Share Tweet P Share Email Print IT’S HAPPENING! Trump Now Up in Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tied in Wisconsin — And Black, Hispanic and Evangelical Vote Is UP from 2016
Robert Cahaly, the chief pollster at Trafalgar Polling, joined Laura Ingraham on Thursday to discuss the latest battleground polls.
Trafalgar Polling correctly predicted Michigan and Wisconsin would go for Donald Trump in 2016.
And today he still feels the same way.
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According to the latest Trafalgar Polling President Trump holds a 3.4 point lead over Joe Biden in Michigan.
President Trump also holds a lead over Joe Biden in Florida and Trump is less than two points behind Joe Biden in Nevada.
Robert also had this shocking news on Hispanic and Black voters this year.
Robert Cahaly: What we’re seeing with the Hispanics,
the blacks and now the youth vote is starting to move. The Hispanic
numbers in both states is 41 for Trump and the African American number
in Nevada was 20 and 27 in Florida.
These are HUGE numbers for President Trump!
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And also Evangelicals are turning to Trump in larger numbers (79%) than in 2016!
79% of white evangelical likely voters are
supporting Trump — which is 9 percentage points higher than his support
among this group at a comparable point in the 2016 election cycle,
according to PRRI’s American Values Survey from September. https://t.co/NfEwPpgF8V
"Will Biden presidency risk plunging the world into a catastrophic third world war?"
The Islamic Global Village Space news outlet asked the question:
"Will Biden presidency risk plunging the world into a catastrophic third world war?"
The Moslem news outlet admitted that President Donald Trump has been a peace president:
"Nevertheless, despite the occasional show of force, Trump has shown
remarkable restraint during his four-year presidency against the advice
of his national security advisers who wanted more proactive engagement
of the US military in conflict flashpoints, such as Syria, Iran and
Afghanistan, to the point that some generals in the top-brass of the US
military even accused him of being Putin’s 'useful idiot.'”
Unfortunately, the Global Village Space says that deep state war hawks apparently know that a Joe Biden win would bring about war president and therefore support him:
"To name a few Trump aides who resigned or were sacked, they include
former national security adviser John Bolton, former national security
adviser H.R. McMaster, former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former White
House chief of staff John Kelly, former director of national
intelligence Dan Coats, former Navy secretary Richard Spencer and former
chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor."
"In
fact, scores of former Republican national security officials recently
made their preference public that they would vote for Joe Biden instead
of Donald Trump against party lines."war
"What does that imply?"
"It
implies that the latent conflict between the deep state and the elected
representatives of the American people has come to a head during the
Trump presidency... "
"... On another occasion, he ruffled more feathers by telling the
reporters: 'I’m not saying the military’s in love with me. The soldiers
are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to
do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make
the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.'”
"In
conclusion, to answer the oft-repeated question as to how the Biden
Presidency would look like, how the “Sleepy Joe’s” vice presidency
looked like, as Trump often derisively taunts him on social media and in
speeches. His presidency would be no different from his uneventful vice
presidency."
In 2014, ex-President Barack Obama's former Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, appeared to agree that Biden was a war hawk according to the Los Angeles Times:
"Gates takes special aim at some of Obama’s top advisors, including
Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, he charges, 'has been wrong on nearly
every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past
four decades.'”
"Obama worried that top Pentagon officers, including
Petraeus and Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
were giving him 'the bum’s rush' in pressing for more troops in
Afghanistan early in his first term, Gates says. He blamed Biden, among
other aides, for that." [https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-pn-gates-book-obama-20140107-story.html]
If there is one man I
can readily imagine—inadvertently, of course, and with the best of
intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric—turning Cold War II into
World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette 1
Biden Jr.
If there is one man I
can readily imagine—inadvertently, of course, and with the best of
intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric—turning Cold War II into
World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette 1
Biden Jr.
((Adds reference to George H.W. Bush in penultimate paragraph.))
If there is one man I
can readily imagine—inadvertently, of course, and with the best of
intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric—turning Cold War II into
World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette 1
Biden Jr.
