The Theological Origins of Modernity, Part 1: The Nominalist Revolution
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- Why do Social Justice Warriors exist? What brought these ridiculous people into being? How did Western culture reach this stage? Interestingly, the question has its answer in an obscure metaphysical and theological debate that undercut the foundations of Medieval thought and inaugurated the modern world. And so to explain the origins of Social Justice Warriors and multiculturalism is to explain the origins of everything from libertarianism to Austrian Economics, to Protestantism, to fascism, to communism, to nationalism and the Alt-Right, and even to science itself. In this video and the next few, I attempt to describe the theological origins of modernity.
Michael Allen Gillespie's book:
amzn.to/2memEpD
Continue on to Part 2 here:
• The Theological Origns...
Very interesting. I was brought here by Classical Theist, you've earned a subscriber! Keep up the good work!
On this question of nominalism, I first got into this question of realism vs. nominalism vs. formalism (as we tend to frame this debate in math) from the strictly mathematical end and it's been interesting to see these ideas overlap into the political sphere. Where one falls in this debate in math doesn't have much impact on the actual practice of math (I happen to fall heavily on the realist/platonist side) but I'm only recently learning that the realist vs. nominalist debate does have implications in political thought. There's just something fishy about nominalism even on the mathematical end...
Furthermore, this conception of God as primarily defined by boundless power seems to have made its way into of much of popular _anti-theism_ , e.g. one of Christopher Hitchens' best rhetorical points against religion is that it's like a celestial North Korea.
First, let me compliment you on your channel. It's excellent. My formal academic training was in mathematics, and though I haven't had time to watch many of your videos, I very much like what I've been able to see so far. Your video on quaternions was fantastic. I've had some mind to make a few math videos for a while, though I'm not sure how well my audience may be able to follow, since my current videos cover very different topics. Perhaps I will test out the waters one day with a video on something fairly basic (I want to do some metric space topology), and proceed from there.
Like you, I lean in favor of Platonism/mathematical realism. Most mathematicians do. Spending a few years doing mathematics tends to implant the very powerful conviction that when one proves mathematical theorems, one is discovering _objective facts_ about something. This is a very difficult thing to explain to philosophers who are inclined toward anti-realism, but who have not had mathematical training. Something about the direction of the mathematical results just seems to force itself upon you, and there is perhaps no better way of understanding this than to actually experience it for yourself.
Your intuition that nominalism in mathematics is highly suspect is a sound one. I encourage you to read Kurt Godel's paper "Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?" which was published in volume 3 of his _Collected Works,_ edited by Solomon Feferman and published by Oxford University Press. In it, Godel makes a number of arguments against the view that mathematics simply consists of applying arbitrary conventions and rules for the manipulation of symbols to certain arbitrarily chosen initial strings of such symbols (i.e. axioms). The most clever by far of his arguments is this: If mathematics truly were purely syntax of language and entirely void of content, then it would have to be consistent. For, by the principle of explosion, from a contradiction, any propositions - including empirical ones - would be derivable. However, by Godel's own Incompleteness Theorems, we know that any sufficiently rich, consistent formal system _F_ must contain at least one statement which is true in _F,_ but not derivable in _F._ Therefore, if mathematics were syntax of language, its own consistency would imply the presence of true mathematical statements which were not provable purely by way of formal symbolic manipulation - *hence, contradicting the initial assumption that mathematics must be purely syntax of language.*
This is an extremely powerful argument, and as far as I'm concerned, it puts extreme nominalist views of mathematics permanently to rest.
Platonism is much harder to defend, though. As I'm sure you know, there are classic arguments in its favor, like the indispensability argument. To my mind, the most powerful objection to Platonism is Benacerraf's argument that because Platonic abstract entities are causally inert, if Platonism is true, then one cannot explain how it is that we come to know mathematical truths. This argument can be (and usually is) extended from the realm of mathematical truths to cover all Platonic realism about universals generally. However, the major problem with the argument is its highly restricted notion of causality. It is obviously true that Platonic mathematical objects do not exist in space and time, and so do not enter into spatiotemporal relations. But why assume that something must exist in space and time in order to have causal powers? That seems to me to be a rather problematic assumption, and in my view, likely false. In any event, I do not know how such an assumption can be defended, except by a question-begging appeal to intuition.
The philosopher Laurence Bonjour discusses this and many other things in his *excellent* book _In Defense of Pure Reason._ The book's aim is to defend the idea of _a priori_ knowledge in general, but he does touch, at times, on mathematics and mathematical knowledge. In any event, it's a book that every Platonist should read.
By the way, Godel believed that mathematical intuition was a kind of intellectual perception that was somewhat analogous to the perception of sense experience. He felt that it was arbitrary to consider the latter epistemologically legitimate, but not the former. I have to agree. The philosopher Elijah Chudnoff very ably defends the view of intuition as intellectual perception in his book _Intuition._
Your observation about the connection between anti-theism and the nominalist God is a very astute one. John Calvin was horrified by the nominalist vision of God and sometimes wondered whether such a God may not really be the devil in disguise. As I believe that I say in a later video in this series, nominalism's God is so terrifying, so distant and so utterly beyond our ken - and the prospects for our salvation are so precarious and uncertain before him - that _one does not want him to exist._ And with God becoming so hidden (see my later video on Luther), is it any surprise that he eventually goes on to disappear (atheism)?
