I am a proud Nominalist !

Excerpt from seminar of April 29, 2023. The purpose of this excerpt is to convey that the term 'nominalism' is widely misunderstood. (for more on this from a different perspective, see Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 83-88). The historical 'nominalists', including Ockham, did not deny the distinct intelligibility of the world; rather, following Aristotle, they believed in (immanent) forms. The realism/nominalism debate was not about whether ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ are thābita, but rather, concerned the status of universals and indeed, in most cases, the ontological status of the Aristotelian categories. In this sense, it closely paralleled debates in late-Kalām - for example, Duns Scotus held a 'moderate realism' derived from Avicenna, which Ockham argued against; but just as later kalām thinkers who denied the existence of the kullī ṭabīʿī were not thereby purporting to deny ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ, neither was Ockham denying them - indeed, he explicitly affirms (as well as the existence of quality) the existence of the first of the categories, i.e. substance which is immanent form in so far as it is fused with matter as constitutive of an individual thing, while denying the extramental existence of quantity and relation (as do jumhūr al-mutakallimīn!). As such, the present obsession with realism/nominalism as the primary organizing rubric in the history of the emergence of modernity and of contemporary 'constructionism' is misplaced. The real culprit is Aristotelian immanentism itself. Istidrāk: Should it be said: "No one is saying the logical universal exists fī al-khārij, only the kullī ṭābīʿī", we would say, "affirming the existence of the kullī ṭabīʿi is mere empty assertion favored by those committed both to "realism" and "immanentism". This is because al-wujūd al-khārijī which is necessarily mutaʿayyin and juzʾī, precludes the possibility of al-kulliyya. No one in the history of kalām or Avicennan philosophy has been able to give a convincing account of precisely what the kullī ṭabīʿī is supposed to be and how this can be compatible with the individuation conditions of al-khārij (which is composed solely of juzʾiyyāt), and this is precisely because the actual intelligible content of the putative kullī ṭabīʿī amounts to the very universality captured by the definition of the logical universal. Only the one-over-the-many exemplary form can really make sense of shared essential intelligibility across individuals. Break free from the shackles of merely descriptive, circular, question-begging Avicennism, both kalām and otherwise ! There is much more to Islamic thought.