![]() Against the scholastic mainstream, he insisted that theology is not a science and rejected all the alleged proofs of the existence of God. Throughout his career, Ockham remained a fideist, convinced that belief in God is a matter of faith alone. He never returned to finish his degree (hence his nickname, “Venerable Inceptor”) but, from exile in Germany, wrote political treatises that provide groundbreaking defense of individual rights, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech. After four years under house arrest, he escaped, claiming Pope John XXII was a heretic himself. Though Ockham’s dispute with church authority began with metaphysics, it soon became political. Consequently, he was summoned to the papal court in Avignon before he was able to finish his degree at Oxford University. ![]() ![]() Ockham’s ontological reduction was suspected of having unorthodox implications for the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which bread and wine is miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. For example, the universal term “man” refers to this or that man while grouping them with all the other men. His theory of mental language aimed to show how we can speak of universals without thereby presupposing that universals exist. He contended that human beings perceive objects directly through “intuitive cognition,” without the help of any universals. This helped him to advance a new version of nominalism, according to which universals, such as man, are not metaphysical realities but only concepts in the mind. Above all, Ockham used the Razor to interpret Aristotle in a more radically empiricist manner than did his predecessors, accepting into his ontology only individual substances and individual qualities. Although Ockham did not invent the Razor, he wielded it so systematically and with such striking effect that it came to bear his name. His claim to fame was “Ockham’s Razor,” the principle of parsimony, according to which plurality should not be posited without necessity. View the full series, "Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics", here.William of Ockham ( c. 1285/7– c. 1347) was an English Franciscan philosopher who challenged scholasticism and the papacy, thereby hastening the end of the medieval period. ![]() Finally, the third group of essays explores some intriguing, but “weird” implications of the nominalist approach to epistemology in the metaphysics of John Buridan. However, Ockham’s epistemology, worked out in detail by John Buridan, seems to have implications concerning the possibility of “Demon Skepticism” (later popularized by Descartes), which in turn poses a threat to the consistency of the nominalist cognitive psychology in general, as discussed in the second group of essays. The first group of essays concerns issues surrounding the possibility of singular cognition in light of the cognitive psychology of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, as well as the latter’s “argument from indifference” as developed by William Ockham to support his own, nominalist epistemology. This volume presents three sets of papers discussing the medieval problem of singular cognition, nominalist epistemology, and the metaphysics of the great medieval nominalist philosopher, John Buridan.
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