+IvanTheHeathen
I thank you for your insightful comment and I'll definitely check out those books (right after the one you're talking about in this series). I do agree it's very difficult to convey the intuition that realism should be taken seriously to someone who has no experience in mathematics. Usually, when I bring up the possibility to someone naive of mathematics, it's instantly rejected for being _strange_ and _anti-empirical_ . However, once you've learned some math (or physics) I think realism is just common sense.
Actually, that Godel essay you mentioned was the one that really convinced me that realism is the best philosophical position. The seed of doubt was actually planted by that Quine-Putnam indispensability argument you mentioned which I interpreted as: _hey, you know all that abstract stuff you need to do science? You're actually ontological committed to that!_
Besides the Godel, Quine, and Putnam stuff the question of why mathematics should be applicable is a question that seems satisfactorily answered _only_ on the realist position. I've never heard a satisfactory answer to this question from an anti-realist. The common answers I hear are (1) we're just good/lucky at picking the fundamental principles or (2) math doesn't actually work all that well. For the "luck" arm of (1) and (2) I just dismiss those as preposterous (they'll of course be using their phone or computer when claiming this). But then the "good" arm of (1) seems to concede the discussion to the realist - that there is actually some content in the world that we're somehow intuiting/relaying it into mathematical form.
I've heard anti-realists say that mathematics is so broad that it's really no surprise at all that reality should be found to conform to at least _some_ kind of mathematical structure. There's a ton of mathematics beyond just what's used in science, and if reality were different, then some of the math that doesn't describe this reality would have described that reality.
I suppose that works as a general reply, but still - the coincidence of things is just too perfect. It's not just _that_ math describes reality; it's _what the math that describes reality looks like._ There's no _a priori_ reason why the main equation of general relativity should be able to be written out in about an inch of space. Why couldn't that equation have been so complicated as to require 1,000 pages just to write it out? It seems at least conceivable that things could have been that way - _and yet, they aren't._ But at that point, we move beyond just mathematical realism and into another of my interests - theology. For why I is there any structure or coherence of _any kind at all?_ Why should anything be organized according to _any_ kind of pattern at all, whether simple or complicated? I think anyone who really takes Platonic realism seriously should be able to countenance the God of classical theism, though.
+IvanTheHeathen
I haven't heard that reply to the question of the applicability of math before. I'd have to think about it a bit more but even if it does answer the main question, it seems to push the question back one level into _why should the notion of a mathematical structure be applicable on an anti-realist view_? This seems to be discussed in your second paragraph.
On a separate note, this video series is quite interesting in understanding modern thought and the principle thesis that nominalism is intimately tied to modern politics seems correct. Much of the philosophical and historical stupidity of the New Atheist crowd (I must admit I was influenced by these guys in college) got me interested in the history behind these ideas and it does seem they're borrowing heavily from ideas without understanding the intellectual baggage that they come with. So, I've been drifting further and further from those philistines the past few years.
Good man! To my great shame, I remember reading both all four of the Four Horsemen's main books while in high school and thinking that they were all excellent. For a (thankfully short) period then, I was a militant atheist. This is now an embarrassing thing to admit to - live and learn, I suppose. I mellowed out into agnosticism by the time I got to college and would even admit to the social utility of religion and some of the great historical achievements of organizations like the Catholic Church. As of about two years ago, I've settled on a kind of generic theism with no confessional affiliation, but one that draws heavily on classical metaphysics.
Edward Feser (a Catholic philosopher with a very good blog, especially if you happen to be interested in Thomas Aquinas' thought) once said that Dawkins doesn't know metaphysics from Metamucil. It's true, I'm afraid. Specialists in the philosophy of religion - including atheists - regard the New Atheists as annoying philistines. Sam Harris' book on ethics was very poorly put together - essentially assuming the truth of a kind of utilitarianism, sweeping all of the truly interesting questions under the rug (when not utterly ignoring them) and producing a book written as if David Hume never existed. Harris' book on free will was just as bad. I have to admit, I ran out of patience for him after that. Hitchens' book on religion is loaded with historical errors - my favorite one being the claim that St. Augustine was find of the myth of the wandering Jew, which is odd, given that the myth does not appear in Europe until centuries after Augustine's death. And Dennett - just because he takes eliminativism as a theory about the mind seriously - is best passed over in silence.
I find nothing intellectually contemptible about atheism as such. But the New Atheists popularity seems to be inversely proportional to their level understanding, and that is regrettable.
