Ockham, Baskerville e a desdiviniza o do logos

We will begin a study of William of Ockham from a small case involving the conferences Foucault taught more than six centuries after the death of the Franciscan philosopher not only, of course, due to a simple and supposed convergence in the nominalist tshared by both authors, but because, rather, we must pay attention to how the Foucaultian precaution of method exposes a persistent and unquestioned validity for our times of a central question to the medieval philosophical debate, namely, the quarrel of universals. The late modernity or, for some, the postmodernity, does not appear, therefore, free from those witch are by excellence the remains of pre-modern and, in this sense, to study the other in relation to our own time has ensured its relevance by the discovery that, in Foucaultian terms, perhaps the other most likly resembles the same then our belief in progress would normally believe. To go back to the Middle Ages is definitely not to go back to obscurity, or to mee something like an exotic that has long been obsolete by the lights of modern reason. As stated by the eminent medievalist Etienne Gilson, “modern philosophy did not sustain a fight to win the rights of reason against the Middle Ages, but, rather, the Middle Ages has won them for itself, and through the act by which the seventeenth century thought to be abolishing the work of previous centuries only continued it. ”