William of Ockham

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William of Ockham (also Occam or any of several other spellings, IPA: [ˡɒkəm]) (c. 1288 - c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. He is considered, along with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, one of the major figures of medieval thought and found himself at the center of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although commonly known for Ockham's Razor, the methodological procedure that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology.

Contents 1 Life 2 Philosophical Thought 2.1 Nominalism 2.2 Ontological Parsimony 2.3 Natural Philosophy 2.4 Theory of knowledge 2.5 Political theory 2.6 Logic 3 Works 3.1 Philosophical writings 3.2 Theological writings 3.3 Political writings 4 Trivia 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Life

William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at a young age. He is believed to have studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's program.^[1] Because of this, he earned the moniker Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Venerable Beginner."

His work in this period became the subject of controversy, and many scholars have thought that Ockham was summoned before the Papal court of Avignon in 1324 under charges of heresy, though an alternative theory recently proposed by G. Knysh suggests that he was initially appointed there as professor of philosophy in the Franciscan school, and that his disciplinary difficulties did not begin until 1327. It is generally believed that these charges were levied by Oxford chancellor John Lutterell.^[2] A theological commission was asked to review his Commentary on the Sentences, during which, Ockham found himself entangled in a different debate. The Franciscan Minister General Michael of Cesena, summoned to Avignon in 1327 to answer charges of heresy, asked Ockham to review arguments surrounding Apostolic poverty. The Franciscan order believed that Jesus and his apostles owned no personal property, and survived by begging and accepting the gifts of others.^[3] This clashed directly with the beliefs of Pope John XXII.

After studying the works of John XXII and previous papal statements, Ockham concurred with the Minister General. He believed that the John XXII was himself guilty of heresy for refusing to accept the Franciscan claim.^[1] Fearing imprisonment and possible execution, Ockham and Cesena, and other Franciscan sympathizers fled Avignon. In 1328 They took refuge in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria, who was also engaged in dispute with the papacy. Ockham was excommunicated for leaving Avignon, but his philosophy was never officially condemned.

He spent much of the remainder of his life writing about political issues, including the relative authority and rights of the spiritual and temporal powers. After Michael of Cesena's death in 1342, he became the leader of the small band of Franciscan dissidents living in exile with Louis IV. Ockham died on April 9, 1348 in the Franciscan convent in Munich, Bavaria. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is April 10.^[4]

[edit] Philosophical Thought

In Scholasticism, Ockham advocated a reform both in method and in content, the aim of which was simplification. Ockham incorporated much of the work of some previous theologians, especially John Duns Scotus. From Scotus, Ockham derived his view of divine omnipotence, his view of grace and justification, much of his epistemology and ethical convictions. However, he also reacted to and against Scotus in the areas of predestination, penance, his understanding of universals, his distinction ex parte rei (that is, 'as applied to created things'), and his view of parsimony.

[edit] Nominalism

A pioneer of nominalism, some consider him the father of modern epistemology, because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence. He denied the real existence of metaphysical universals and advocated for the reduction of ontology. Ockham is sometimes considered an advocate of conceptualism rather than nominalism, for whereas nominalists held that universals were merely names, i.e. words rather than existing realities, conceptualists held that they were mental concepts, i.e. the names were names of concepts, which do exist, although only in the mind. Therefore, the universal concept has for its object, not a reality existing in the world outside us, but an internal representation which is a product of the understanding itself and which "supposes" in the mind, for the things to which the mind attributes it, that is it holds, for the time being, the place of the things which it represents. It is the term of the reflective act of the mind. Hence the universal is not a mere word, as Roscelin taught, nor a sermo, as Abélard held, namely the word as used in the sentence, but the mental substitute for real things, and the term of the reflective process. For this reason Ockham has been called a "Terminist," to distinguish him from a Nominalist or a Conceptualist.