In fact, atheistic naturalism itself has its roots in certain theological ideas. I've only made six parts in this series, but there will eventually be many more. I felt impelled to momentarily go and discuss some other things for a while. Part 7 (whenever it comes out) will be about Thomas Hobbes and how his physicalistic determinism (and hence, all physicalistic determinism) actually has its origin in the Calvinist idea of predestination. Luther's idea of the _deus absconditus_ (hidden God), which he got from nominalism, would eventually drive God further and further out of the world (fist Deism, then atheism). And panentheistic ideas, like those of the mystic Meister Eckhart, began the process of identifying God's action with events in the physical world and God's "body" with the universe itself. That produced the idea that to know God, one need only study the behavior of physical bodies. Eventually, God faded (because of the combined influence of the other ideas mentioned above) and all that remained was the study of physical bodies. The theological views of certain early scientists - especially Newton - and their consequences and connections to nominalism, might also be worth talking about at some point. I've decided to expand the series far beyond the confines of the book whose name it bears.
Anyway, welcome to my channel! Hopefully, you'll find something stimulating and interesting here. As you'll see if you browse through the comments on my videos, I'm not shy about responding to comments - though I have a few others that I need to get to. The sheer volume of them is beginning to get overwhelming. If you have anything you'd like to ask or comment on, feel free to. My apologies if I take some time to give my response.
Milton Friedman's Law of Unintended Consequences seems to have taken hold: Ockham, with his razor, wanted to simplify things. Instead his thought spawned a plethora of dogmas that have been barking down the centuries. Re-viewing this after years and it is still a gem.
thank you for taking the time! very helpful.
35:30 "It would not be possible to destroy any instantiation of a universal, without also destroying the universal itself."
Why? I don't understand this.
Hey Ivan! Your emphasis on the modernist focus on God's power over his other attributes seem well founded. Ockham was actually an occasionalist, and rejected that things have causal powers. He held that all change in the world is directly controlled by God, rather than indirectly through instruments, as the traditional Scholastics held.
Hello, Grant. Yes, you're right. Occasionalism follows pretty naturally from nominalism, since causal powers are themselves properties. Stripping matter of intrinsic causal powers is what eventually allowed Hume to be skeptical of induction and the principle of causality. And it also denuded matter of the intrinsic intentionality or "mindedness" (through form) that it had in the Medieval realist worldview, which forced Descartes to think of mind and matter as two totally seperate and distinct substances in order to be able to carve out any place in the world for mental events.
Hi Ivan,
Can you recommend 2 or 3 books on the Critique of Nominalism? Thanks.
I want to thank you for this video and for the book recommendation. I recently moved to Germany from Poland and I was striked by the local mentality. I was on the search for answers, even started to study philosophy and thanks to you I am now on the right track :)
You should make more videos like that (looong and full of content :)).
Bardzo dziękuję!
Germany is particularly insane regarding its social/political attitudes. Berlin may be the most left-leaning city in the world. I will make more videos soon. I still have to finish the videos in the series that you've started watching here, and work-related responsibilities have kept me from that for a while, but I plan to continue making videos. The story of the origins of modern thought is not nearly well-enough known and needs to be told. I'm glad that you have found this helpful.
@Straight White Male hey straight white Male, I see you everywhere lol
Listening to the first few minutes of your critique of the left, reminds me of the Psedo-Islamic movement of the Wahabbi school. Their claim that their doctrines are right (very dry literalist interpretation), that all (traditional sufi) Muslims are innovators of the religion and even regarded as disbelievers.
Hello from Brazil!
I am reading the book for the second time. But this time I am also watching your comments videos on the book.
I need to say that your videos are making the book clearer. Thank you!
22:34 - As soon as you said, "Both of these objects instantiate the universal of green-" the lighting made you turn green.
All by design, my friend. All by design.
Good video, by the way, I'll be going on to the next!
Coming back to this in 2023. Fascinating stuff
You know your stuff my man. A good listen, I'm looking forward to your other videos on this topic. Cheers
Very impressive talk, because of erudition and depth of knowledge. I appreciate it.
Thank you! I hope that you appreciate the other parts as well.
this is one of the best videos ive seen on youtube.
If there aren't universals, then the plural is forbidden in language.
An excellent point.
Thanks for the subscription. In turn glad to have landed on this channel, some interesting talks I'll be getting through!!!
I read the articles on Chuck Schuldiner and Richard Stanley that you wrote on your blog and found them quite interesting (I’m a fan of Chuck’s despite some of his songwriting weaknesses). Have you watched the documentary that was made about Stanley and the making of _The Island of Dr. Moreau?_ It’s called _Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau._ If you have Amazon Prime, you should be able to find it there. It’s very much worth watching. The sheer insanity that accompanied the creation of that film is utterly unique in the annals of filmmaking. I don’t know of anything else that even approaches it. Marlon Brando’s hilarious and unbelievably grating antics on set alone make the documentary worth your time.
@@IvanTheHeathen i did watch the documentary a while ago, and it was very interesting; particularly Stanley's great grandfather being the man on whom the HG Wells novel was based. The final cut by John Frankeheimer was awful but enjoyable, especially the way that Marlon Brando (his role as Kurtz was surely taken into account when casting him) looked like a old lesbian with alopecia but evidently didnt give a damn about it. The earliest film adaptation "Island Of Lost Souls" from the early 1930s is a good early talking film.
why dont you make more videos??? i just discovered your channel! btw it was fkd up the way TBR spoke to you
Good to see you back my man!
