Ockham, William of

OCKHAM, WILLIAM OF

(b. Ockham, near London, England, ca. 1285; d. Munich, Germany, 1349)

philosophy, theology, political theory.

Traditionally regarded as the initiator of the movement called nominalism, which dominated the universities of northern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and played a significant role in shaping the directions of modern thought, William of Ockham ranks, with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, as one of the three most influential Scholastic philosophers. Of his early life nothing is known; but it is supposed that he was born in the village of Ockham, Surrey, between 1280 and 1290 and that he became a Franciscan friar at an early age. He entered Oxford around 1310 as a student of theology and completed his formal requirements for the degree by lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the years 1318–1319, thereby becoming a baccalaureus formatus, or inceptor. During the next four years, while awaiting the teaching license which would have made him a magister actu regens, or doctor of theology, Ockham took part in quodlibetal disputations, revised his lectures on the first book of the Sentences for public circulation, and wrote some philosophical and theological treatises.

In this period his teachings, recognized for their power and originality, became a center of controversy and aroused opposition from partisans of Duns Scotus, whose doctrines Ockham criticized, as well as from most of the Dominican masters and some of the secular teachers. In 1323 one of the latter, John Lutterell, went to the papal court at Avignon to press charges of heretical teaching against Ockham, who was summoned to Avignon to answer these accusations early in 1324. Because his academic career was cut short by these events, so that he never received his license to teach, he came to be known as “the venerable inceptor”—that is, candidate who never received the doctoral degree he had earned.

At Avignon, Ockham stayed at the Franciscan convent while awaiting the outcome of the process against him; and during this period he probably wrote several of his theological and philosophical works. A commission of six theologians was appointed by Pope John XXII to examine the charges against his teaching; and although this commission drew up two lists of suspect doctrines, no action appears to have been taken on the charges. Meanwhile Ockham became actively involved in the dispute then raging between Michael of Cesena, general of the Franciscan order, and Pope John XXII over the question of evangelical poverty; and he gave his support to Cesena.

When, in May 1328, it became apparent that the pope was about to issue an official condemnation of their position, Cesena, Ockham, and two other Franciscan leaders fled by night from Avignon and sought the protection of the German emperor, Louis of Bavaria. Louis, whose claim to the imperial crown was contested by Pope John, welcomed the support of Ockham in his cause, as well as that of Marsilius of Padua. The pope, enraged by this defection, excommunicated Ockham and his companions, not for heretical doctrines but for disobedience to his authority. During the ensuing years Ockham remained at Munich and devoted his energies to writing a series of treatises and polemical works directed against John XXII, some of which contained carefully argued discussions of the powers and functions of the papal office, the church, and the imperial or civil authority. When Louis of Bavaria died in 1347, the contest with the Avignon papacy became a lost cause; and there is some evidence that Ockham sought to reconcile himself with the Franciscan faction that had remained loyal to the pope. It is thought that he died in 1349, a victim of the Black Plague, and that he was buried in the Franciscan church at Munich.

Ockham’s writings, as preserved, fall into three main groups: philosophical, theological, and political. The philosophical works include commentaries and sets of questions on Aristotle’s Physics and commentaries on Porphyry’s Predicables and Aristotle’s Categoriae, De interpretatione, and De sophisticis elenchis. Ockham wrote an independent work on logic, entitled Summa logicae, that gave full expression to his own philosophy of language and logical doctrines. An incomplete treatise, published under the title Philosophia naturalis, dealt with the concepts of motion, place, and time in an original and independent manner. Of his theological writings the most important is the set of questions on book I of the Sentences, edited by Ockham for publication and therefore known as his ordinatio, along with the questions on the other three books, which are in the form of reportata (stenographic versions of the lectures as actually delivered). The Quodlibeta septem, containing 172 questions on theological and philosophical topics divided among seven quodlibetal disputations, are of great value as an expression of Ockham’s distinctive philosophical positions.

Of logical as well as theological interest are the treatise De praedestinatione et de praescientia dei et de futuris contingentibus and the work known as De sacramento altaris, which seems to consist of two distinct treatises and which is devoted chiefly to arguing that the doctrine of transubstantiation does not require the assumption that quantity is an entity distinct from substances or qualities. One other theological work, the authenticity of which has been questioned, is the Centiloquium theologicum, consisting of 100 conclusions directed mainly to showing that doctrines of natural theology cannot be proved by evident reason or experience.

