What are universals?
In 1948, Richard M. Weaver (1910-63), a professor of English at the University of Chicago, published Ideas Have Consequences. Decrying the modern assault on language and objective truth, Weaver laid the blame for such attacks at the foot of William of Ockham (c. 1285-1347). The English Franciscan, Weaver wrote, “propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience.” It may sound like a lot of ivory tower irrelevance, but the denial of universals has had deadly consequences in our society. So what are these “universals”? Whereas St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) had taught that man can know the true, objective essence of things, Ockham denied it was possible. As Benjamin Wiker observed in Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity, 2002), Ockham believed that “when we use the word dog there is really no universal entity, essence or dog-ness that we perceive. Dog is merely a name we