Nominalists having problems with explaining similarity of two green objects seems like a bad argument to me. We ascribe hypotheses to our observations by following a strategy similar to Occam's Razor, we need to construct an explanation, a fiction if you want to call it that. And indeed, they are not actually same green. Any green object will have a unique light-matter interaction and will be a different green, no greenness universality is at play here. We denounce them similar because our measurements and observations fall under a close interval but they are indeed different. Measurability is not a universal, measurements are just rational numbers ascribed to quantities. Rational numbers are just sophisticated integers and integers are just a symbolic notation for our one-many intuition that we developed during our evolution. Nominalism might have problems but for me, Platonic view requires a greater metaphysical leap of faith.
I only used the example of "green" as an example. The broader argument in no way hinges on that specific example.
Think a bit more closely about what you just said. You said: "We [pronounce] them similar because our measurements and observations fall under a close interval but they are indeed different." But what is a "close interval"? What does the word "close" mean in this context? If some measurement A is made, and then measurements B and C are made and deemed to be "close" to the result of measurement A, how is it that we can declare measurements B and C to *both* be "close" to the result of A? Presumably, B and C will be different from one another, and will also each be different from A, so what is it that allows us to declare B and C to both be "close" to A, despite these differences?
Without some concept or universal of "closeness" it is impossible to make sense of any such statement. A strict nominalist will have to say that the concept of closeness is also a fiction; but if that concept is a fiction, then your proposed explanation for why we regard shades of green as similar collapses.
You can retreat into some concept of "meta-closeness" to try and explain this, but the same problem will recur again, and you will just be stuck in the infinite regress originally mentioned in this video.
The problems with nominalism are indeed far more serious than those with realism. Nominalism, when taken truly seriously, ultimately requires you to abandon rationality itself. I'll take the Platonic heaven over that any day of the week.
@@IvanTheHeathen But why fret over something as intuitive as "closeness" and make it into a universal, if I have to construct a Platonic heaven, which seems more fictitious to me by the way, in the end? For example, to define closeness I need absolute values and subtraction and things like that. All of those can be built from basic integers. At this point, I am willing to consider integers and our notion of quantity as phenomenological givens, something we acquired during the evolution of our brains. You can even analyze those into sets and logic and couple of inference axioms which seems even more plausible to be evolutionary developed phenomenological noesis.
So, I am saying we can construct theories from couple of phenomenological starting points and these would still be rationally acceptable compared to what we would get if we were to start with universals. You are right in that we would not have any sure way to say that resulting theories are indeed rational. Maybe this goes even to Kant's critic of pure reason. But, we can't be sure whether our theories are rational even if we were Platonists. For Platonic view, the fact that world is rational is like an axiom, a given. You don't have any other option. With phenomenological beginnings, I can still be skeptic [because I have many reasons to] about universe's rationality and can still employ all the tools of the rational mind.
Platonic view wants me to accept the world's rationality as given while this kind of nominalism wants me to accept things like modus ponens as given. By Occam's Razor, I am leaning more towards the second.
@@burakcopur3841
_"But why fret over something as intuitive as "closeness" and make it into a universal, if I have to construct a Platonic heaven, which seems more fictitious to me by the way, in the end?"_
That's not an answer. You can't just wave your hand over a problem and declare your preferred answer to it "intuitive." If I were to come out and declare belief in Platonic forms "intuitive," that would not be helpful at all in this discussion. It would really be a way of _avoiding_ discussion.
My point is that you can't just take some notion of "closeness" as given. That idea implicitly relies on universals being real. There's no other way to justify your intuition that two things (B and C) are both "close" to some third thing (A). Appealing to intuition without giving any deeper argument doesn't help. What if the intuition is wrong? What if someone else has a different intuition? That's why an argument is needed.
Your deeper attempt at justification doesn't work either. What is an integer? Appealing to integers to help you justify your intuitions about "closeness" only works if you believe that integers are real mathematical objects. _But if you believe that, then you've accepted realism about universals!_ On the other hand, if you think that integers are just fictions, then they can't help you justify your intuitions about what "closeness" is. They are just fictions. They are not real, and thus have no bearing on reality, no bearing on which things are really "close" to one another and which things aren't.
Breaking down integers into more fundamental mathematical notions like sets or morphisms doesn't help either. What is a set? What is a morphism? Even if we grant that there is some basic unanalyzable intuition of these things, the truly fundamental problem remains: these things are only helpful in justifying intuitions about "closeness" if they are real. And if we accept that they are real, then we accept realism about universals. Otherwise, sets and morphisms, just like integers and ideas about closeness or greeness, are just fictions. Our intuitions about these things don't matter, then, because they are just fictions. If they are fictions, then appeal to intuition accomplishes nothing, no matter where those intuitions come from or how they are justified.
Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that such intuitions are placed in us by evolution - _so what?_ If evolution and selection crafted us to have certain intuitions, then all this means, at best, is that those intuitions had some survival or reproductive value. Just because believing something helps you to survive and/or reproduce does not mean that that thing is true.
