Realism and Nominalism Revisited [The Aquinas Lecture, 1954]

The Aquinas Lecture in Philosophy #5

by Henry Babcock Veatch

Veatch, Henry Bock

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Veatch was born in Evansville, Indiana. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1937 and spent his career at Indiana University (1937–1965), Northwestern University (1965–1973), and Georgetown University (1973–1983) where he was Philosophy Department Chair from 1973 to 1976. He also had visiting professorships at Colby College, Haverford College and St. Thomas University.

Veatch was active in the Episcopal Church and served as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1961. In 1970–71 he served as president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association. He was a member of the Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church.

Henry Veatch died in Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University maintains the archive of his collected papers (1941–1997).

Reviews

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful, little book, though more narrowly focused on 20th century logical nominalism than the on the medieval schools. For a sustained study of nominalist scholastic metaphysics and logic, a reader should go elsewhere, such as Heiko Oberman's excellent "The Harvest of Medieval Theology," Etienne Gilson's classic "History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages," or the newer study by Claudio Panaccio titled "Ockham's Nominalism."

One of my favorite parts of this book (which is a lecture from the fifties delivered at Marquette) is Veatch's quotation of a key passage from Thomas Aquinas with his reflections. The quote is from the saint's work on Aristotle's Metaphysics: "The notion of a being of reason is properly attributed to those intentions which reason finds in things insofar as they are considered by reason - such for instance as the intention of genus, of species, and the like which, to be sure, are not found in rerum natura, but rather are consequent upon reason's consideration of the things of nature. Now it is this sort of thing that is properly the subject of logic" (12).

It may appear obvious at first, but Veatch's point is that so much of the work of the modern philosophy of logic, from Frege to Russell to Quine, is simplistically positivist and nominalist, taking up the old Kantian error of assuming some sort of first principle of reasoning as a "pure" and "untouchable" starting point. But Aquinas (going back to Aristotle) saw clearly that before discerning a form or meaningfully discussing it, some other form(s) was already at work. Only a reasoning being can reason, stretching out itself into objects of knowledge, naming, categorizing, organizing, etc. The ideas of logic are not found undisturbed in nature somewhere and all we have to do is come up with arbitrary symbols (names) for them! The very notion of considering anything in nature is, truly, consequent on the reasoning person's own pre-established considerations, stemming from his or her own archontic powers, which, in turn, stem from the individual human's form given by God. To push this farther, as Conor Cunningham puts it, without realist metaphysics, there is no difference between an ice cream and a car accident; already at work in our naming and our conception of these things, form is determining meaning. The redistribution of atoms is a cold, hard fact of reality; there is no purely natural way to meaningfully distinguish between, name, identify, or understand this atom pile or that atom pile unless forms are already at work and the Good is what we're aiming at.

[J.A.A. Purves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like weights on the bar bell that I am only just working myself up to being able to lift in four sets of ten, reading this was a thought exercise that I haven't quite attained the strength for.

Lucid, fascinating, stretching and yet half of it was still over my head. But that's my fault, not the author's.

Mental notes to pursue further:

1) Extreme Realism is closer in the abstract thought world to Nominalism than I originally thought. According to Mr. Veatch, Bertrand Russell went from Extreme Realist to Nominalist while holding many of the same assumptions. Both positions exist in this strange purely theoretical thought world divorced from the reality of life.

2) To argue for the existence of universal truths, one does not have to insist that the terms used to describe a truth must correspond to their own abstract existences in reality. Instead, one can admit that the language of logical propositions and arguments is simply the tool that enables us to know the existence of things in reality. There does not have to be some perfect abstract attainment of the ideal of "red" as a "thing" that exists in outside reality in order for the word "red" to meaningfully describe a fact about objective reality.

3) There is an incoherent "half-way house" for those who don't want to choose between realism and nominalism. They try to distinguish what can be known by science as "real" and what cannot be known by science as "not real." This collapses upon itself because the epistemological foundation necessary for science to exist is not reached by science. "Descriptive" terms cannot be wholly divorced from "Logical" terms because without using the logical terms the descriptive terms have no meaning. Scientific knowledge is impossible without first establishing some necessary epistemological truths about objective reality. Some truths cannot be proved by the scientific method.