ABSTRACT
Platonism had been overshadowed by the influence of Aristotle during the mediaeval period, despite the obvious affinity of transcendent metaphysics with certain aspects of Christian doctrine (such as the belief in a spiritual afterlife). And Aristotle was very much a down-to-earth empiricist and, in today’s terms, a physicalist. Many of his mediaeval scholastic followers espoused empiricism, as encapsulated in the Latin phrase nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (‘nothing is in the understanding which was not previously encountered in sense-experience’). They often combined this doctrine with either nominalism or conceptualism-both involving a denial of the transcendent reality of independent Forms or universals (see pp. 162-3)—and with a repudiation of Plato’s conception of the soul as a separate entity preexisting the body.
