OXFORD PHILOSOPHERS II

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OXFORD PHILOSOPHERS

II

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William Ockham

Many of Ockham’s positions in logic and metaphysics were taken up either in development of, or in opposition to, Duns Scotus. Though his thought is less sophisticated than that of Scotus, his language is mercifully much clearer. Like Scotus, Ockham regards ‘being’ as a univocal term, applicable to God in the same sense as to creatures. He allows into his system, however, a much less extensive variety of created beings, reducing the ten Aristotelian categories to two, namely substances and qualities. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief

History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.172.)

Ockham’s most signiﬁcant disagreement with Scotus concerned the nature of universals. He rejected outright the idea that there was a common nature

existing in the many individuals we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything in the world is singular. (Anthony Kenny An

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Universals are not things but signs, single signs representing many

things. Thereare natural signs and conventional signs: natural signs are the thoughts in our minds, and conventional signs are the words which we coin to express these thoughts. Ockham’s view of universals is often called nominalism; but in his system it is not only names, but concepts, which are universal. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of

Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.173.)

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At different times in his career Ockham gives different accounts of the relationship between the names of the mental language and the things in the world. According to his earlier theory, the mind fashioned mental images or representations, which resembled real things. These ‘ﬁctions’, as he called them, served as elements in mental propositions, in which they took the place of the things they resembled. Fictions could be

universal in the sense of having an equal likeness to many different

things. Later, Ockham ceased to believe in these ﬁctions; names in the

mental language were simply acts of thinking, items in an individual

person’s psychological history. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief

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Ockham is best known for something which he never said, namely

‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’. This principle,

commonly called ‘Ockham’s Razor’, is not found in his works, though he did say similar things such as ‘it is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer’ or ‘plurality should not be assumed without necessity’.

In fact, the sentiment long antedated Ockham; but it does sum up his reductionist attitude to the technical philosophical developments of his predecessors. Sometimes this attitude enabled him to cut away ﬁctional entities; as often as not, it led him to overlook distinctions that were

OXFORD PHILOSOPHERS II