Log24

In one of the definitive works of conservatism in the twentieth century, Richard Weaver designates the rise of nominalism as a critical turn in the emergence of the intellectual and cultural disintegration associated with liberalism, which it is the business of a reviving conservatism to contest: “The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.” It is nominalism that provides the intellectual foundation– if a paradox may be hazarded– for the attack by Fish and numerous others (their name is Legion) on the very idea of intellectual foundations:  

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our  convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a  source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. (4)

(4). Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago and London, 1948), 3.

R.V. YOUNG is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of At War With the Word and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (2000).