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nominalism

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Financial, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.07 sec.
nominalism, in philosophy, a theory of the relation between universals and particulars. Nominalism gained its name in the Middle Ages, when it was contrasted with realism realism, in philosophy.

1 In medieval philosophy realism represented a position taken on the problem of universals . There were two schools of realism.
..... Click the link for more information. . The problem arises because in order to perceive a particular object as being of a certain kind, say a table, we must have a prior notion of table. Does the kind "table," described by this prior notion, then have an existence independent of particular tables? Nominalism says that it does not, that it is just a name for a group of particular objects. Nominalism is appropriate to materialist and empirical philosophy and hence has been popular in modern thought.

Bibliography

See R. A. Eberle, Nominalistic Systems (1970).



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Remarks such as "if we reject the Platonic ideas, the emancipation of sexual eros is inevitable," and "strict nominalism is an absurdity," are worth savoring in the mind.
Twilight of an idol? by Shiffman, Mark / Modern Age
Nominalism insisted that words are mere tools of convenience, which left reason orphaned also: since words didn't really refer to anything real, reason too became a kind of coping mechanism for dealing with the complexity of the sensory world (it cannot be stressed often enough that "reason" and "word" are denoted by the same term in Greek, logos).
Aquinas to the Rescue by Oakes, Edward T. / Commonweal
It is compatible with nominalism (Sellars) as well as 'scholastic' realism about universals (Peirce, Armstrong), or with object ontology as well as process (Popper) or system ontology (Bunge).
Arguments for philosophical realism in library and information science by Hjorland, Birger / Library Trends
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