Le nominalisme d'Ockham

Abstract

William of Ockham rejects the existence of universals, relations and quantities as distinct entities, but he accepts at the same time that the truth of general statements, relational statements and quantitative statements essentially depends on what is objectively going on in the world. The paper shows how the Ockhamistic idea of a thing (res) solves this apparent tension and reconstructs from there Ockham’s nominalistic program, which consists in establishing the ontology in the most economical way and defending it with an appropriate semantic theory.