![ockham common ockham common](https://live.staticflickr.com/7323/16580693342_073484e1d1_b.jpg)
Both Buridan himself and the secondary literature have emphasized the strong similarities between these two octagons (as well as a third one, for propositions with oblique terms). This paper studies John Buridan's octagons of opposition for the de re modal propositions and the propositions of unusual construction. The chapter concludes with some detail what sort of modifications the standard semantic construction of modern quantification theory would have to undergo in order to faithfully reflect the two competing medieval conceptions. Indeed, the real strength of their nominalism is not so much their criticism of the older, realist way of construing these relationships as their detailed, systematic account of how a philosophy of language based on a strictly nominalist ontology is possible. The historical significance of Ockham’s innovations is that they were the first to introduce a radically new type of theoretical disagreement into scholastic discourse, a type of disagreement with which we, as heirs to these historical developments, are all too familiar, namely, the conflict between proponents of paradigmatically different conceptual schemes.
![ockham common ockham common](https://landscapephotographymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ockham-Common-Surrey-England-by-Thomas-Miles.jpg)
This chapter outlines the innovative semantic theories of the two great 14th-century nominalist thinkers whose work eventually gave rise to the quasi institutional separation of the nominalist via moderna, the “modern way,” from the realist via antiqua, “the old way” of doing logic, science, philosophy, and theology in the late middle ages.