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See also: main tendencies of See also: medieval philosophy, the other being See also: Realism
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The controversy between nominalists and realists arose from a passage in Boethius' See also: translation of Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of See also: Aristotle, which propounded the problem of genera and See also: species, (I) as to whether they subsist in themselves or only in the mind; (2) whether, if subsistent, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and (3) whether separated from sensible things or placed in them
.
The Realists held that universals alone have substantial reality, existing ante res; the Nominalists that universals are See also: mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things and existing See also: post res; while the Conceptualists, mediating between the two extremes, held that universals are concepts which exist in our minds and express real similarities in things themselves
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Though a strong realist tendency is evident in the See also: system of Erigena (9th century), the controversy was not definitely started till the rrth century: it lasted till the See also: middle of the 12th, when the first See also: period of scholastic philosophy ends
.
Under an appearance of much vain subtlety the controversy about universals involved issues of the greatest speculative and See also: practical importance: realism represented a spiritual, See also: nominalism an See also: anti-spiritual, view of the See also: world; while realism was evidently favourable, and nominalism unfavourable, to the teaching of the See also: Church on the dogmas of the Trinity and the Eucharist
.
Nominalism was a
See also: doctrine of sceptics and suspected heretics, such as Berengar of See also: Tours and Roscellinus
.
Even See also: Abelard's mediating doctrine of See also: conceptualism (q.v.) was sufficiently near to obnoxious ideas to involve him in lifelong persecution
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The principles of the See also: great orthodox philosophers of the later scholastic period which begins in the 13th century, Albertus See also: Magnus and See also: Thomas Aquinas, were those of moderate realism
.
When nominalism was revived in the 14th century by the
See also: English Franciscan, See also: William of
See also: Occam, it gave evidence of a new tendency in thought, a distrust of abstractions and an impulse towards See also: direct observation and inductive research, a tendency which had its fulfilment in the scientific See also: movement of the See also: Renaissance
.
Occam's dictum " Entia non multiplicanda sunt praeter necessitatem " was inspired by a spirit similar to that of See also: Bacon
.
Though nominalism is properly a medieval theory, the tendency has passed over into
See also: modern philosophy: the See also: term " nominalist " is often applied to thinkers of the empirical, sensationalist school, of whom J
.
S
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See also: Mill may be taken as the chief representative
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