If there is one man I
can readily imagine—inadvertently, of course, and with the best of
intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric—turning Cold War II into
World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette 1
Biden Jr.
Pray an Our Father now for the
restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the
Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
US Catholic bishops fund network that endorses Biden, abortion, strippers
US Catholic bishops fund network that endorses Biden, abortion, strippers
Direct proof from the group's own
websites and social media feeds show that it has no intention of
following the U.S. bishops' poorly enforced funding guidelines.
October 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews)
— A shocking new private poll shared by one of the country’s leading
data scientists claims that 30% of American women under 25 identify as
homosexual, bisexual, or transgender.
Before looking into the reasons for these numbers, Eric Levitz, in a New York Magazinearticle
about the gender gap between Trump and Biden supporters, calls
attention to the continuing rise of “singledom” — a preference for
non-married life — among young women in the United States:
Neither the societal shift away from traditional gender roles nor the
downstream cultural consequences of that shift are anywhere near
complete. As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued,
the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation
of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In
2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in
the United States than married ones.
A large part of the trend away from marriage is attributable to young
women rejecting sexual complimentarity and identifying as lesbian,
bisexual or a member of the opposite sex, Levitz explains:
And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprecedentedly
single; they also appear to be unprecedentedly uninterested in
heterosexuality: According to private polling shared with Intelligencer
by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.
As the poll is limited to women under 25, it doesn’t reflect changes
to women’s sexual preference later on in life, while they’re still able
to have kids.
In any case, conservative commentators were astonished at the poll’s findings.
“What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society,” suggests Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative. “And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family.”
“And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually
uninterested in men,” Dreher continued. “There is nothing remotely
normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture —
that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most
important thing that a generation can do is produce the next
generation.”
“No families, no children, no future,” he added.
Andrew Sullivan, a popular mainstream political and societal
commentator who identifies as homosexual, isn’t buying the stats, which
he seems to think are way out of line and suggestive of openness to
“female sexual fluidity.”
Sullivan tweeted,
“Wild guess: 25 percent bi - meaning female sexual fluidity; 3 percent
exclusively lesbian; 1.9 percent trendy trans; 0.1 percent actually
trans.”
Wild guess: 25 percent bi - meaning female sexual
fluidity; 3 percent exclusively lesbian; 1.9 percent trendy trans; 0.1
percent actually trans. https://t.co/mS6kkb6Ifl
In an update to his article, Rod Dreher, and many of his readers,
seemed to have reached the same conclusion as Sullivan: “The “B” in
“LGBT” — bisexual — is probably doing a hell of a lot of work in that 30
percent number.”
While the reported statistics about female sexuality are shocking, the rise of “singlehood” is by itself cause for great alarm.
Increasing numbers of single people see themselves as a new victim
class — objects of discrimination by society and government which seem
to favor married people and families. The singlehood activists want to
level the playing field by steamrolling not only laws and regulations
which offer economic benefits for marriage; they would like to see
marriage itself tossed in the dustbin of history.
— Article continues below Petition —
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“Any way you look at it, the United States has undergone a seismic shift in marriage culture over the past few decades,” noted Stella Morabito, a senior editor at The Federalist, in a prescient 2014 commentary.
“A small, vocal, and organizing core of ‘singles activists’
are starting to prod and poke everyone to tell marrieds: ‘check your
privilege!’” continued Morabito. “They basically claim that all economic
or social benefits for marriage discriminate against singles.”
“Many singles’ activists envision a utopian society in which legally
isolating every individual expands freedom,” observed Morabito. “And it
might even seem that way for a little while. Some will revel in a
perceived ‘New World Orgy’ of freedom. But the morning after this binge
of faux freedom will bring a hangover that doesn’t go away.”
Morabito warns that the singles movement serves a statist agenda,
increasing the role of government in individual lives, while diminishing
individual freedom.
Dr. Wodarg's position as the Coronavirus "is not statistically as exceptional"
Today, in Germany there was real debate between pulmonologist specialist
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and the website which is called Mimikana.
The website presents Dr. Wodarg's position as the Coronavirus "is not
statistically as exceptional as it is presented: Without tests, nobody
would notice that SARS-CoV-2 existed at all... In fact, we don't see an
increase at this point - in Europe!"
