I do think that most modern analytic philosophers tend to be nominalists though. I’ll admit that physicists aren’t quite sure how to take the laws of physics, but the view that they are descriptive is I think the dominant view even if sometimes physicists speak like realists towards laws as independent entities.

The place where you really see nominalism is towards mathematics. Quine famously said,

We do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities—classes, relations, properties, etc.—exist in space-time; but we mean more than this. We renounce them altogether.…Any system that countenances abstract entities we deem unsatisfactory as a final philosophy

Admittedly in some papers he gave lip service to there perhaps being something abstract. But I think this view of Quine was pretty dominant in the 20th century.

But perhaps this is just the Peircean in me coming out and seeing too much philosophy as nominalistic.

I don’t think that is remotely true, at least with regard to the common definition of nominalism as the proposition that “various objects labeled by the same term have nothing in common but their name”.

Ockham most emphatically did not believe that. No contemporary scientist believes that either. Not to knock academics again, but I think you would have a hard time finding anyone outside of a humanities department that believes that.

Now if you take the more restricted position (which is not properly termed nominalism in my opinion) that universals don’t exist as real objects in the outside world, then certainly Ockham agreed. He maintained the reality of similarities and the reality of concepts instead.

Certainly many if not most contemporary scientists believe the same thing. In any case, the pragmatic difference between the doctrine of real similarities and the moderate realist position of Aristotle is difficult to identify.

Orson Pratt didn’t believe that “states”, “qualities”, “properties”, or “operations” were material, and says as much in this very tract.

He does maintain that none of these things exist independently of matter however. Hence his statement that “the followers of Joseph Smith maintain the materiality of all existence”.

Most of the tract is directed explicitly at the questions of whether a spirit or a mind can be immaterial, or more specifically, exist independently of material.

The primary point of view he was criticizing was the idea that spirits have NO PLACE and are indeed NOWHERE, and are without temporal extent (DURATION) of any kind. Any substance that is embedded in space and time is either matter by another name or is associated with matter.

I think Orson Pratt is pretty persuasive on this point, and as it happens Aristotle shared the same view, i.e. that a materially uninstantiated substance, form, or universal doesn’t exist. Universalia ante rem, or moderate realism with regard to universals.

I don’t think we have to be particularly modest. If by how much “stuff” you would mean density (‘cuz it’s all stuff) I don’t see it as being a viable model to say we don’t see spirits because instead of having some 10^27 particles making up their bodies like we do they have only some 10^small number (i.e. they are so low density we usually look right through them). Goes back to the complexity argument that Mark was making (which I fully agree with).

So, at present, the most viable model of interaction that I can conceive of is that spirit matter does not or rarely interacts with physical matter. Yet, on the other hand – we have to account for this weird coupling of the spirit body with our physical body, transferal of memory upon death, etc — that obviously requires some interaction. Tricky stuff.

Blake Once again — JS didn’t grasp the notion of immaterial substances as that concept(s) was discussed in classical and medieval theology. An immaterial substance is one having mental properties only like Descartes’ thinking substance — no matter, but interacting with matter by virtue of mental properties.

I don’t think we can say that either. I think it safe to say that in his studies Joseph was exposed to quite a few ideas. Probably not with even the level of rigor a Freshman philosophy class would provide. But I’m pretty confident that by Nauvoo a lot would have been made clear just from his reading of theological commentaries. (As limited as they were) It would be interesting to know if his Hebrew teachers would have communicated any of this to him. (While the Kabbalistic parallels to many Nauvoo teachings are quite interesting, I think no one has presented convincingly that these are anything but coincidental or seen at best in a superficial way while reading Biblical commentaries)

One should also note that immaterial entities need not be mind. That is, in the post-Cartesian era the most popular view. Thus even those who reject Cartesian dualism such as German idealists still end up embracing an ontology based upon “knowing.” (And thus mind-like) However a Thomist soul isn’t really conceived of in those ways – even though Descartes view clearly is tied to the Aquinas view.

J. Stapley I agree that if spirits exist (which I believe they do) then they are not immaterial (which is to say they don’t exist).

Existence != being material. This was the big error in Pratt’s “The Absurdities of Immaterialism.” To a dualist, mind is immaterial but exists just as much as rocks do.

Now we can distinguish between being real and existing (or being actual). Although most of the modern era has adopted a position called nomalism. In that ontological view “generals” or “universals” can’t be real. To a scholastic realist, there are things that are actual but one can also point to general propositions or universals and say they are real even though they don’t exist. One need not be a Platonist to hold to such a position. This was the dominant position among the pragmatists, for instance. Interestingly despite Priestly and all the others around the time of Joseph Smith, idealism was still the dominant position in the 19th century. (Although it was nominalist in certain other ways)

J. Stapley Jacob, are you saying that Joseph didn’t equate existence with materiality?

I see no evidence that he did. Orson Pratt clearly did. But I’m unaware of any statements by Joseph which indicated that “to be” entailed “to be material.”