Philosophy
c. 1287 to 1347, Ockham, Surrey, England
The razor, nominalism, and the primacy of the individual - the Franciscan logician who cut medieval metaphysics to the bone and helped seed empiricism, contingency, and the limits of absolute power.
Start learning William →The principle of parsimony as a rule of reasoning: do not posit more entities, causes, or assumptions than the facts actually require. Ockham never wrote the famous words ‘entities must not be multiplied,’ b…
Ockham’s claim that nothing universal exists out in the world: there are only individual things, and universals such as ‘humanity’ or ‘redness’ are concepts, signs in the mind that stand fo…
Ockham’s theory of knowledge: all knowing begins with intuitive cognition , a direct acquaintance with the individual thing that lets us judge whether it exists. From this contact with singulars, abstractive cogni…
Ockham held that God can do anything that does not imply a contradiction, and that the entire created order is therefore contingent - freely chosen, and capable of having been otherwise. His distinction between God&rsqu…
Drawn into the bitter Franciscan poverty controversy, Ockham turned his logic against the papacy itself, arguing that no pope holds a ‘fullness of power’ to override the rights and liberties God and nature g…
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