A medieval philosophical position arguing that universal concepts (like 'humanity' or 'redness') are merely names or mental constructs rather than real entities existing independently of individual things.
From Latin 'nominalis' meaning 'relating to names,' derived from 'nomen' (name). The term emerged in medieval scholastic debates about whether universal categories had real existence or were simply convenient labels created by human minds.
Nominalism sparked one of the biggest intellectual fights of the Middle Ages—imagine philosophers arguing for centuries about whether the concept 'tree-ness' actually exists or if there are just individual trees that we group together! This debate laid groundwork for modern scientific thinking about classification and observation.
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