Ockhamism

The claim

Only individuals exist. Universals are not things in the world, nor formal aspects of things, but signs in the mind that stand for many individuals at once.

What it held

Ockham's razor is not the whole of Ockhamism but it is the engine. Applied to the medieval furniture, it removes a great deal: no real universals, no formal distinctions, no species intervening between the mind and the object, no relations existing over and above the things related.

What replaces them is a theory of language. A universal term is a natural sign that supposits for many individuals, and the work formerly done by metaphysics is done by logic — by rules governing what a term stands for in a given proposition. This is why Ockhamism is also called terminism.

The theological half is divine freedom, and it cuts deep. God could have commanded otherwise; the moral order is not a structure God consults but one he institutes. And what God can do absolutely exceeds what he has in fact ordained, which means the actual world is contingent through and through — nothing about it could be deduced, and it must be investigated.

That last consequence is why historians of science keep returning to him. A world that might have been otherwise has to be looked at.

How it argued

Logical analysis of terms and propositions, plus systematic application of the principle of parsimony to inherited metaphysical commitments.

What it was arguing against

Scotus above all, whose formal distinction he rejected and whose realism about common natures he denied. Also the whole apparatus of species in the theory of knowledge.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether Ockham is a conceptualist or a nominalist proper, which turns on what mental signs are. Whether divine command theory makes morality arbitrary — the standing objection since.

Common misconceptions

That Ockham wrote his razor. The formula about entities not being multiplied does not appear in his works; it is a later summary of a principle he uses constantly. And parsimony was not his invention — Aristotle and Aquinas both state versions of it.

How it began

A Franciscan summoned to Avignon on suspicion of heresy, who fled to the protection of the Emperor and spent his later life writing political tracts against papal authority.

What became of it

The via moderna became one of the two recognised paths in the late medieval universities, and its terminist logic was standard teaching until humanism swept it out.

Lasting influence

Luther was trained in it. Modern nominalism descends from it. The contingency of the created order is a recognised precondition for empirical science, and Ockham states it most clearly.

Why it still matters

Parsimony is a working criterion in every science. The nominalism debate about whether properties are real is one of the central questions of contemporary metaphysics.

Put another way

An inventory in which most of the stock turns out never to have been delivered.

Where to start

A modern selection with commentary. The Summa Logicae is not a book to open at page one.

The surprising bit

He is said to have told the Emperor: defend me with the sword and I will defend you with the pen. He was excommunicated for his politics rather than his philosophy, and probably died of plague.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Scotism

Opposed by

Thomism

Influenced

Nominalism

The verdict

A demolition so thorough that what came after had to be built on different ground.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy