Well said Curt. I commend you for your historical approach to the dismantling of language, meaning, objective truth and natural law. The inability to speak with words which actually have meaning and universal signification leads to the inability to speak objectively and universally, which leads to the inability to talk truthfully within the logical boundaries of morality and natural law.

William of Ockham was the founding father of modern day nominalism, which then led to moral relativism and even philosophical atheism. Without Ockham’s philosophical and theological relativism, wherein words lost their objective meaning and universal applicability, Martin Luther would have been at a total loss. Without the nominalism which Ockham fathered, the philosophical atheism of the French Enlightenment would never have been possible. Ockham distorted the beautiful theology and philosophy of Blessed John Duns Scotus, Mary’s Architect, who laid the theological groundwork for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

William of Ockham and his disciples throughout the travail of ages are mere hiccups of the Skeptics (a.k.a. “academics”) in the centuries just before and just after the birth of Our Lord. True philosophers in the neo-Aristotelian and neo-Platonic lines tried to defeat the Skeptics, but they were more slippery than wet snakes and could not be pinned down in debate. The Great Doctor of Grace, Saint Augustine, was able to do solo what great Realists and Idealists could not do before him. Augustine whipped the relativistic school of Skeptics into extinction until their reappearance with the 14th century nominalists with this simple yet profound argumentation:

1- It is absolutely true that absolute truth exists; or 2- It is absolutely true that absolute truth does NOT exists. 3- Whether you choose 1 or 2, you presuppose and prove universal and absolute truth, which negates the entire foundation of the School of Skeptics and moral relativism. 4- Silence, which by default gives the philosophical victory to the schools of Realism and Idealism.

For those who hold fast to logic and reason, moral relativism and nominalism, wherein the reality and meaning of words is compromised, are not options.

Anselmus