. Ockham thought that this is what would happen if a piece of bread made from bleached flour were transubstantiated as in the Eucharist. Aquinas’s view in this case is more complicated, but he does seem to have thought that the bread’s whiteness could exist without the bread—though perhaps not without the bread’s quantity—which itself could exist without it.
Bibliography
Boyard, C., and R. Keele, eds. 2013. Later medieval metaphysics: Ontology, language and logic. New York: Fordham University Press.
Buridan, John. 2001. Summulae de Dialectica. An annotated translation, with a philosophical introduction by Gyula Klima. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Courtenay, W.J. 1991. In search of nominalism: Two centuries of historical debate. In Gli studi di filosofia medievale tra otto e Novecento: Contributo a un bilancio storiografico, ed. A. Maierù and R. Imbach, 214–233. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
———. 2008. Ockham and Ockhamism. Leiden: Brill.
Ebbesen, S., and R. Friedman, eds. 1999. Medieval analyses in language and cognition. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Geach, P. 1955. Form and existence. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55: 251–272.
Iwakuma, Y., and S. Ebbesen. 1992. Logico-theological schools from the second half of the 12th century, a list of sources. Vivarium 30: 173–210.
Kaluza, Z. 1988. Les querelles doctrinales á Paris: Nominalistes et réalistes aux confins du XIVe et du XVe siècles. Bergamo: P. Lubrima.
Klima, G. 1988. Ars artium essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modern. Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
———. 1999. Buridan’s logic and the ontology of modes. In Ebbesen and Friedman 1999, 473–495.
———. 2011a. Demon skepticism and concept identity in a nominalist vs. a realist framework. In Klima and Hall 2011a, 83–94.
———. 2011b. Demon skepticism and non-veridical concepts. In Klima and Hall 2011b, 117–126.
———. 2013. Aquinas vs. Buridan on essence and existence. In Bolyard and Keele 2013, 30–44.
Klima, G., and A. Hall, eds. 2011. The demonic temptations of medieval nominalism. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kretzmann, N., et al., eds. 1982. The Cambridge history of later medieval philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lagerlund, H., and B. Hill, eds. 2017. The Routledge companion to sixteenth century philosophy. Leiden: Brill.
Normore, C.G. 1987. The tradition of medieval nominalism. In Wippel 1987, 201–217.
———. 2011. Externalism, singular thought and nominalist ontology. In Klima and Hall 2011, 137–147.
———. 2017a. Nominalism in the sixteenth century. In Lagerlund and Hill 2017a, 121–136.
———. 2017b. Likeness stories. In Pelletier and Roques 2017b, 81–94.
Ockham, William. 1974. Summa logicae, opera philosophica, ed. P. Boehner, vol. 1. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.
Panaccio, C. 2004. Ockham on concepts. Aldershot: Ashgate.
———. 2011. Late medieval nominalism and non-veridical concepts. In Klima and Hall 2011, 95–116.
Parsons, T. 2014. Articulating medieval logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pelletier, J., and M. Roques, eds. 2017. The language of thought in later medieval philosophy. Berlin: Springer.
Spade, P.V. 1982. The semantics of terms. In Kretzmann et al. 1982, 188–196.
Tachau, K. 1988. Vision and certitude in the age of Ockham. Leiden: Brill.
Thorndike, L. 1944. University records and life in the middle ages. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wippel, J., ed. 1987. Studies in medieval philosophy. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Normore, C.G. (2023). Thoughts About Things: Aquinas, Buridan and Late Medieval Nominalism. In: Hochschild, J.P., Nevitt, T.C., Wood, A., Borbély, G. (eds) Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 242. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15026-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15026-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15025-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15026-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)