Mimikana admits this is apparently true, but says the "real comparison,
we have to use are the mortality rates in China" which are apparently
approximately 6 times higher than normal according to the chart they
presented.
(Mimikana, "Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg is an internist and pulmonologist, that
is, a specialist. However, his statements cause discussion.," March 17,
2020)
The website article is an attempt to refute Wodarg's position and ends with the conclusion that:
"The claim that the current quarantine measures are nonsensical and
exaggerated cannot be confirmed... other experts show quite clearly that
it is dangerous to underestimate SARS- CoV- 2."
"Apart from that, there is another danger... that of mutation! The more a
virus spreads, the greater the likelihood that it will mutate."
The last sentence made me laugh because even I know that all viruses mutate. That's what they do.
Live Science said:
The new coronavirus, like all other viruses, mutate, or undergoes small
changes in its genome. A recently published study suggests... [it] had
already mutated into one more or one less aggressive strain. But experts
aren't convinced."
"... Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist... the authors' conclusions are 'pure speculation.'"
(Live Science, "How fast can the coronavirus mutate?," March 6, 2020, 11 days ago)
Moreover, Dr. Wodarg in his website wodarg.com reported a stunning
revelation from the "important Italian [new agency] source" Agenzia Nova
dated March 13, 2020:
"Coronavirus: ISS, in Italy there are only two deaths ascertained so far due to Covid-19:
'Rome, 13 Mar 19:12 - (Agenzia Nova) - There may be only two people who
died from coronavirus in Italy, who did not to present other
pathologies. This is what emerges from the medical records examined so
far by the Higher Institute of Health, according to the President of the
Institute, Silvio.'"
(www.wodarg.com, wolfgang wodarg Q&A - typical questions and answers: COVID19 in Italy?)
Why can't we in the United States have a real debate on the Coronavirus
before we suspend Masses and impose martial law-like edicts?
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as for
the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the
Immaculate Heart of Mary.
We Are At Pravda Levels of Mainstream Media Propaganda.
Our greatest obstacle is the hopelessly brainwashed.
You are the most amazing of people, YOU who take the abuse while trying to wake up family and friends to what's really going on and I love and respect you greatly x [https://twitter.com/Jimcorrsays/status/1318501170567053317]
Intellectual historians often seek to define and diagnose modernity by identifying its inaugural figure. Once we attend to the development of ideas, it is hard to resist tracing some distinctive features of the modern age—especially if we are ambivalent about or critical of those features—to a philosopher who must stand as a kind of intellectual continental divide, responsible for a new and pervasively influential worldview paradigmatically different from what came before. There is a fair amount of conceit in the notion that any one thinker could really have such deep cultural significance. Still, we all know the familiar candidates, the most famous of which is alluded to in the Ciceronian Society’s statement of purpose: Descartes and his rationalism. Other candidates include Kant for his critical turn, or Hume for separation of ought from is, or Augustine for his invention of the inner self. A lesser known, but still quite venerable hypothesis is to blame the plagues of modernity on a fourteenth-century logician, William of Ockham (c. 1285
‒
1349). Étienne Gilson, the grandfather of the twentieth-century revival of medieval philosophical scholarship, once wrote that, “as a philosopher, it was Ockham’s privilege to usher into the world what I think is the first known case of a new intellectual disease.”2
New intellectual diseases are rare indeed; most of the philosophical problems we identify today—materialism, subjectivism, rationalism, skepticism—were present already among Presocratic philosophers. Gilson’s words are strong, but they seem tame compared to the words of Richard Weaver—a thinker justly included in the Ciceronian Society’s list of thinkers who have inspired thought about “tradition, place, and ‘things divine.’” Allow me to quote what is, to my knowledge, the most dramatic, and perhaps the most widely influential, condemnation of Ockham, from the opening pages of Weaver’s 1948surprise best-seller
Ideas Have Consequences:
page 1
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.3
It is natural to wonder whether this could be anything but melodrama and hyperbole. Could anything justify such a characterization of Ockham’s significance? Why did Weaver—an English professor at the University of Chicago—give a scholastic logician such a crucial place in his story of “the dissolution of the West”? To answer these questions, we need first to be precise about what, if anything, is wrong with Ockham’s philosophical innovations, and to do this, we will have to clarify precisely what those innovations were.
