While the turn to empirical reality can be linked with
nominalist distrust of concepts, the pressure that Nicholas should have felt in himself to associate empiricism with divinity, must have urged him to substantiate the relevance of sensible experience from some more reliable perspective as well.
The
nominalist view of the world combined with the idea that all our knowledge comes only from our senses and that our minds at birth were nothing but a blank slate lead to empiricism.
For if words have meaning by ways other than standing for an object, then Russell's requirement that the
nominalist has to give an explanation of 'resemblance' seems to beg the question against the
nominalist.
42) In Vitoria's Commentaruim in Secundam Secundae (1535) there is a plethora of references to either Duns Scotus or
nominalist authors such as William of Ockham, Gabriel Biel, Jacques Almain, and John Mair; and he is straightforward in demonstrating how often many of the ideas set forth by these authors are actually in harmony with Thomistic doctrine, or even the extent to which he prefers these over those of Aquinas.
In any case, the Franciscans veered towards a
nominalist dismissal of talk of essences and tended to favour putting the solution to the problem beyond human powers.
By contrast, operating almost exclusively with a model of efficient causation,
Nominalist theology, as well as the scientific projects of Empiricism to which it would eventually give rise, conceives of perception as a mechanistic and notably unself-conscious breaking down of material "sensation" as something to be apprehended, disaggregated, and tabulated as so many finite singularities.
The Thomists accentuated God's reason, while the
Nominalists accentuated God's will.
73) This strain of Catholic thought--what Paul Tillich called "the Protestant principle"--has traditionally been handed down more strongly (though not exclusively) through the Protestant churches (74) When Martin Luther, an Augustinian priest of the early sixteenth century, brought his order's Augustinian world-view to bear on reading the
nominalists, he found something simpatico with his own sense that scholasticism's high estimation of human knowledge and action had become presumptuous and even idolatrous.
Contrast this with what I'll call a
nominalist position, on which the question of whether something is alive or dead is entirely settled by how we choose to use the English words "alive" and "dead," without invoking any further commitments about how the world is arranged.
The real drama of the poem (which Pinsky finds exciting) is Wintersian, in that it "includes the
nominalist dilemma as one historical part of its sensibilities among others.
There has been a widespread view that species are only arbitrary artifacts of the human mind, as some
nominalists, in particular, have claimed.
Those Christian thinkers who believed (like some fourteenth-century
nominalists and, among contemporary thinkers, Shastov) that God is omnipotent in the absolute sense, i.
