Only individual things actually exist

Nominalism takes its name from those philosophers who argued, against the intellectual descendants of Plato, that universals or abstractions do not have an historical existence. For nominalists, only individual things actually exist. In the fourteenth century nominalist traditions were used by theologians including William of Occam who emphasized the inability of reason to apprehend the things of God, insisting that God reveals himself primarily to faith and not to reason. Nominalists typically emphasized the will of God as the reason for the existence of all things and considered reason a human capacity to which God was not obliged to conform.