…when Harclay finds himself associating scientific knowledge with confusion, we have a problem.
Gilson notes that Ockham reads Harclay as a realist, because he does think there is something
real in our general grasp of things; it’s just confusedly real.
And so our universals actually point to something real about things, in other words, point to individuals.
Ockham is going to react against Harclay's view, and gives us this revolutionary idea:
that general ideas correspond to nothing in reality.
There is not anything out there, in a confused mode or any other mode, that actually matches
up to our idea of the Form of Horse.
I think I can take that… I'll modify that slightly in a minute.
What’s Ockham's revolutionary idea?
So universals correspond to nothing that actually exists in reality.
It is only individuals, only individuals that exist.
So if you have any knowledge whatsoever, it is a knowledge of individuals.
This is what leads Gilson to describe, on page 55, to describe Ockham as “the perfect anti-Plato.”
For Plato the forms, the ideas, the universals are the ultimate reality; for Ockham it’s
precisely the opposite.
They are totally vacuous as descriptions of the real, it seems.
Maybe I should go over this, since it is question 3, bottom of page 53.
How does he contrast these three?
“Harclay was not saying, like Duns Scotus, that universals were real entities apart from
their existence in individuals.”
We have a kind of realism which puts the universal as another thing.
There’s the individual horses, then there's the essence of Horse, the Form of Horse, as
another thing besides those, which can be known intellectually by its own methods.
“Nor like Thomas Aquinas was he saying that universals are virtually present in individuals,
from which they are abstracted by the intellect.”
That's the Thomist position, that there’s not some subsistent Form of Horse which actually
exists in some alternate realm, but in the Aristotelian way, the Form of Horse is present
as the essence, the equine nature of each individual horse.
You have to go, you have to look at individuals to find it, but the intellect performs a process
of abstraction in order to grasp the essence that is really there.
So it's not a separate, not a separate thing, but it is known, in a certain fashion, through individuals.
“Ockham [sic] was maintaining at least this: that the universals are individuals conceived…
I’m sorry, *Harclay* maintained individuals are… universals are individuals conceived
in a certain way.”
Ockham looks at this and says, ‘Not nominalist enough!’
There's still a remnant of realism here.
He's going to go all the way and say: in fact, universals correspond to nothing.
Middle of page 54.
“Ockham wants us to realize that since what… everything that really exists is individual,
our general idea does not correspond to anything in reality, and this is, as Ockham [sic] notes,
as *Gilson* notes, a revolutionary idea.”
This cannot be a reformation, this has got to be a total revolution.
He goes on page 55 to make a distinction, this is the subject of question 5 on the reading
list, between intuitive knowledge and abstractive knowledge.
Two different forms of knowledge.
Intuitive knowledge is our immediate perception of an actually existing thing.
So if I have an intuitive grasp of a thing, if I’m knowing a real thing, it’s an individual
thing, but if I'm knowing in its individual reality, I'm grasping it, presumably through
my senses, as an actually existing individual.
So I know it is an individual because it is, as it were, right in my face; it's plain in
front of me.
We talked before about this empiricist principle that what you can be sure of is what is immediately
evident to the senses.
There's no way of prying you away from those things.
For the rationalist, for Descartes, it was the immediate awareness of one's own state
of consciousness, of the innate ideas and the like.
For the empiricist, it’s one's own immediate states of sensory impression.
What then is abstractive knowledge?
It is, he says, “that cognition from which no conclusions can be drawn about the real
existence of the thing known.”
So here's an interesting inversion: the more abstractly I grasp something, the *less* I
know about it.
I don't know whether it exists or not.
So to grasp something through this abstractive knowledge is to grasp it but not to be able
to say whether or not it exists.
So the consequence of this is that intuition can form the only possible basis for science.
If I want to have systematic correct knowledge of things that exist, I have to get it through intuition.
I cannot possibly get it through abstraction.
So if you want scientia, if you want to know the real, if you want to have accurate and
certain knowledge of realities, since the realities are individual, since individuals
are only known in their concrete existence through intuitive faculties, any knowledge
you have that can be called scientific will have to be intuitive knowledge.
What about abstraction, then?
Abstraction looks kind of like Harclay’s confused grasp.
It looks like it's second best.
To know something in a universal sense is to know it in an inferior way to what you
would know if you had it intuitive grasp of it.
We have something interesting here going on. I want to talk about two senses of abstraction.
I think we can see this here present, certainly in Ockham.
What are these two senses of abstraction?
The first way… the classical way of thinking about abstraction, I think certainly in the
Thomistic sense, maybe in the Aristotelian sense, is: when I abstract something, I take
away, I leave behind all that is individual, all that is particular, all that is embodied,
that is connected with time, with particularity, with its particular history…
I look at this, I look at *this* dog, and I leave behind my knowledge of everything
that makes this dog *this* dog.
Then I simply grasp the canine nature that it possesses.
This type of abstraction is really distinguished by what it holds on to.
It leaves behind, sort of peels off the outer shell, the things that are insignificant in
terms of knowing, in terms of the dog being a dog: its particular breed, its particular
history, its state of health, all the things that are connected with its being an individual
dog, and I just grasp its inner nature, its essence, its canine-ness.
The second form of abstraction is more characteristic of, sometimes of modern science.
We see it present here in Ockham.
This type of abstraction we can think about as abstracting away from the concrete reality
of the individual and the intuitive grasp of that individual as a real existing thing.
This is a type of abstraction, I think, that is distinguished by what it leaves behind.
There's a sense in which, if I'm right up and I'm standing right 10 feet away from you,
I can see you clearly.
If I'm standing 100 yards away from you, I see you less clearly.
I can draw fewer conclusions about you.
It might be Sean, but it might also be Tim, or somebody else, but I can't say for sure.
That's the kind of thing that abstraction becomes, in the hands of the kind of empiricist
mind of Ockham and of others, it seems to me.
There's not a sense that my abstraction is taking me towards the ultimate higher truth
about the thing, in the realm of the intellect, which has to be beyond the senses.
There's a feeling that actually abstraction, and the whole philosophical superstructure
that goes with it, is taking me *away* from the certainty and confidence of immediate
intuitive experience.
We see two different attitudes towards philosophy in this.
It might be unkind to call them the German and the English, but perhaps I could think
more like: the rationalist and the empiricist, or the classical and the scientific, the modern scientific.
Classical scientific and modern scientific.
You guys see the difference between these?
Between abstraction that takes me closer to the reality, the ultimate reality of the thing,
which can only be known by the abstract intellect.
That's one philosophical framework for abstraction.
In the empiricist system, abstraction is always a matter of leaving something behind, that
it would be rather better if you didn't have to leave behind.
Perhaps I have to abstract to get to some sort of overall theory of number or motion
or something else but I have to give up parts of reality to get there.
I have to treat number as though, numbers as though they were neither even nor odd.
Whereas every individual number is even or odd.
If I make a theory of integers, it has to be a theory that applies to all integers,
so I have to back off the level of detail, and I lose something of the reality of things.
I think it's important to recognize this second type of abstraction at work in Ockham’s
reasoning about universals.
Page 56. “Intuition is the only possible foundation for what Ockham
calls experimental knowledge or scientific knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge
that causes science in us, because intuition alone can able to us to perceive the existence
or nonexistence of things.”
My marginal note here is that this is where the trap snaps shut.
You have an idea or a theory of what's going on in our knowing of individuals and universals,
but the ultimate consequence of this is that science, being a science of individuals, must
be an intuitive science, not an abstract, speculative philosophical science.
The farther you get away from the senses, the more likely you are to be spinning sort
of cloud-like castles in the sky, fantasies that are not connected to real things.
This is the empiricist attitude, I think, in philosophy, distinguished maybe from what
we might call the Platonic attitude, that the farther we get away, out of the cave,
the more we get into the intellectual light, the clearer we're able to see the true realities of things.
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