_"But, we can't be sure whether our theories are rational even if we were Platonists. For Platonic view, the fact that world is rational is like an axiom, a given. You don't have any other option. With phenomenological beginnings, I can still be skeptic [because I have many reasons to] about universe's rationality and can still employ all the tools of the rational mind."_
You hit upon something very important. Yes, belief in the efficacy and power of reason _is_ an axiom. But under nominalism, even though you "can still employ all the tools of the rational mind," you are sort of play-acting as you do it. You use the tools of reason without knowing whether they actually mean anything. My ultimate problem with nominalism is that it reduces reasoning to a kind of charade, an arbitrary game that people can play in which they agree to pretend that what they are saying actually makes sense. But taking rationality seriously is something that you can either do or not do. You can't non-circularly prove the efficacy of reason. Platonism or realism, whatever else can be said about it, actually takes rationality seriously. It treats reasoning as something that actually matters instead of as an arbitrary charade.
The difficulty with this reply is that you presuppose a notion of truth. For instance, you say, "Just because believing something helps you to survive and/or reproduce does not mean that that thing is true." You need to define what truth is before you can say that something else is not it.
Secondly, we can admire the Platonist's position for treating "reasoning as something that actually matters..." Nevertheless, treating something as if it matters does not make it so. How can you justify the merits of reasoning by reasoning? That is circular.
So, it seems, to me, that your inclination towards realism rests on many presuppositions. If you were to question these presuppositions, and find that their justification is ultimately elusive, then you'd be in the same place as the relativists.
Finally, with regard to your reference to Godel above -- specifically his argument against mathematics being a syntax of language -- why not apply his argument to that of reasoning, mathematics, rationality, logos, or truth itself? In whatever system (of reasoning, etc.) you use, there will be something that isn't justified by that system. If that is the case, then how can you trust that system as being self-consistent when you cannot prove that it is?
Godel relies on notions like the principle of explosion and contradiction, but even these concepts may be doubted. Indeed, paraconsistent logics have provided excellent arguments against taking the principle of explosion seriously.
It appears that in your search for truth, you pick and choose what you want to take seriously, along with whatever presuppositions will fit your eventual conclusions, and go from there. If you think that there is absolute certainty, or universals, or reality, then you have to surpass every other thinker that has come before us to prove that this is the case, as well as get past the wide-ranging sceptical challenges that confront us. No one has achieved this feat; no one has even come close.
For you, being a mathematician, it would probably be best to take a look at how the mathematicians of the last two centuries lost out to scepticism in their quest for certainty. We can see this in the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead. Russell, indeed, was quite depressed when he couldn't prove the certainty of mathematics, after which he switched to mostly writing about politics and random other things. He, one of greatest mathematicians, just gave up hope on absolute truth -- a hope that you still seem to hold.
this is also the basis of jungs psychological types.
Some white noise in the background.
+priapus512
It's probably my laptop's fan whirring that you're referring to. Sorry about that. The laptop I'm using is fairly old. There's nothing I can do about that.
Hello,
What is the name of the vloger you mentioned at 6:08? I can't understand the name, alas. I will appreciate the hint.
Anyway, great content, great rhetoric, very elegant - a pleasure to listen to; chapeau-bas.
I was referring to Mencius Moldbug. He's not a vlogger, but a blogger. His blog is now finished and he will not be adding to it again. He says that it has fulfilled its purpose. But his archive is rather extraordinary and worth checking out. I especially recommend the series of posts called "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" and also his "Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations." Here is the link to his blog:
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com
Haven't seen your reply, so sorry for late a response: thank you. You mentioned humanism and I wonder whether Michael Allen Gillespie elaborates on different currents of it as Irving Babbit did in his spectacular Literature and the College - In Defense of Humanities. I, anyway, am going to purchase Gillespie's book for it seems worth its while.
I like how you ended with a smile
Watching this after your recommendation on the MW video. Interesting that you only bring up the Nominalists' critiques of Platonic and Aristotelian Realism. Couldn't you go a step further and trace elements of today's relativism and nihilism back to more contemporary objectors like Diogenes, Pyrrho, or even Democritus?
+Subversive Untermensch
Yes, I could do that insofar as these ideas are, in a sense, eternal and part of a perennial philosophical debate, but I don't see the point of doing it because I'm trying to explain how we transitioned from Medieval thought to modern thought. Those who followed the nominalists often drew on some of the philosophers that you mentioned, as I go on to mention in later parts of this series. For instance, philosophical skepticism saw a resurgence after 1471, with the publication of Cicero's _Academica_. But by 1471, the transition to modern thought was well underway. In late medieval times, these works were not known and so thinkers like Ockham had to think up some of those ideas on their own. _Outlines of Pyrrhonism_ was not republished until the 1520's, I believe. Also, there were some major differences between medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and and ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Scholastic realism was heavily influenced by Aristotelian realism, but it was not exactly the same as Aristotelian realism.
