Nominalism

Nominalism, arising in the Middle Ages among certain Franciscan friars, refers to the rejections of “universals” in identifying and describing the relation between different objects in the world. Whatever relations that men observe between objects and persons does not derive from a universal category, but from a perceived relation that is formed in the mind of the observer. “The tradition that followed [William of] Ockham insisted that universals were simply names (nomina) that we apply to individual objects that happen to look alike. Hence the name ‘nominalism’ for the philosophical position that universals do not have real existence in the mind of God but are simply names that we assign to particular objects.”¹Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 80.

Nominalism arose in departure from the Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions that had guided many medieval thinkers, who might be regarded as Realists. They had been convinced that the order of the material world of experience possessed a definite relationship with unseen forms. “Reality cannot be limited to that which is sensible, as if the world is merely material and mechanical. Rather, reality is structured by two tiers, a sensible world of becoming and an intelligible world of Being.”²Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church (Grand Raipds, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2023), 10. Nominalism, therefore, became a rival assumption to a kind of Realism that preceded it, one influenced by Platonic thought. There were, however, differences among the Realists.

Disagreements occurred over whether Forms or Ideas exist in a separate realm (Plato believed in transcendental universals) or subsist and inhere within concrete particulars (Aristotle believed in concrete, immanent universals). Nonetheless, they all considered themselves Platonists in this sense: they all agreed that reality is defined by the existence of universals—they were all realists even if they disagreed on a specific theory. Over and against other ancient philosophies, Platonism believed in a transcendent reality that could not be reduced to materiality with all of its limitations.³The Reformation as Renewal, 10.

Realism was the presiding assumption in the Middle Ages against which Nominalism eventually found advocates.