Ockham’s innovation is usually addressed under the label of “nominalism.” Accounts of what this is, however, are liable to cause confusion, especially in theological scholarship. Most theologians, following the scholarship of Heiko Oberman, highlight the influence of Ockhamist nominalism on the Augustinian school which shaped Luther.4
But nominalism is usually opposed to “realism,” and Augustinian theology is supposed to be more indebted to “realist” Platonism, compared with a more moderate Thomistic Aristotelianism. What’s more, attempts to characterize the weaknesses of “nominalist” theology differ greatly. Louis Dupré, for instance, has complained that “nominalist theology effectively removed God from creation…. The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature… thus making God largely inaccessible to reason.”5
As a criticism of nominalist theology this is completely baffling. Dupré in fact makes nominalism sound not only thoroughly orthodox, but entirely continuous with previous, non-nominalist theology: God the supernatural creator is distinct from created nature, and so beyond the full comprehension of human reason.
The confusion is even more obvious when we realize that other thinkers, apparently drawing on the same theological research, accuse Ockham’s theology o f moving God.
3
I n the other direction; thus Brad Gregory, in his recent book
The Unintended Reformation
, makes it clear that he thinks nominalism is of a piece with a naturalistic metaphysics that denies divine transcendence, reducing God to just another entity in the universe of discourse.6
If Gregory and Dupré can condemn Ockham for such polar opposite theological exaggerations—elevating God above the reach of reason, or demoting Him to the realm of creatures—we should wonder whether we should start our investigation somewhere other than in theology. Nominalism does have theological implications—which we will get to—but to characterize nominalism properly we must leave the theological arena and treat it as primarily a
philosophical doctrine. Unlike many other well-known medieval thinkers, Ockham was not a theologian; he remained throughout his career a teacher of “arts,” which is to say, of
philosophy, and he is known primarily as a logician. It is in this area that Ockham can truly be said to be an innovator, and it is here that we need to turn to grasp what is meant by his “nominalism.”
Ockham’s “nominalism” is usually understood as an attempt to answer a question about
what universals are
. As Weaver himself describes it: “It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which
denies that universals have real existence
.”7
Richard McKeon, a respected scholar of Aristotle and medieval philosophy, similarly describes Ockham’s nominalism: “No universals, only individuals, exist outside the mind, and it is from those extramental realities that knowledge has its first beginnings.”8
So, according to these and many other mainstream accounts,
realists
hold that
universals have some mind-independent existence
, while
nominalists
hold that
universals do not have such mind-independent existence
. If this characterization were accurate, Ockham’s nominalism would certainly have dire consequences, for it seems tantamount to a denial of objective truth. As Weaver puts it, “Ockham’s triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man….”9
For Weaver and others, then, it is a straight line from nominalism to relativism, skepticism, nihilism, hyperpluralism, and the death camp
But are nominalism and realism really best understood as denying and affirming that universals have extramental existence? A first problem with this characterization becomes evident when we realize that, on this account, Thomas Aquinas would
4
count as a nominalist. Aquinas is supposed to be the exemplary medieval realist—indeed, it is most often from Thomist quarters that Ockham’s nominalism is criticized—and yet Aquinas is very clear that nothing exists as a universal; all existing things are individuals. Universals, as such, do not exist, not even on some “different metaphysical plane.”
What deserves to be called a universal is, for Aquinas, not some mind-independent being, but an entirely mind-dependent being. Aquinas consistently says that universality—being a genus, being a species—is not a property of anything insofar as it exists in reality. There is no existing universal “humanity,” there are only the
individual human natures
, existing either in reality, as the individual souls of individual men, or as individual modifications of individual minds—i.e., as acts of thought or concepts. Those are the only two ways the nature exists, and in neither case is it a universal.
