In his 1948 work Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver claims that all of our problems can be traced back to the consequences of a single doctrine: nominalism. This claim, developed in the medieval university system, holds that the concepts we form have no transcendent reality behind them beyond the names we give to things. Weaver believes that the explicit or tacit acceptance of this idea is primarily responsible for what he sees as the decline of the Western world. In this reading group, we will consider the arguments that Weaver makes for this specific view of history, while looking more broadly at the idea that any philosophical doctrine could be influential enough to have the kinds of effects that he claims.

On Thursday, April 25th, we will discuss Weaver's claims about piety understood as the proper relation between the present and the past, and discuss more generally whether any philosophical idea can have the society-shaping power that Weaver attributed to nominalism. We will be reading the last chapter of Ideas Have Consequences. Please find a link to the readings below.

This seminar is the fourth and final in our Spring 2024 series How Consequential Can an Idea Be?