We come to the end of our series within a series, on Michael Allen Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity. We’ve spent a lot of time on this text because it’s such good, rich material, and because it’s a fairly recent book with a genuinely novel perspective. For my part, I’m persuaded that nominalism goes a long way toward explaining the modern world. Before we leave this Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XIV: Nominalism, Petrarch, and the Renaissance Origins of Humanism
In the last two articles, we explored the origins of nominalism in an obscure medieval controversy, and the sharp break it represented with past traditions in philosophy. The prior model of knowledge had been based on mathematics, where definitions, deduction, and a priori reason yielded certain knowledge. The certainty of knowledge arrived at through these means created secure Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XIII: William of Ockham and the Origins of Nominalism
In the last article, we saw how William of Ockham developed his nominalist philosophy in the context of disputes within the medieval Franciscan order. Ockham’s nominalism—the thesis that there are no real, abstract universal concepts, but that these terms refer only to ideas that we have—undercut Aristotelian arguments about the naturalness of property ownership, based as they Continue Reading …