What does Aquinas say is a universal, then? While a nature does not
exist
as a universal, the nature can be
considered as a universal
insofar as the individual act of a mind relates that mind to many things. As Aquinas puts it, universality is an accident of an intelligible nature which accrues to it insofar as it exists in the intellect and thus relates the intellect to many things existing in reality.
10
If Aquinas on this account does not sound like a realist, perhaps we could at least still say that he is not really a nominalist either, but something in between—a conceptualist. This middle position is usually characterized as holding that while universals are not real things, they are not mere words either, they are concepts. But this revised characterization of Aquinas as a conceptualist only raises another problem, because Ockham himself should also be characterized as a conceptualist in this sense. Ockham did not think that the only things that are universals are words; he thought that words can be universal only because they are attached to concepts that are universal. Indeed, Ockham’s definition of a universal seems as if it were just a rephrasing of Aquinas’s own definition: “the universal is an intention of the soul capable of being predicated of many.”
11
If the problem of universals is the question “
what kind of things exist as universals?
” and if names, concepts, and mind-independent things are supposed to be the available respective nominalist, conceptualist, and realist answers to this question, it seems that there might never have been a
nominalist
in the history of philosophy, nor would there likely ever be. What is more, if Platonic Forms are ideas in a divine mind, as most Platonists, including perhaps Plato himself, construed them, it is not
page 5
clear that there has ever been a
realist
either. Everyone, in some manner or other, is a conceptualist. These reflections alone should be enough to convince us that if “realism,” “conceptualism,” and “nominalism” are to capture philosophically interesting views, they cannot be labels for positions on the existence of universals. The fact of the matter is that the medieval problem of universals was never primarily a question of the
existence of universals
. We may be misled by the Greek Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234
‒
301), who framed three questions about the existence of universals, in his introduction to Aristotle’s logic. Porphyry asked:
(1) Whether universals exist independently of the mind; (2) if so, whether they are incorporeal; and (3) if they are incorporeal, whether their existence depends on corporeal things. 12
These questions prompted much subsequent medieval discussion, and they do seem to take the form of questions about what sort of
things
universals
are
. But it is noteworthy that Porphyry raised (and then refrained from answering) these metaphysical questions in the context of a work on logic; and the questions did not last long in Porphyry’s overtly metaphysical form. Boethius, commenting on Porphyry’s questions, treats them as an occasion to make epistemological distinctions. Nothing exists as a universal, he says, but what exists can be understood as a universal, when it is “abstracted”
‒
that is, considered apart from the particular features that accompany it in its actual existence. Boethius essentially reframed Porphyry’s questions about what universals are as his own questions about what is the basis for universal concepts.
Boethius’s epistemological reinterpretation of Porphyry’s questions was a half-step toward a complete reframing of the question of universals that was fully established by Ockham’s day. We see by the time of Abelard (c. 1079
‒
1142) that Porphyry’s questions about universality are reinterpreted as questions about language and logic:
what in reality
could
legitimate the use
of
universal terms
. This new, more explicitly linguistic concern is evident also in an additional, fourth question which Abelard added when commenting on Porphyry: (4) whether a universal term would still signify anything even if it did not name anything.
13
If there are no actual roses for the “word” rose to refer to, does the word “rose” still have any meaning?
page 6
What is at stake when Abelard posed these questions is not ontology so much as the mechanisms of meaning. Abelard’s re-interpretation of and addition to the classic Porphyrian questions completes a shift in emphasis from strictly metaphysical concerns (what kinds of things are universals?) to epistemological and psychological concerns (how does a reality made up of individual things justify our use of universal concepts?), and even further toward logical or semantic concerns (what are the different semantic functions of universal terms, and how are these different functions related?). It is these semantic concerns
‒
and not the prior metaphysical concerns
‒
which are at stake in later medieval debates between realists and nominalists. While metaphysical implications may ultimately be of more pressing concern, if we are to characterize the nominalism of Ockham, we must treat it as an answer to the epistemological and semantic questions of universals. Ockham’s nominalism is not an answer to a question about the existence of universals, but an answer to a question about
how words signify.