Over the course of his life, Ockham changed his view of what universal concepts are. To begin with, he believed that universals have no “real” existence at all in the Aristotelian categories, but instead are purely “intentional objects” more or less in the sense of modern phenomenology; they have only a kind of “thought”-reality. Such “fictive” objects were metaphysically universal; they just weren't real. Eventually, however, Ockham came to think this intentional realm of “fictive” entities was not needed, and by the time of his Summa of Logic and the Quodlibets he adopted instead a so called intellectio-theory, according to which a universal concept is just the act of thinking about several objects at once; metaphysically it is quite singular, and is “universal” only in the sense of being predicable of many.

[edit] Ontological Parsimony

One important contribution that he made to modern science and modern intellectual culture was through the principle of parsimony in explanation and theory building that came to be known as Ockham's Razor. This maxim, as interpreted by Bertrand Russell,^[5] states that if one can explain a phenomenon without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it, i.e. that one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible number of causes, factors, or variables. He turned this into a concern for ontological parsimony; the principle says that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity - Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate - although this well-known formulation of the principle is not to be found in any of Ockham's extant writings.^[6] He formulates it as: “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.” For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity is God; everything else is contingent. He thus accepts the Principle of Sufficient Reason, rejects the distinction between essence and existence, and advocates against the Thomistic doctrine of active and passive intellect. His skepticism to which his ontological parsimony request leads appears in his doctrine that human reason can prove neither the immortality of the soul nor the existence, unity, and infinity of God. These truths, he teaches, are known to us by Revelation alone.

[edit] Natural Philosophy

Ockham wrote a lot in natural philosophies, among others a large commentary on Aristotle's physics. According to the principle of ontological parsimony, he holds that we do not need to allow entities in all ten of Aristotle's categories; we thus do not need the category of quantity, as the mathematical entities are not "real". Mathematics must be applied to other categories, such as the categories of substance or qualities, thus anticipating modern scientific renaissance while violating Aristotelian prohibition of metabasis.

[edit] Theory of knowledge

In the theory of knowledge, Ockham rejected the scholastic theory of species, as unnecessary and not supported by experience, in favor of a theory of abstraction. This was an important development in late medieval epistemology. He also distinguished between intuitive and abstract cognition; intuitive cognition depends on the existence or non existence of the object, whereas abstractive cognition "abstracts" the object from the existence predicate. It is not yet decided among interpreters as to the role of this two types of cognitive activities.

[edit] Political theory

Ockham is also increasingly being recognized as an important contributor to the development of Western constitutional ideas, especially those of limited responsible government. He was one of the first medieval authors to advocate a form of church/state separation, and was important for the early development of the notion of property rights. His political ideas are regarded as "natural" or "secular", holding for a secular absolutism. The views on monarchial accountability espoused in his Dialogus (written between 1332 and 1348) greatly influenced the Conciliar movement and assisted in the emergence of liberal democratic ideologies.

[edit] Logic

In logic, Ockham worked towards what would later be called De Morgan's Laws and considered ternary logic, that is, a logical system with three truth values, a concept that would be taken up again in the mathematical logic of the 19th and 20th centuries.

[edit] Works

The standard edition is William of Ockham, 1967-88. Opera philosophica et theologica. Gedeon Gál, et al., ed. 17 vols. St. Bonaventure, N. Y.: The Franciscan Institute.

[edit] Philosophical writings

• Summa logicae (Sum of Logic) (before 1327), Paris 1448, Bologna 1498, Venice 1508, Oxford 1675.
• Quaestiones in octo libros physicorum, (before 1327), Rome 1637.
• Summulae in octo libros physicorum, (before 1327), Venice 1506.
• Quodlibeta septem (before 1327), Paris 1487.
• Expositio aurea super artem veterem Aristotelis, 1323.
• Major summa logices, Venice 1521
• Quaestiones in quattuor libros sententiarum, Lyons, 1495.
• Centilogium theologicum, Lyons 1495.