In fact, I go on to say, in a later part of this series, that the debates that the nominalists (and, following them, the humanists and Protestants) began were, in a way, a rehashing of ancient debates between Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism. But with history, you have to start somewhere, otherwise you'll have to trace everything to the beginning of time, and so I chose to focus on the transition from Medieval to modern thought.
I doubt this is all that complicated. I just recently did a stint feeding my video game addiction, and the phenomenon you describe as western culture is really just the repeated cycle of the production of groups who systematically ostrocize anyone who seems to compete. The faces and indeed values change, but people act the same regardless.
It's bizarre to watch even the most innocuous comment about what might be wrong with a video game, for example, degenerate into a mass cannibalism of the person making the comment by the fans of any given game.
That's just how people are.
I'd love to hear a discussion between you and Jay Dyer!
Isn't he the one who wrote that _Esoteric Hollywood_ book? I once watched an interview with him on Red Ice Radio about _Twin Peaks_ - a show of which I happen to be a huge fan - but I don't know much at all about Dyer's theological views, or what he has to say on the subject of universals in particular.
Thank you for the reply. I find your series of talks on Gillepsie quite fascinating (and extremely well presented!), especially as I had read his book a few years ago and found his argument compelling.
Dyer has written, done podcasts, and TH-cam videos on a variety of issues, ranging from film analysis to CIA mind control and, what particularly interests me, theology, where he has often referred to the devastating effects nominalism has had on the West. However, while agreeing with Gillespie (I don’t actually recall Dyer ever referring to him explicitly) on this issue, he argues that modernity, and of course post-modernity, could be traced back even further than the advent of nominalism. In this, of course, he is correct, since Gillespie’s argument does, ultimately, beg the question . i.e. what led to Scholasticism which preceded and “evolved” into nominalism? Dyer, as do most Eastern Orthodox thinkers, points to the underlying theological conflicts that lead to the Great Schism of 1054 (a position I agree with), and ultimately to the seeds sown by St Augustine. Eastern Orthodoxy, Dyer would argue, having rejected the notion of Divine simplicity, never had to deal with the issue of universals in the way Scholasticism did and as result never generated anything similar to nominalism and the problems it generated.
Take care and keep up the good work!
That's interesting, but nominalism wasn't inspired by considerations surrounding divine simplicity, so much as divine _omnipotence._ The concern for people like Ockham - and, earlier than him, Duns Scotus - was that a metaphysical picture of the world constrained by the logical categories represented by universals would imply certain ultimate limits on what God could do - and that, to them, was unacceptable. Scotus in particular was bothered by the doctrine of analogy that belief in divine simplicity and realism about universals implied, worrying that it made God far too mysterious to make human communion with Him possible and that analogy threatened to reduce theological language to nonsense. There are still theologians and philosophers of religion who share those concerns - William Lane Craig being just one prominent example (although, honestly, I really don't think that Craig understands what Thomas Aquinas had to say about analogy).
As far as the reasons for the emergence of nominalism, theologians like Ockham believed that they were working to return Christianity to the purer state that it was in in its early days, uncorrupted by the influence of pagan philosophy and Muslim commentary on that philosophy - something that Luther also believed himself to be doing, by the way. Franciscans like Ockham were extremely suspicious of the Aristotelian philosophical categories that Scholastic realists like Aquinas made use of in their theology. And the fact that Aristotle had been reintroduced to Western Europe by the Arabs, at a time when Western Europe was at war with the Islamic world, certainly exacerbated those suspicions.
If you mean to say that Dyer wants to claim that Eastern Orthodox theologians rejected divine simplicity, I just have no idea how such a claim could possibly be sustained. Broadly speaking, Western Christian theology, at least up through the Middle Ages, was Aristotelian, and Eastern Christian theology was Platonic - and the original arguments given in favor of divine simplicity and non-composition were all Neoplatonic arguments that Eastern theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa discovered in Plotinus and adapted to Christian thought. Major figures in the history of Eastern Christian theology - Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Maximos the Confessor, Basil of Caesarea, St. Athanasius - all explicitly affirmed simplicity.
More importantly, it's hard for me to see what the rational motivation is for belief in God if simplicity is to be rejected. If God is not metaphysically simple, then He cannot be said to be an ultimate explanation for reality. I think that cosmological arguments, in order to work, require one to accept simplicity - unless, of course, one accepts nominalism, in which case the whole idea of rational explanation and logical coherence ultimately has to go out the window anyway. If you ask me, rejecting divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism.
You are right that many subsequent problems for Christian thought down the centuries have their roots in the many polemical controversies in which Augustine engaged. When he was wearing one hat, Augustine took Pelagius to task, insisting that man, without divine grace, was ultimately not capable of anything worthy or noble. This is a point that Christians have to take seriously because if man can rise to moral goodness and union with the divine purely by his own power, then what was the point of Christ's sacrifice? This part of his thought, in which Augustine emphasized the corruption and sinfulness of the world, and the weakness and frailty of human faculties, especially now that Christ has left it, Protestants greatly admired, insisting as they did that the Catholic doctrine of good works made the Catholic Church crypto-Pelagian. Calvinists especially were fond of the anti-Pelagian Augustine, and Pascal, as is well-known, greatly admired him.