To appreciate what is novel in Ockham’s answer to this question, it is appropriate to compare it with the “realist” answer exemplified by Aquinas. Aquinas’s view is perhaps best framed in terms of what historians of philosophy call the “inherence theory of predication.” A proposition is true, on this account, if the predicate term signifies a
nature
or
form
which inheres in what is named by the subject term. “Socrates is white” is true if and only if the form of
whiteness
inheres in Socrates. “Socrates is a man” is true if and only if Socrates is characterized by the nature
humanity
. Obviously this view is linked to a metaphysical account of things as caused to be what they are by virtue of their forms; and it is linked, as well, to an account of cognition according to which I understand things insofar as they are characterized by these intelligible forms. Indeed, this is why it leads to the semantic account, as my words are only meaningful insofar as they signify the concepts in my mind, which concepts are caused by, and so represent by means of their formal similarity to, the forms of things.
Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s “realism.” It is not that these signified forms
are universals
or have any universal
existence
; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making
page 7
it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a
word signifies
, and the
mind is aware of
, many things insofar as they all share that same form. This is why Aquinas said that universality is a feature of individual forms existing in the mind, insofar as those individual forms relate that mind to many things.
Notice, however, that even if it does not entail that
universals exist
, the inherence theory of predication does seem to entail a rather highly populated universe of discourse, if not perhaps a highly populated ontology. For this view requires, in addition to all the beings about which I can form true propositions, a whole new set of beings, namely, the
natures
or
forms
, which verify any true proposition about those beings. For Ockham, this proliferation of objects was the ground for grave objection. In Ockham’s judgment, it is at best a meaningless play of language, and at worst an irresponsible complication of our theorizing, to insist that “the column is to the right by to-the-rightness, God is creating by creation, is good by goodness, just by justice, mighty by might, an accident inheres by inherence, a subject is subjected by subjection, the apt is apt by aptitude, a chimaera is nothing by nothingness, a blind person is blind by blindness, a body is mobile by mobility, and so on for other, innumerable cases.”
14
Why should we “multiply beings according to the multiplicity of terms”? This is, for Ockham, “the root of many errors in philosophy: to want it to be such that, to a distinct word there always correspond a distinct significate, so that there is as much distinction between the things signified as between the nouns or words that signify.”
15
If Ockham’s primary motivation was to articulate an alternative to this proliferation of beings, he saw that he could do this very efficiently with some incisive
logical
or
semantic
innovation. Instead of having common terms signifying
forms
or
natures
of things, Ockham insisted that they signify the things themselves. “Man” does not signify the humanity of individual human beings; it signifies the individual human beings themselves. In other words, “man” is not predicated of men on account of their
having humanity
; rather, it is predicated of men just because “man” is a name for men. Ockham thus replaced the inherence theory of predication with an alternative version, sometimes called the two-name theory, or the identity theory. “Socrates is a man” is true if “Socrates” and “man” can name the same thing, if Socrates is among the things—individual human beings—that “man” can signify.
In effecting this revision of the semantics of terms, Ockham
eliminated the need for even talking about
natures or forms. This is the crux of Ockham’s nominalism, which
.
page 8
while it cannot be adequately described as a denial of the existence of
universals
, can be described as a denial of the existence of
forms
or
natures
.
What’s wrong with Ockham’s nominalism? One objection is that his semantic revisions were unnecessary. As it happens, if ontological parsimony is the goal, Ockham’s strategy of semantic revision was much more radical than it needed to be. There were strategies for reducing the ontological burden of the realist commitment to forms, within the realist semantic framework.
For starters, among all the kinds of forms which can be signified by terms, according to Aquinas, there is no one uniform way in which they exist. The existence of the form “sight,” by which the eye sees, may be some positive presence in the nature of things (which biologists can describe in terms of the qualities of a healthy eye that gives it the power to see), but the existence of the form blindness in the blind eye need be nothing more than the nonexistence of sight
‒
the form of blindness is a privation of the form of sight and so not really an additional form at all. In general, distinguishing and qualifying the different ways there can “be” a form present in a thing goes a long way toward alleviating the apparent profligacy of the realist account of words signifying forms. Arguably such qualification of modes of being, and not theological discourse, is the real theoretical crux of Aquinas’s views on the “analogy of being.”
