A Dispute the Whole Language of Divine Attributes Depends On

The medieval debate over universals that nominalism belongs to was never a purely abstract exercise, since it bore directly on how theologians could speak of God's attributes, goodness, wisdom, justice, being shared, whether literally or only by analogy, across God and creatures, and nominalism's insistence that general terms name no further real, shared entity pushed theology in this period toward treating divine attributes as either radically unique to God, or as convenient labels rather than descriptions of any real, common property; this theological stake is a major reason the dispute mattered so intensely to figures who were, first and foremost, working theologians rather than detached metaphysicians. Realists about universals answer nominalism's parsimony argument by insisting that shared resemblance itself, real red things genuinely being similar to one another in a way that is not just a matter of a shared name, is exactly the phenomenon that needs explaining, and that nominalism, for all its economy, ultimately explains classification by simply redescribing it rather than accounting for why the classifications track anything real at all; nominalists reply that this demand for a further explanation of resemblance is precisely the unnecessary posit their razor is designed to cut away.