But when he was wearing another hat, as in writings of his like _Against the Academicians_ and _The Teacher,_ Augustine took a rather optimistic view of the possibility of certain human knowledge of the world, suggesting that the world, and our hopes to understand it, might not be entirely vain, and almost sounding like a Stoic in the process. Humanist thinkers would later resuscitate this Augustine, and it's well-known that Descartes' famous _cogito_ was actually first thought of by Augustine (although there are _crucial_ differences between Descartes' and Augustine's versions!). There are certain remarks scattered throughout Augustine's writings where he speaks very highly of astronomy.
Really, if one examines all of the major theological disputes of early Christianity, one will see them reflected over and over in all subsequent Western thought. The answers given at Nicea and other councils to questions of grace, the trinity, the relation between God, the cosmos and man, and so forth, were all very precariously balanced, and I supposed that they were bound to be questioned and attacked in the course of time. Christianity has a number of contrary tendencies at its core that it has proven persistently difficult to strike a balance between. Part of Christianity wants to affirm creation as good, as the work of a good and loving God; another insists that the world is corrupt, and exhorts the righteous to withdraw from it; yet another tells of Christ's immanent return, after which all of the corruptions of the world will be swept away, and encourages the righteous to prepare the world for his return. Just these opposed tendencies alone have produced an unbelievable welter of different political doctrines throughout Western history.
Even further back - to absolute divine simplicity and dialectics - www.pravoslavie.ru/english/print98156.htm
The link that you posted isn't working, unfortunately. In case you happen to see this, I'd love to have a discussion with you on this subject and hash it out.
Thank you!
Why are you wearing a jacket? :)
Great video!
Do you believe the nominalist revolution would have occurred without Christianity? Is it possible, say, to envision a sort of nominalist school if we had just remained non-Christian Platonists?
It's very difficult to say for sure. My guess is at there probably would be something like a nominalist school, even if Christianity had never come along, because the philosophical tendencies of nominalism were already significantly present in some important schools of pagan philosophy. One need only read about Heraclitus, whose emphasis on perpetual change and non-essentialism was very nominalistic, to see this. The same general tendencies are embodied in Epicureanism and in the work of Pyrrhonian skeptics like Sextus Empiricus. Plato did not go philosophically unchallenged in antiquity, after all.
There is some plausibility to your suggestion, insofar as nominalism as it actually developed in the late Middle Ages was informed by a desire to return to what was seen as a more original, faith-based approach to Christianity, shorn of pagan philosophical excrescences. Whether this perception is warranted is questionable, though, as all of the major early Christian theologians were trained in pagan philosophy - especially Neoplatonism - and were often effusive in their praise of "noble pagans" like Plato, whom it was believed anticipated certain Christian truths to the greatest extent possible without knowing Christ. This is true even of Augustine, who was generally rather skeptical of excessive worldly learning because he thought that it nourished a foolish pride. Christianity developed in the context of late pagan antiquity as is probably inseparable from that context. Christians took those elements of pagan thought that they believed worthy of preserving and integrated them into their thinking.
I doubt whether nominalism would have developed in _exactly_ the way that it did without Christianity, but without Christianity, the West as we know it today would not exist. A world without it would be unrecognizable to us. It would be informed by completely different basic assumptions about the nature of man, the divine and the world, and therefore would be so different from the world that we actually live in that most speculation on its character is probably idle.
With that said, the tension between realism and anti-realism in philosophy is as old as philosophy itself. I think it's a dichotomy that flows out of the nature of thought and rationality itself, and so people will always debate these questions in some form or another. The ancient world had its competing philosophical schools. On the realist side, there were groups like Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics, and on the anti-realist side, there were Epicureans, Skeptics - both Pyrrhonian and Academic - Heracliteans, etc. It's not obvious that the realist side would have come to dominate in this debate. Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps it just looks like the realist side was so influential because early Christian theologians were all enamored of philosophical realism, and Christianity would go on to take over the West and influence its history. (In fact, after the rise of nominalism, during the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, there was renewed interest among Christian thinkers in the works of pagans like Sextus Empiricus and Epicurus, so there does appear to be some connection here.)
When I had first commented I had only watched about 20 mins now I finished it. In the words of the great Aids Skrillex "you're a fucking white male" or some shit like that. I'm having trouble grappling with what you've talked about in this video. As I understand it Okam or how ever you spell it of Okams razor helped create the school of thought known as Nomalism where God is pretty much might makes right even if he's contradicting himself and that brings us to the next video. This is in contrast to realism or what ever you called it where universals have limits and if I understand a universal is an idea of something like the idea of a chair
+xpallodoc
Sort of. Let me try and make this as clear as I can. A universal is a property that some object can have. It can be something like "redness," or "blueness," or "frogness," or "chairness." A red object, like a brick or a can of coke, instantiates the universal of "redness"; a blue object like the external hard drive that I have sitting on my desk, instantiates "blueness"; a frog instantiates "frogness"; and a chair instantiates "chairness." So yes, exactly. I'm fucking a white male. I instantiate "whiteness" and "maleness."
