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 …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XII: Michael Allen Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity
In the previous two articles, we saw how two competing, perhaps contradictory, inheritances from Plato were absorbed into Christian theology. There was, on the one hand, the conception of God as self-sufficient, immovable perfection, which rendered the existence of the world of experience superfluous, and, indeed, problematic. On the other hand, there was the conception of God Continue Reading …