Brzytwa Ockhama czy Brzytwa Austina – która ostrzejsza

The text is an attempt to confront a philosophical “superstition” according to which William of Ockham was a nominalist. I use John L. Austin‟s text The meaning of a word (1940) in order to explain what I mean when I say that universals are “language-rooted” (that is the most common definition of nominalism). The critique of similarities between things, the rejection of redundant hypostases, the adjuster-words – these are the concepts on the basis of which I introduce a new term, namely “Austin‟s razor”. It is exactly this term which allows me to demonstrate that Ockham‟s theory is not “language-rooted”, as William Ockham turns out to be a conceptualist, which I prove in my commentary on the excerpts from his Summa logicae. In the process I also show that Ockham‟s theory and the thought of late Austin (from How to talk: some simple ways, 1953) have a lot in common.

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