The third group of Ockham’s writings is made up of the polemical and political works written in his Munich period. Many of these are of interest only in connection with the historical events of the time; but some of them contain important discussions of moral, legal, and political concepts and issues developed in connection with the controversies over the powers of pope and emperor, of church and state. Such are the lengthy Dialogus inter magistrum et discipulum de imperatorum et pontificum potestate, the Octo quaestiones super potestate et dignitate papali, and the shorter but eloquent Tractatus de imperatorum et pontificum potestate, written in 1347. Modern critical editions of the political works are well under way; but editions of the philosophical and theological writings are very much needed, since the early printed editions are both rare and not fully reliable, while some important works (those on Aristotle’s Physics ) have never been printed at all.

Ockham was a thinker of profound originality, independence, and critical power. Although he had scarcely any acknowledged disciples, and did not found a school in the sense of having followers committed to defense of his teachings (as did Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus), the actual influence exerted by Ockham’s thought, in his own time and into the seventeenth century, was of a significance and breadth that may well have surpassed that of Aquinas or Scotus. This influence is clearly discernible in the empiricist doctrines of Locke and Hume, in the controversies concerning faith and merit associated with the Reformation, and in the political theories that found expression in the Conciliar Movement and in seventeenth-century constitutional liberalism. Although some historians have portrayed Ockham as an innovator who revolted against the traditional values and standards of medieval Christendom, it is nearer the truth to say that he was very much a product of the medieval culture and educational system, who sought to resolve problems that were generated by that culture and that had reached critical dimensions in his own time.

The condemnations of strict Aristotelianism that took place in 1277 were symptomatic of a crisis in the Scholastic effort to harmonize Greek metaphysics with the Christian creed; while the conflict between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, followed by the controversy between Louis of Bavaria and John XXII, brought to the surface issues concerning the sources of political and ecclesiastical authority that were becoming acute with the decline of the feudal system. It was to save the values threatened by these conflicts, rather than to destroy them, that Ockham subjected the prevailing Scholastic positions to criticism, and sought more adequate and powerful principles of analysis. His chief contributions to philosophy, lying in the areas of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge, were the direct result of his effort, as a theologian, to meet the twofold commitment to reason and experience, on the one hand, and to the articles of the faith, on the other.

This dual commitment to faith and reason finds expression in two maxims that are constantly invoked in Ockham’s writings. The first is that God can bring about anything whose accomplishment does not involve a contradiction. Although this principle is accepted on the basis of the Christian creed, it is equivalent to the philosophical principle that whatever is not self-contradictory is possible, so that what is actually the case cannot be established on a priori grounds but must be ascertained by experience. The second maxim, known as Ockham’s Razor because of his frequent use of it, is the methodological principle of economy in explanation, frequently expressed in the formula “What can be accounted for by fewer assumptions is explained in vain by more.” Ockham often expressed it, however, in this longer form: “Nothing is to be assumed as evident, unless it is known per se, or is evident by experience, or is proved by the authority of Scripture” (Sentences I, d. 30, qu. 1).

These maxims are equivalent in force and constitute the unifying principle of Ockham’s doctrine, whether viewed in its theological or philosophical aspect. They determine a view of the universe as radically contingent in its being, a theory of knowledge that is thoroughly empiricist, and a rejection of all realist doctrines of common natures and necessary relations in things—all of which constitute what is called Ockham’s nominalism. They also eliminate every form of determinism in Ockham’s metaphysics and psychology, by associating the principle of divine omnipotence with that of divine liberty and freedom of choice and by making the liberty of the human will basic to moral and legal theory.

A first consequence of these principles is the elimination of various metaphysical “distinctions” that played a dominant role in late thirteenth-century Scholasticism and that derived in large measure from the interpretation of Aristotle made by the Islamic philosopher Ibn Sīnā. The real distinction between essence and existence, held to be a doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, supposed that in an existing thing its essence or nature, although not separable from its existence, is nevertheless really distinct from it. Ockham argued that if essence and existence are distinct realities, then it is not self-contradictory for one to exist without the other; but since it is self-contradictory to suppose that an essence exists without existence, it follows that there cannot be a real distinction between the two. By a similar argument it is shown that there cannot be a real distinction between individuals and their natures, as the theory of common natures existing in individuals supposes.

Ockham directed his main critique against the Scotist theory that the common nature differs from the individuating principle by a formal distinction that is less than a real distinction but more than a distinction of reason. To show that this involves a contradiction, Ockham argued as follows: Let the common nature be indicated by the letter a and the individuating difference by the letter b. Then, according to Duns Scotus, a is formally distinct from b. But Scotus must concede that a is not formally distinct from a. Yet, Ockham argued. wherever contradictory predicates are verified of two things, those two things must be really distinct. Hence b and a cannot be really identical if they are formally distinct, as Scotus claimed; and by the same argument it can be shown that if they are really identical, they cannot be formally distinct.

