- Length
- 800 pagesLoux and Freddoso's English of Parts I and II, 1974-80; no complete English version
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Summa Logicae
The book that took the razor to the metaphysics of its own century. Ockham argued that universals are signs rather than things, that most of what the schools disputed about was an effect of grammar, and that a theory should not carry more entities than its work requires.
- Date
- c. 1323
- Author
- William of Ockham
- Region
- Oxford and London
- Language
- Latin
- 1974 English, Michael Loux Part I, on terms; in copyright Attested
- 1980 English, Alfred Freddoso Part II, on propositions; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 23 years
The dominant logic of the late Middle Ages, dismissed with the rest of scholasticism after the seventeenth century, and read again once analytic philosophy recognised what was in it.
What the book says
A complete logic in three parts, written to show that a great deal of the metaphysics of the previous century was a mistake about language. Ockham starts with terms. A term can stand for things in the world or for other terms, and confusing the two is where the trouble begins: when we say man is a species, the word is not doing what it does in Socrates is a man. The middle part treats propositions and the last treats argument, including a full account of the syllogism, of fallacies and of demonstration. Threaded through all three is the campaign the book is remembered for. There are no universals in the world. Only individuals exist, and generality belongs to signs - a general term is a natural sign in the mind that stands indifferently for many individuals, not a name for something they share. So the common natures the previous generation had argued about, and the formal distinctions Scotus multiplied to handle them, are not discoveries but artefacts of taking grammar for ontology. The tool for clearing them away is the principle of parsimony that later got his name: do not multiply entities beyond necessity, a rule he applies here to categories, relations and species alike.
What it argues
That only individuals exist, and that everything general is semantic. A universal, on Ockham's account, is a term - a natural sign that arises in the mind and stands for many individuals at once - and asking where the universal is located outside the mind is asking a question with no answer because it has no subject. From this the reductions follow. Relations are not extra things over and above their relata. The Aristotelian categories are not ten kinds of being but ways of predicating. Quantity is not a thing distinct from substance. Each of these had been an entity in earlier systems, and Ockham removes it by showing that the sentences we want to say remain true without it - which is the razor in operation rather than as a slogan.
What it answered
Scotus first, and behind him the whole realist settlement. The dispute is technical and its stakes are large: if there are common natures in things, then knowledge of universals is knowledge of the world, and if there are not, then science is about how our signs behave and the connection to individuals has to be re-established some other way. Ockham thinks the second and spends the book showing that it costs less than it appears to.
How it argues
By semantic analysis, which is why it reads more like twentieth-century philosophy than like anything else from its period. Ockham's method is to take a sentence that seems to commit us to an entity, distinguish the ways its terms are functioning, and show that the apparent commitment came from the grammar rather than the content. The prose is dry, orderly and technical. It is a textbook, and the polemical work is done inside the exposition rather than alongside it.
The moment
Oxford in the 1310s and 1320s, and then a collision. Ockham was summoned to Avignon in 1324 to answer for propositions drawn from his writing, spent four years there under investigation, and in 1328 fled with the head of his order after taking the losing side in a bitter dispute about whether Christ and the apostles had owned property. He was excommunicated for leaving, not for his philosophy, and spent his remaining twenty years under imperial protection writing political polemic.
How it travelled
As a school and then as a caricature. Ockham's followers became a recognised party in the universities, the via moderna, and the split between them and the older realists organised late medieval teaching. Then the humanists dismissed scholastic logic wholesale, and for four centuries Ockham was known chiefly for a razor he never phrased as it is usually quoted. The recovery is recent and rests on scholarship: the critical edition of the philosophical works, finished at St Bonaventure in 1988, made it possible to read what he actually wrote, and analytic philosophers found a theory of reference and a nominalist programme they recognised.
The strongest objection
That the account explains generality by relocating it. If a general term is a natural sign standing for many individuals, something must make it stand for these and not those - and whatever that is looks very like the shared feature the theory denies. Ockham's answer is that individuals simply resemble each other more or less, and that resemblance needs no third thing to underwrite it; realists reply that degrees of resemblance in respect of what is exactly the question. The dispute has continued in almost the same terms into contemporary metaphysics, which is a reasonable measure of how well he stated it.
Why read it
In selection, and mainly the first part on terms and supposition, which is where the philosophy is and which Loux's translation covers. It rewards a reader with any interest in how much metaphysics can be dissolved by paying attention to what sentences are actually doing - a project that was reinvented in the twentieth century by people who did not know it had been tried.
- First printed
- 1488
- First in English
- 1974
- Digitised
- Partial
The critical Latin edition of the Opera Philosophica was completed at St Bonaventure University between 1967 and 1988, which is the reason modern work on Ockham dates from the 1970s onward.
Loux translated Part I and Freddoso Part II; Part III has never appeared complete in English. All are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived. Ockham is now read as a major figure in the history of semantics and of nominalism, and his treatment of mental language as a language with a syntax has been discussed alongside modern work on thought and representation.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain, but the English exists only in modern in-copyright partial translations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Ockham's nominalism is as thoroughgoing as later summaries suggest is argued, since he retains a good deal of Aristotelian machinery. The razor in its familiar wording is not his; what he says is more careful and less sweeping. Which propositions were actually at issue at Avignon has never been fully established, and the investigation ended without a verdict when he fled. And how far his semantics anticipates modern theories of reference, as opposed to resembling them, is a standing question in the history of logic.