Anything theological-such as the existence of God or his attributes-can be known by faith alone (thus, apparently, laying the groundwork for the Reformation).” We can know that one thing can cause another thing to happen only based on repeated experience, not on some abstract knowledge of a thing’s nature (thus laying the groundwork for modern science). We can call human beings “human” based on their sharing a certain resemblance with each other, but we can’t infer anything about them based on their common name. In Ockham’s view, the universe is inhabited by a number of individual things that have no necessary connection with each other. However, Ockham denied the real existence of universal natures. Thus, for instance, if an individual was referred to as “human,” it was because he really possessed a human nature that was ordered toward flourishing through a life of virtue (as Aristotle says) or participation in the divine life (as Christian revelation says). “Prior to Ockham, the dominant Western understanding held that individual things (“particulars”) have common natures (“universals”) which dictate the purpose of each thing, and which can be known by man. The writer, Danile Lattiter, points on Ockham’s nominalism as the issue: ![]() The title shouldn’t be surprising by now – we’ve seen enough figures on the right and the alt-right hankering for a return to the middle-ages to no this isn’t a parody of modern conservatism. This time the piece is called William of Ockham: The Man Who Started the Decline of the West. I cam across another piece on William of Ockham at that weird conservative site Intellectual Takeout – the place that had that odd piece on Hannah Arendt. So while William of Ockham is devout he is seen as creating a kind of back door in Western thought for atheism. if you adopt fideism you give up trying to prove the existence of god. While that principle sounds very devout, it eliminates the possibility of their being logical or rational ways of learning theological truths i.e. Feser’s main beef with William O was his fideism – the notion that faith is the only or primary route to theological truth. So why don’t the right like him? In the review I did of conservative philosopher Edward Feser’s book on how Thomas Aquinas somehow disproved atheism (spoiler: he didn’t) I pointed out how William of Ockham and Duns Scotus are seen as the villains of the middle-ages by the new advocates of Thomism. ![]() William, an English Fransciscan monk is an important figure in the philosophy of epistmology and reasoning. The Right (or at least the tiny section of the right who knows who he was) don’t like the actual William of Ockham 1285-1347. No, no, not a piece on how the right’s current tendency towards consipracy theories or misplaced explanations.
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