Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

THE NOMINALIST SEMANTICS OF
OCKHAM AND BURIDAN:
A “RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION”
Gyula Klima
SOME HISTORICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL PRELIMINARIES
This paper is going to outline the innovative semantic theories of the two great
14 th -century nominalist thinkers whose work eventually gave rise to the quasiinstitutional
separation of the nominalist via moderna, the “modern way”, from
the realist via antiqua, “the old way” of doing logic, science, philosophy, and
theology in the late Middle Ages. 1 The person who initiated these changes was
the English Franciscan theologian, William Ockham. However, the person who was
primarily responsible for establishing Ockham’s nominalism as a genuinely viable
theoretical alternative was the French secular Master of Arts, John Buridan.
The historical significance of Ockham’s innovations is that they were the first to
introduce a radically new type of theoretical disagreement into scholastic discourse,
a type of disagreement with which we, as heirs to these historical developments,
are all too familiar, namely, the conflict between proponents of paradigmatically
different conceptual schemes. In the case of conflicts of this type, the disagreement
is not merely over different possible answers to the same questions answerable
within the same conceptual framework. For in a conflict of this type there is no
uniformly shared conceptual framework that would fix the commonly recognized
rules of the “language games” to be played by the disputants in discussing their
disagreements. Therefore, what becomes at stake in these conflicts is rather the
very legitimacy of some of the questions and rules of the opposing camp. For
example, after Ockham, the old metaphysical question “What are the common
natures signified by our common terms and how are they related to the singulars?”
has to yield to the new semantic question “Do our common terms signify some
common natures in the first place?” Ockham’s and Buridan’s resounding ‘no’ to
this new question and their relentless pursuit of the implications of this answer
radically transformed late-medieval theoretical discourse.
The importance of Ockham’s and especially Buridan’s work consists in their
presenting a consistent, alternative way of construing the fundamental semantic
1 For a detailed historical discussion of the late-medieval separation of the via antiqua and the
via moderna see: Moore, W. L. 1989 “Via Moderna”, in: J. R. Strayer: Dictionary of Middle
Ages, New York: Scribner, 1989, vol.12. pp. 406-409.
Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 2: Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic
Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Editors)
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