Aquinas’s famous thesis of the unicity of substantial forms is an example of another strategy: linguistically I may posit diverse forms (humanity, animality, bodiliness) to account for Socrates being a man, an animal, and a body, but according to Aquinas there is in reality just one substantial form (Socrates’ soul) which is responsible for causing Socrates to be a man, an animal, and a body. In this and other cases, ontological commitment can be reduced by
identifying
in reality what, on the semantic level, are treated as diverse forms. As Boethius had seen, what the mind is capable of
logically
distinguishing need not be
actually
distinct in the nature of things.
In principle, any number of strategies for reducing overall
ontological
commitment are available within the framework of realist
semantics
, so that in general, the kind of form that fulfills the required
semantic
function did not need to be the kind of form that has a distinct and positive
metaphysical
presence in the nature of things.
16
Even if Ockham understood or appreciated such strategies available to realists, however, they no doubt seemed to him to be unnecessarily complicated. Why achieve a parsimonious ontology by introducing a complicated theory of forms and then
page 9
qualifying different ways in which these forms can have some kind of
being
less than full-blown real existence? Much simpler to avoid the problem altogether and not even introduce “forms” into philosophical discourse.
A much deeper criticism of Ockham has to do not with his failure to appreciate the flexibility of the realist framework, but with the metaphysical implications of his own alternative nominalist framework. Contra Weaver, we cannot draw a straight line from nominalism to relativism; Ockham did not do away with objective reality, but in doing away with one part of objective reality—forms—he did away with a fundamental principle of explanation for objective reality. In doing away with forms, Ockham did away with formal causality. Formal causality secures teleology—the ends or purposes of things follow from what they are and what is in accord with or capable of fulfilling their natures. In the natural world, this realist framework secures an intrinsic connection between efficient causes and their effects—an efficient cause produces its effects by communicating some formality: fire warms by informing objects with its heat.
Thanks to the nominalist rejection of forms, by the time of early modern philosophy the notion of formal causality had become the explicit butt of humanist jokes. In Moliere’s
Invalid Imaginaire
, for instance, a doctor is mocked for explaining that a drug causes sleep because it has a
virtus dormativa
, a sleep-causing power. What we have here, notably, is not an argument against the notion of formal causality, but a perspective which simply fails to appreciate the role that formal causality once served for those thinkers that took forms seriously. Forms had explanatory power in the older realist framework, not because general belief in that power was supposed to replace the empirical work of discovering and characterizing how they operated, but because confidence that there were such causal powers helped to account for the order of nature and the very possibility of successful scientific inquiry.
It is commonly said that modern science neglects formal causes but attends to efficient and material causes; but classically understood, efficient and material causes cannot function or even be conceived without formal causes, for it is form which informs matter, giving concrete objects their power to act on other objects. The loss of formal causality is thus in a sense the loss of efficient and material causality as well—an implication that is not quite fully realized until we see it brilliantly explored in the philosophy of David Hume.
Of course, the gravity of the loss of teleology is also evident in the realm of ethics. Ockham was no libertine or relativist, but he prepared the way for the intractable
page 10
confusion of modern moral reflection. Morality is concerned with ends, and humans, having the natures they do, need to acquire certain further qualities or forms—virtues—which help them fulfill their essential natures and achieve their ultimate end. Alasdair MacIntyre has most famously traced the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project to explain morality without teleology. Ockham’s denial of forms and formal causality is unquestionably part of the conceptual disaster that left Enlightenment thinkers with only misunderstood fragments of a once very different project of moral theorizing.
There is another, even more basic, implication of the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality. In the realist framework, the intrinsic connection between causes and effects was particularly important for explaining how the mind knows the world; concepts formed by the mind, insofar as they are causally connected to things which are the foundation of those concepts, necessarily retain some intrinsic connection to those things. While we can be mistaken in particular judgments, we can be assured of the basic soundness of the mind’s power, thanks to the intrinsic connection between concept and object. The kind of radical skepticism Descartes proposed, even if only methodologically, was simply never entertained through most of the middle ages. More classical versions of skepticism, usually having to do with the fallibility of the senses, were commonplace, but the possibility of a complete incongruity between the mind and reality—such that even mathematical concepts could be the product of some deceptive manipulation and have no connection to the mathematical “realities” they seem to represent—this was not available in a realist framework for which concepts are formally and so essentially related to their objects.
