QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

way of thinking. 149 Thought concerning the basic elements and structure of reality were
connected to the central controversy in Scholastic philosophy, i.e. the nature and existence of the
universals. 150 Aquinas had proposed that ideas had a threefold existence: firstly that they existed
in the mind of God, secondly that they appeared in comprehensible form in real entities in nature,
and thirdly that they existed in the minds of human beings. For ideas to reach their minds,
humans had to abstract them from experiences with things in the material world, but in the mind
of God, all the universals existed independently of any objects. God was both the foundation of
all existence and its highest form. He was also an active order and the dynamism out of which
everything unfolded.
The dispute between realism and nominalism concerning the nature and existence of universal
concepts was connected to deep metaphysical questions. Are ideas basically something material
or spiritual? The dispute which culminates in the names of John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) and
William of Occam (c. 1285-1347) became increasingly acute in the 1300s. The conceptual
realists followed Plato. For example, they believed that the idea of red existed independently and
timelessly beside red objects, independently of the awareness of a human mind. According to
moderate Aristotlean realism, general concepts truly existed, but only when attached to
individuals. The nominalists believed that it was only individuals that truly existed. According to
some nominalists, reality existed exclusively in the mind since to assign it another existence
outside the mind would amount to superfluous duplication, a violation of the principle of
economy of thought. Conceptualism was a compromise position according to which general
concepts did exist inside the human mind. 151
Nowhere did the Middle Ages come so close to physics in the form into which it was to evolve
in the 1500s and 1600s as in the work of a group of thinkers who taught or studied in the 1300s
at the University of Paris where William of Occam was the central figure. Occam emphasized
the role of empirical research in his epistemology. Empirical research was needed in discovering
which, of many logical possibilities, truly existed in reality. 152 Anti-Aristotelian ideas were
149 Tarnas 1998, 200-201.
150 Universals are often called also general concepts, properties, attributes, characteristics, or qualities.
151 Niiniluoto 1980, 124. Dijksterhuis 1986, 166. Platonists understood ideas as archetypes or prototypes which
served as models for the individual things which somehow participated in them. Nordin, 1995, 167.
152 Dijksterhuis 1986, 164. Nordin 1995, 207-215. Occam himself was more interested in logic than the natural
sciences. In contrast to Aristotle, who saw the world as it was out of necessity, Occam stressed the contingency of
the world, the countless possible realities. Occam’s razor, his famous methodical rule, emphasised economy and was
counter to the real existence of universals.
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