So, by emphasizing the rationality of God, Platonic philosophy emphasized the reasonability of God, and hence of reality itself. There aren’t going to be any big surprises with a God who is predictable, rational, and more or less fully known. That kind of God produces regular effects in a regular manner, so one’s obligations are clearly spelled out, and one simply has to follow the rules in order to stay in God’s good graces. A God that can be known is, in a sense, a safe God. God was not arbitrary or capricious, according to a Platonic conception, but preeminently rational, and hence knowable. The reason is that Platonism made God intelligible. But in William of Ockham’s context, where Christian theology occupied a very high station, it could be a truly terrifying idea. In a naturalistic context, and one accommodated to nominalism for so many centuries, this is simply par for the course. So a certain degree of skepticism is built into a nominalist outlook. It might have all sorts of advantages, but it is not going to be “truth-with-a-capital-T,” the certain, final knowledge that Plato and his followers sought. If reason is all you have, and all reasoning proceeds on names and appearance, then the kind of knowledge that one can expect to acquire is going to be very limited. In a modern context, where reason is the only path to knowledge, this would have entailed some form of skepticism. There aren’t going to be any big surprises with a God who is predictable, rational, and more or less fully known.īut if all our concepts are mere names, as William of Ockham taught, then the kind of knowledge that Plato sought was not available. One simply had to define one’s terms, and think carefully about what those definitions entailed. But it was rather the point of Platonic philosophy that certain knowledge was, finally, obtainable. For most philosophically inclined people, they would not become problematic again until Hume and Kant raised the specter of skepticism in the eighteenth century. Some ancient philosophers had taught this, of course, but Plato’s supremacy ensured that it never became the dominant position. Getting at truth may be difficult in the sense that one has to put the work in, but it is not difficult in the sense that the concepts of truth, or of knowledge, are in themselves problematic. If universals exist, are evident to reason, and can be used as a basis for extracting certain, permanent knowledge, then there is a close connection between the intellect and reality. Nominalism seemed to cut human beings adrift, however. There were many other facets to this discussion, but the general idea of nominalism was to attack these kinds of knowledge claims, those based on abstract, speculative, metaphysical reasoning, which had characterized Western philosophy since the time of Plato. If there was no human nature, those “truths” were not self-evident, but only names. So nominalism strengthened the hand of the Franciscans who wanted a more austere, poverty-embracing way of life, against the popes, bishops, and their allies in the Dominican order, who thought that the naturalness of owning property could be deduced from self-evident truths about human nature. If there is no such thing as an essential human nature, neither can there be any such thing as certain, permanent, a priori knowledge, on the model of geometry and as advocated by Plato, about how humans ought to live, including the propriety of property ownership. 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 were on the assumption that abstract universals such as “human,” and therefore some such thing as “human nature,” really did exist. In the last article, we saw how William of Ockham developed his nominalist philosophy in the context of disputes within the medieval Franciscan order.
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