William of Ockham and Lorenzo Valla: False Friends. Semantics and Ontological Reduction

At first glance, Lorenzo Valla has much in common with William of Ockham. Both see language as the key to an understanding of the world, criticizing realist ontologies which admit of various abstract entities. Modern scholars have therefore often argued that Valla's transformation of medieval m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRenaissance quarterly Vol. 56; no. 3; pp. 613 - 651
Main Author Nauta, Lodi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Renaissance Society of America 22.09.2003
Cambridge University Press
Subjects
Adjectives
Aristotelianism
Cultural background
Cultural differences
Eyes
False friends
History
Literary criticism
Logic
Nominalism
Nouns
Ockhamism
Ontology
Passion
Philosophers
Philosophy, Renaissance
Renaissance philosophy
Semantics
Signification
Terminology
Valla, Lorenzo
Valla, Lorenzo (1407-57)
Verbs
William of Ockham
William of Ockham (1285-1349)
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Summary:At first glance, Lorenzo Valla has much in common with William of Ockham. Both see language as the key to an understanding of the world, criticizing realist ontologies which admit of various abstract entities. Modern scholars have therefore often argued that Valla's transformation of medieval metaphysics and logic is nominalist in spirit and continues Ockhamist nominalism. The article criticizes this widely held interpretation. At closer inspection, Valla's views on ontology and semantics are very different from Ockham's. Apart from the obvious differences in cultural background, they show widely different approaches, methods, and arguments at a more philosophical level.
ISSN:0034-4338
1935-0236
DOI:10.2307/1261609