WHAT’S WRONG WITH OCKHAM? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West
1
WHAT’S WRONG WITH OCKHAM? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West
1
Joshua P. Hochschild
[
Anamnesis
, online essay, December 17, 2014]
http://anamnesisjournal.com/2014/12/whats-wrong-ockham-reassessing-role-nominalism-dissolution-west/
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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 campBut 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
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.
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
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012).
7
Weaver,
Ideas Have Consequences
, 3.
8
Richard McKeon,
Selections from Medieval Philosophers
, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 352
9
Weaver,
Ideas Have Consequences
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.
10
See Thomas Aquinas, ch. 3 in
De Ente et Essentia
.
11
William of Ockham,
Summa Logicae
, in
Philosophic Classics, Volume II: Medieval Philosophy
, ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 474, line 10.
12
See Porphyry’s
Isagoge
.
13
See Peter Abelard,
Glosses on Porphyry
.
14
William of Ockham,
Summa Logicae
(St. Bonaventure N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute, 1974), 169.
15
William of Ockham,
Summula Philosophiae Naturalis
(St. Bonaventure N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute, 1984), 270.
16
See Gyula Klima, “Ontological Alternatives vs. Alternative Semantics in Medieval Philosophy.”
S. European Journal for Semiotic Studies
3 (1991): 587-618.
17
See Alfred Freddoso, “Ockham on Faith and Reason,” in Paul V. Spade,
The Cambridge Companion to Ockham
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 326-349 [https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West]
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