/lit/ - Literature

William of Ockham

circa 1285-1347

English Franciscan William of Ockham, or Occam, owes his general reputation to the fact that he is associated to what is called "nominalism", a doctrine that expels universal categories from reality and only ascribes them to a mental act of classification. He is then supposed to have founded a school of thought opposed to Thomism and Scotism. This purely intellectual scheme does a bad job of capturing a life marked by a continuous succession of oppositions to what he judged to be the power of the Church. In fact, the "nominalist" philosophical principle is much older and more permanent than this version of the story supposes. All scholastic thinking from the late Middle Ages was rather "nominalist". On the contrary, it was the "realist" position that required particular efforts. Nevertheless, William of Ockham's positions, strongly elaborated and constructed, had an aspect of provocation by refusing any distance between a general science, which could easily admit the nominalist considerations (and would do so in practice), and theology, which should stay an exception.

[...]