Ockham (sometimes also spelled "Occam") is most famous for Ockham's Razor, but most people who refer to it today actually state it incorrectly. They usually state it as "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity." This isn't exactly what Ockham had in mind. A better phrasing would be something like, "Don't employ universals beyond necessity." Ockham did not believe that universals were real things that existed apart from or independently of any of the objects that instantiated them. To Ockham, there are only red objects; there is no redness itself. The concept of "redness," according to him, is something that we invent because we need it in order to be able to speak and communicate coherently. But if we use universals when we speak, this creates the impression that universals are real things that exist apart from the objects that instantiate them. This is a mistaken impression, according to Ockham. Therefore, we should use as few universals in our language as possible because the more of them we use, the more we are moved away from a true description of reality. The more universals we use, the more we come to believe, falsely (according to Ockham) that they are real things in themselves.
The realists held the opposite position from Ockham. They thought that universals were real things. They thought that even if every single red object in the universe were destroyed, the universal of "redness" would still remain. Actually, they thought that universals were, in a way, more real than the actual objects that instantiated them. The realist view was was that universals existed in God's mind, and that God used these universals to order the universe. The reason that the world is orderly, according to them, was that the world was like a reflection of God's mind. Universals existed in God's mind and the world was organized according to universals. This view had the interesting implication that by studying and learning about the world, you could also learn something about God.
I hope that's clear.
I think both the nominalists and realists are two nihilistic extremes which represent noumenon and phenomenon.
The nominalists reject categorization despite a reality in which change does not occur at a rate where order is impossible.
The realists accept categorization absolutely despite a reality in flux which does change.
Were the Pagans the closest to being a hybrid/balance of these two poles?
Dæmon Knight
I don't think that you can ascribe any monolithic position to the pagans as a whole on this issue. Like with many other things, pagans disagreed with one another about universals. Heraclitus and certain of the ancient Skeptics can plausibly be interpreted as nominalists, and Plato and Aristotle were realists (Plato, obviously, a more extreme one than Aristotle).
If you read Plato's dialogues, it very quickly becomes clear that Plato had extremely unconventional views on religion for his time (he was basically a monotheist). The same can be said for Aristotle after one makes note of the argument in the _Metaphysics_ that leads to the Prime Mover. I don't know anything about Heraclitus' religious views, and so I can't say anything enlightening on the subject, but I think that, if the rest of Heraclitus' work is any indication, they, too, were highly unconventional (though, perhaps in different respects than Plato's or Aristotle's). The Skeptics, obviously, were skeptics about the religion of their time.
I would be very careful about drawing too many conclusions on the connections between pagan views on universals and their religious beliefs. You don't want to be too hasty, here.
IvanTheHeathen
"I don't think that you can ascribe any monolithic position to the pagans as a whole on this issue."
Of course you can, all you have to do is see the patterns.
"In monotheism there is always a one, judgment.
Cost/Benefit placed in the heavens, or on earth in the form of a self, or a SELF as God - the ego must sacrifice itself to this SELF, and find salvation.
Paganism believes in the continuous, expressed in the multiplicity of gods, responsibility of consciousness.
There is no one good/evil, good/bad, but a multiplicity of outcomes, relating to an intent, a goal, an ideal, each with a cost and a benefit not free of objectivity, but ALWAYS in relation to a fluid cosmos.
Shifting cost/benefits, dependent on the understanding and talents of the particular mind.
no parity of judgment, but a severity, imposed from without and from within, as cost/benefit, as the sensation of need/suffering - the experience of existing.
No salvation, but endurance, durability; no final peace, but eternal war/conflict one is either conscious, or unconscious, of. " -Old Goat
IvanTheHeathen
Ill have to read read Plato's dialogues as an undergrad this semester but i can already see the underlying anti-life and anti-reality ideals he proposes which i have heard were influences from the east...
Haste is what is lacking in this modern world which has the comfort and privilege to sit around and not draw any conclusions while other tribes of people whom have more conviction take advantage of this fact in order to further their own interests.
We need to be more Laconic.
Really enjoyed this video in spite of the condescending speech about some (or all) of the progressive left at the beginning. Keep up the good work.
I suppose that my tone was harsh. I fully expected to be preaching to the choir in these videos and did not expect them to get any level of attention at all. If I could redo them, perhaps I would choose to be a bit more restrained on that score, but what's done is done. And in any event, I'm not one to hide what I really believe, so if nothing else, at least I'm shooting straight with you. Ultimately, though, I'm glad that you got something out of this video (and perhaps the others in the series as well).
Leftism is pure poison, Keith Stack. No reason to sugar coat it. Look at its fruits besides the Radical Feminists and Antifa SJW's. Look at the French Revolution and Russian Revolution and Castro's Cuba. I'd say strong rebuke of Leftism is sensible.
Nothing wrong with treating leftist as they deserve.
Good to see you back my man!
+thebigleowbosiki
Thanks! Good to be back! I honestly intend to make videos more-or-less regularly now. I have a few interesting topics to talk about backed up. We'll see how things go. Cheers!