William of Ockham

William of Ockham an English Franciscan friar, logician and theologian (c. 1287-1347), remembered for the principle of economy known as Ockham's razor and for a radical programme of philosophical and political criticism that helped to loosen the medieval synthesis of church and state. He is one of the most original thinkers of the later Middle Ages.

Life and Studies

William was born around 1287 at Ockham, a village in Surrey, England, and entered the Franciscan order as a young man. He studied at Oxford, where he commented on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard theological text. His lectures showed such independence of mind that they provoked accusations of heresy, and the investigation of his teaching was still pending when he was summoned to the papal court at Avignon in 1324.

At Avignon he lived in the Franciscan convent while a commission examined his views. He became involved in the great controversy between the papacy and the Franciscan order over apostolic poverty, the belief that Christ and the apostles owned no property. When the dispute hardened, William fled Avignon in 1328 in the company of the general of the order and took refuge with the emperor Louis of Bavaria.

He spent the rest of his life at Munich, under imperial protection, writing treatises against the papal claims to temporal authority. He was excommunicated, and his works were later placed on the list of prohibited books, but his thought proved extraordinarily fertile in the universities of the later Middle Ages.

Logic, Nominalism and the Razor

Ockham is the most famous representative of the nominalist tendency in medieval thought. He denied that universal terms such as human or animal correspond to real common natures existing in things independent of individuals. For him universals are signs, concepts or words that stand for many individuals, and only individual substances and their qualities really exist.

This rejection of common natures had wide consequences. It simplified ontology, the inventory of what exists, and it made logic the central instrument of thought, since reasoning must follow the ways in which terms signify rather than the structure of an independent world of essences. His Sum of Logic is one of the most important logical works of the Middle Ages and influenced later logicians for centuries.

His name is attached to the maxim that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, commonly rendered as Ockham's razor, though similar formulations occur in earlier writers. He used the principle to argue that a simpler explanation is preferable and to eliminate supposed entities that do no necessary explanatory work, a method that anticipated themes of modern scientific and analytic philosophy.

Knowledge, Will and Theology

In epistemology Ockham was a defender of the intuition of individual things as the foundation of knowledge. He held that we have direct cognitive contact with singular objects, from which general concepts are abstracted, and he was sceptical of claims to demonstrate truths about God by unaided reason. Many theological propositions, he taught, rest on revelation rather than on proof.

His theology emphasised the absolute power of God, who is not bound by any necessity other than the law of non-contradiction. God could have created a different order, and whatever moral order exists is the result of his free will rather than of a structure of reasons that he must obey. This voluntarism separated faith and reason more sharply than Aquinas had done and made room for a stronger sense of divine freedom.

He insisted that apparent advantages in this life are not reliable signs of divine favour, and that virtue consists in conformity to the divine command rather than in the pursuit of happiness. These positions gave later scholasticism a distinctive and contested place in the history of the philosophy of religion.

Politics, Poverty and the Limits of Papal Power

Driven into opposition to the papacy, Ockham became a formidable political thinker. He argued that the pope's claim to supreme temporal authority was unfounded in Scripture and tradition, and that the church had no right to compel belief by force. His polemics against the Avignon popes, especially John XXII, formulated a case for limiting clerical power that circulated widely in the fourteenth century.

He defended the Franciscan ideal of poverty not merely as a counsel of perfection but as a way of life that Christ and the apostles actually practised, and from this he drew conclusions about the proper relation of property, power and Christian witness. His historical and legal arguments were an early example of the use of reason and evidence against a hierarchic authority.

His ecclesiology looked for a church governed by the faithful and by general councils rather than by an absolute monarch, a view that fed into the conciliar movement of the following century. In this way his thought contributed to the long development of limited government and the separation of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions.

Influence and Legacy

Ockham's nominalism spread through the universities of Oxford, Paris and the German lands, where his followers, often called the modern way, developed his logic and his theology. His work set the terms of debate for later scholastic authors, both those who adopted his views and those, such as the Thomists, who opposed them. His influence on figures such as Gabriel Biel and later on Luther has been much discussed.

His political writings were studied by defenders of imperial and conciliar authority and became part of the intellectual background of the Reformation and of later theories of resistance to unjust rulers. The idea that a ruler who exceeds his lawful power may be resisted has medieval roots, and Ockham was among its most vigorous exponents.

He is remembered for two things above all: the logical razor that bears his name and the sharp separation he drew between the realms of faith and of reason, of the church and of the state. He was a critic rather than a builder of systems, but his criticism cleared ground on which the thinkers of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period would build.

See also

• Nominalism
• Ockham's razor
• Franciscan order
• Scholasticism