10 ROGER BACON. NOMINALISM

In the Middle Ages, philosophers who shared Plato's point of view were called realists, because they considered universals to really exist. Their position was called realism. Universals considered invisible and timeless ideas that exist before things, denoting general concepts, the widest, which can denote a large class of objects. The opposite point of view was called nominalism. Its main representatives are considered to be William Ok-kam (late XIII – XIV centuries), Johann Buridan (late XIII – XIV centuries), Nikolai from Otrekur (XIV century), and others.

Its representatives assumed that universals are only names and can exist not by themselves, but only in the mind of man in the form of concepts or terms. They believed that only specific, single, sensually perceived objects existed. Nominalistic views appeared and began to spread only in the Renaissance.

Nominalism in its manifestations could be extreme and moderate. Moderate nominalists believed that universals exist after things in the form of generalized names, that is, concepts. These concepts are very important, although they do not exist objectively. Moderate nominalism was also called conceptualism. Extreme nominalists, in particular, John Roscelin (1050–1120), considered that common concepts were completely meaningless, that is, if they did not really exist, then there was no need to talk about them.

A student of Robert Grossetesta, Roger Bacon (1210–1294) was a representative of the opposition movement that was formed at the University of Oxford in England in the second half of the 13th century. He spoke against Thomism and against scholasticism as such. R. Bacon believed that universals exist only in the unit, which in turn does not depend on the thinking principle. He emphasized not only the subjectivity of the general, as supporters of nominalism believed, but also the objectivity of the individual. He denied the atomistic teaching, which spoke of the indivisibility of atoms and emptiness, and put forward the idea of ​​a combination of qualitatively different elements that form concrete things.

The main work of R. Bacon was “Great Work”, consisting of seven sections and containing the theory of human thinking, as well as views on the relationship of science and theory. The limited in scope "Lesser Labor" represented Bacon's previous work in the reduction. "The Third Labor" was a processing of the previous two.

W. Ockham viewed sensations as a kind of signs. In the context of medieval Europe, turning to signs allowed, on the other hand, to look at the concept of the soul, that is, to move from subjective “inner experience” to an objective analysis of sign relations.

U. Okkam deduced that the entities or the alleged forces should be cut off where they could get by with a smaller number, this position was called the Okkam “razor”.