id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-4733		Nominalism - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	5289	783	52	Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals, which dates back at least to Plato, and is opposed to realist philosophies, such as Platonic realism, which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars. David Armstrong, perhaps the most prominent contemporary realist, argues that such a trope-based variant of nominalism has promise, but holds that it is unable to account for the laws of nature in the way his theory of universals can.[citation needed] More fundamentally, Robert Pasnau has questioned whether any kind of coherent body of thought that could be called 'nominalism' can be discerned in fourteenth century writing.[28] This makes it difficult, it has been argued, to follow the twentieth century narrative which portrayed late scholastic philosophy as a dispute which emerged in the fourteenth century between the via moderna, nominalism, and the via antiqua, realism, with the nominalist ideas of William of Ockham foreshadowing the eventual rejection of scholasticism in the seventeenth century.[27]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-4733.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-4733.txt