[edit] Theological writings

• Questiones earumque decisiones, Lyons 1483.
• Quodlibeta septem, Paris 1487, Strassburg 1491.
• Centilogium, Lyons 1494.
• De sacraento altaris and De corpore christi, Strassburg 1491, Venice 1516.
• Tractatus de sacramento allans.

[edit] Political writings

• Opus nonaginta dierum (1332), Leuven 1481, Lyons 1495.
• Dialogus*, (begun in 1332) Paris 1476. Lyons 1495.
• Super potestate summi pontificis octo quaestionum decisiones (1344).
• Tractatus de dogmatibus Johannis XXII papae (1333–34).
• Epistola ad fratres minores, (1334).
• De jurisdictione imperatoris in causis matrimonialibus, Heidelberg 1598.
• Breviloquium de potestate tyrannica (1346)
• De imperatorum et pontifcum potestate [also known as 'Defensorium'] (1348)

[edit] Trivia

William of Ockham has inspired several characters in fiction, including:

• In The Name of the Rose, the monastic detective William of Baskerville, who uses logic in a similar manner and, also like William of Ockham, has faced charges of heresy. William expressly sources his manner of thinking to William of Ockham. Initially William of Baskerville refers to William of Ockham as "my friend from Occam" and "my friend William, currently in Avignon" before conflating these two descriptions and expressly referring to William of Occam.
• In the academic novel Straight Man, the frustrated English professor Hank Devereaux Jr, who uses logic as a guide through the many confusing situations he faces in the novel, names his dog "Occam".
• In a certain episode of The X-Files, Fox Mulder derides Ockham's Razor by renaming it Ockham's Principle of Unimaginative Thinking.
• William of Occam is also cited in Howard Nemerov's poem, "The Blue Swallows."
• The 1997 movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster, makes reference to Ockham's Razor, with respect to alien life.

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} Vincent Paul Spade. William of Ockham. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved on 2006-10-22.
2. ^ Hundersmarck, Lawerence (1992). Great Thinkers of the Western World. Harper Collins, 123-128. ISBN 0-06-270026-X. 
3. ^ McGrade, Arthur (1974). The Political Thought of William of Ockham: Personal and Institutional Principles. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-20284-1. 
4. ^ Holy Days. Liturgical Calendar. Church of England. Retrieved on 2006-10-22.
5. ^ Russell, Bertrand (2000). History of Western Philosophy. Allen & Unwin, 462-463. ISBN 0-415-22854-9. 
6. ^ W. M. Thorburn. The Myth of Occam's Razor. Mind. Oxford University. Retrieved on 2006-10-25.

[edit] See also

• History of science in the Middle Ages
• Occam programming language
• Oxford Franciscan school

[edit] External links

• Mediaeval Logic and Philosophy, maintained by Paul Vincent Spade
• The Catholic Encyclopedia: William of Ockham
• William of Ockham biography at University of St Andrews, Scotland
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: William of Ockham
• Biography and ideas at SWIF/University of Bari, Italy
• Dialogus, text translation and studies at British Academy, UK
• The Myth of Occam's Razor by W. M. Thorburn (1918)

This article is part of the Medieval Philosophers series

Augustine of Hippo | Boëthius | John Scotus Eriugena | Rhazes | Roscelin | Avicenna | Algazel | Anselm of Canterbury | Bernard of Chartres | Peter Abélard | Gilbert de la Porrée | Hugh of St. Victor | Richard of St. Victor | Maimonides | Alexander of Hales | Averroës | Alain de Lille | Robert Grosseteste | Albertus Magnus | Roger Bacon | Bonaventure | Thomas Aquinas | Ramon Llull | Godfrey of Fontaines | Henry of Ghent | Giles of Rome | John Duns Scotus | William of Ockham | Jean Buridan | Nicole Oresme | George Gemistos Plethon | Johannes Bessarion | Francisco de Vitoria