In the Middle Ages, when Platonic and Aristotelian realism were associated with orthodox religious belief, nominalism could be interpreted as heresy. And while Platonism had firmly become a part of Christian religious doctrines, Aristotelian philosophy was seen as contradicting church ideologies and met resistance. However, Christian philosophers who studied Aristotle – like Abelard – were among the first to stand against Platonic ideas of Forms and Universals. Abelard’s theory of conceptualism was the first step and a stepping stone for nominalism.
Religious implications aside, nominalism does indeed reject Platonic realism as a requirement for thinking and speaking in general terms. Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word like “humanity” does not imply the existence of a general thing named by it.
And while nominalism is different from Aristotle’s theories as well, the nominalist position does not necessarily deny Aristotelian thought. William Ockham and other philosophers of the 13th century opposed the ideas of Universal’s complete and directly contradicted realism. With the rise of nominalism as another explanation of reality, Christian philosophy divided into two opposing schools of thought – similar to the era of Plato and Aristotle, and this division persisted long after the Renaissance as well between continental rationalists and British empiricists.
