Editing William of Ockham (section)

===Nominalism===
William of Ockham was a pioneer of [[nominalism]], and some consider him the father of modern [[epistemology]], because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual [[universal (metaphysics)|universals]], essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Baird |first1=Forrest E. |title=From Plato to Derrida |last2=Kaufmann |first2=Walter |publisher=Pearson Prentice Hall |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-13-158591-1 |location=Upper Saddle River, New Jersey |author-link2=Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)}}</ref> He denied the real existence of metaphysical universals and advocated the reduction of [[ontology]].{{cn|date=September 2024}}

William of Ockham is sometimes considered an advocate of [[conceptualism]] rather than nominalism, for whereas nominalists held that universals were merely names, i.e. words rather than extant realities, conceptualists held that they were mental [[concept]]s, i.e. the names were names of concepts, which do exist, although only in the mind. Therefore, the universal concept has for its object, not a reality existing in the world outside us, but an internal representation which is a product of the understanding itself and which "supposes" in the mind the things to which the mind attributes it; that is, it holds, for the time being, the place of the things which it represents. It is the term of the reflective act of the mind. Hence the universal is not a mere word, as [[Roscellinus|Roscelin]] taught, nor a ''sermo'', as [[Peter Abelard]] held, namely the word as used in the sentence, but the mental substitute for real things, and the term of the reflective process. For this reason William has sometimes also been called a "[[Terminism (Philosophy)|Terminist]]", to distinguish him from a nominalist or a conceptualist.<ref name="Turner1913">{{Catholic Encyclopedia| year=1913|wstitle = William of Ockham | author =William Turner|inline=yes}}</ref>