Ockham’s nominalist innovations almost immediately raised the specter of such radical doubt; this was noticed not only by the first generation of Ockham’s critics, but even by Ockham himself, who proposed thought experiments about God manipulating our minds to make us think things that are not true. For Ockham, such thought experiments were possible not only because of God’s absolute transcendent power, but because the human mind retained for him no intrinsic connection to an intelligible order. Ockham was no skeptic, and he was no Descartes; indeed, he was rather confident in the reliability of human cognition. But the law of unintended consequences applies in the history of philosophy as elsewhere, and it was only a matter of time before some philosopher exploited, as fully as Descartes did, the new opportunity of skepticism made possible by the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality.
page 11
Accordingly, Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly
modern
problem of knowledge, but as part of an
alternative conception
of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of
wisdom
, traditionally conceived as an
ordering grasp of reality
. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering
wisdom
. Notice: even if contemporary philosophers came to a consensus about how to overcome Cartesian
doubt
and secure
certainty
, it is not clear that this would do anything to repair the fragmentation and democratization of the disciplines, or to make it more plausible that there could be an ordered hierarchy of sciences, with a highest science, acknowledged as queen of the rest—whether we call it first philosophy, or metaphysics, or wisdom.
This brings me, finally, to knowledge of “things divine.” Nominalism clearly has consequences for theology. When it comes to particular doctrines of traditional Christian theology, nominalism, rigorously applied, obscures or renders incoherent many traditional propositions—about the relation of nature and grace, divine and human action, the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, justification and sanctification, the divine nature, etc. But even prescinding from such particular doctrines, think about what nominalism does for the very idea of Christian faith. Christian faith once could be compelling because it could claim to be the true wisdom, in a world that already imagined that true wisdom might be possible. Today we find Christian faith marginalized as a matter of private belief—even among otherwise perfectly sincere Christian believers! Christian faith offers itself as the way—a way of life and a way of knowing—indeed, a way of life
because
it is a way of knowing, a kind of insight, theoretical and practical, into the intelligible order of things. Faith and theology will necessarily appear markedly different in a world
page 12
which cannot even conceive of what it would be to desire or possess an architectonic and life-transforming wisdom. Just as forms and their active power secured intrinsic connections between causes and their effects, between agents and ends, and between mind and reality, so they also secured intrinsic connections between what the mind grasps by reason and what the mind grasps by faith. Ockham, the father of nominalism, is indeed a crucial figure in the history of the separation of faith and reason, not because he denied that there was truth, even truth about God, but because he deprived us of the classical means of accounting for the unity of truth, including of truth about God.
17
So Richard Weaver was wrong. Or rather, Richard Weaver was right, but for the wrong reasons. He correctly saw that Ockham’s logical innovation was “a crucial event in the history of Western culture… issue[ing] now in modern decadence.” But Ockham’s innovation was not so straightforward a move as denying that universals exist. Rather, it was a subtle, seemingly discrete, but ultimately much more insidious decision to revise an account of mind and language by refusing to include intelligible natures and formal causality, the conceptual lynchpin of the entire classical and medieval heritage. The fact that this loss remains so hard for us to see and to accurately explain is itself evidence of how momentous it is, and how much work of recovery we have yet to do.
Endnotes:
1
Delivered as an address to the 4
th
Annual Meeting of the Ciceronian Society, Mount St. Mary’s University, March 27, 2014.
2
Étienne Gilson,
The Unity of Philosophical Experience
(New York: Scribners, 1937), 86.
3
Richard Weaver,
Ideas Have Consequences
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 2
‒
3.
4
Heiko Oberman,
The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism
(Cambridge, MA, 1963).
5
Quoted in Emmet Kennedy, “The Tangled History of Secularism,”
Modern Age
42 (2000): 33.
6
Brad Gregory,
The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
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