The notion of a common nature in individuals, really or formally distinct from them, is therefore self-contradictory; and it remains that universality is a property of terms, or of concepts expressed by general nouns, and is simply their capacity to be used to signify or denote many individuals. In denying that there is any universality in things, Ockham does not deny that the basis for universal predication of general terms is objectively present in individual things; he only denies that the fact that Socrates and Plato, for example, are similar in that each is a man entails that there is some entity common to both and distinct from each. Ockham’s nominalism is not to be construed as a doctrine that denies any foundation in things for the generality of terms, and his theory of human cognition rests squarely on the assumption that direct experience of existing things gives rise to concepts of universal character that directly signify things as they are or can be.

Since whatever exists is individual, Ockham holds that our knowledge of things is based on a direct and immediate awareness of what is present to our senses and intellect, which he calls intuitive cognition. He defines this type of awareness as one which enables us to form an evident judgment of contingent fact—that is, that the object apprehended exists, or that it is qualified in a certain way, or is next to another object, and so forth. Such cognition gives rise only to singular contingent propositions that are evident; hence it does not yield scientific knowledge in Aristotle’s sense, in which premises and conclusions must be of universal character. Every intuitive cognition, however, can give rise to an abstractive cognition of the same object, which Ockham defines as the cognition of an object which does not suffice for an evident judgment concerning the existence of the object or concerning a contingent fact about the object. Thus, while I am observing Socrates and hearing him talk, I can judge evidently that Socrates exists and that he is talking; but if I depart from the spot and then form the proposition that Socrates exists, or that he is talking. my statement is not evident and may in fact be false.

But Ockham insists that there is no distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition with respect to objects cognized, but only with respect to their capacity to yield evident judgments of existence and contingent fact. In the natural course of events, every abstractive cognition presupposes an intuitive cognition of an object understood by it; but Ockham says that since the cognitions are distinct from each other and from their objects, it is logically possible for God to cause an intuitive cognition of an object which is not present or not presently existing. In such a case. Ockham says, the intuitive cognition will yield a judgment that the object is not present or that it does not exist; for it would be self-contradictory to hold that one can have an evident judgment that an object exists, if it does not exist.

The general propositions which serve as premises of scientific knowledge, in the strict sense, are established by inductive generalization from singular judgments evident by experience. But Ockham holds that such scientific statements, being formed from abstractive cognitions of their objects, cannot have absolute evidence, or necessary truth, as categorical propositions; they must be construed as necessary propositions concerning the possible, or as conditional statements. Except for premises of mathematics, which are known per se by the meanings of the terms, the principles of the natural sciences are held by Ockham to be evident by experience but not as necessary in the absolute sense, although they may be said to be necessary in the conditional sense of presupposing the common course of nature without divine interference.

Ockham’s empirical theory of knowledge and his nominalist doctrine of the relation of discourse to reality are reinforced by a remarkably original and thoroughgoing use of the logica moderna of the arts faculties, with its theory of the supposition of terms, which takes the form of a fully developed philosophy of language. Ockham’s Summa logicae gives the most complete expression to this semantically oriented logic.

Ockham’s treatment of theology is consistent with his treatment of philosophy and natural science, in the sense that absolute evidence for theological propositions cannot be had in this life and only a positive theology based on acceptance of the testimony of Christ and the saints is possible. The order established by God and revealed in the laws of the church, which Ockham ascribes to God’s potentia ordinata, is freely established by divine choice but is not necessary, since God, by his absolute power, could have ordained a different order. In moral and political philosophy Ockham applies these same criteria of divine freedom and omnipotence to refute the claims of pope and emperor alike to absolute power and dominion over members of the church or citizens of the state. The dignity of man is found in his freedom of choice; and Ockham reiterates that the law of God is a law of liberty, not to be degraded and corrupted into absolutism and coercive tyranny.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Individual works include Quodlibeta septem (Paris, 1487; Strasbourg, 1491); Summa logicae (Paris-Bologna, 1498; Venice, 1508, 1522, 1591; Oxford, 1675), modern ed. of Pars prima and Pars IIa et tertiae prima, P. Boehner, ed., 2 vols. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1951–1954); De sacramento altaris et De corpore christi (Strasbourg, 1491), with Quodlibeta, new ed. by T. B. Birch, with English trans., The De sacramento altaris of William of Ockham (Burlington, Iowa, 1930); Summulae in libros Physicorum (Bologna, 1494; Venice, 1506; Rome, 1637), also known as Philosophia naturalis; Super quatuor libros Sententiarum … quaestiones (Lyons, 1495), with Centiloquium theologicum, modern critical ed. of Sentences I, Prologus and Dist. I, Gedeon Gal, O.F.M., ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1967); Expositio aurea…super artem verterem (Bologna, 1496), modern ed. of the Proemium and Expositio super librium Porphyrii, Ernest A. Moody, ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1965); Tractatus de praedesitinatione et de praescientia Dei et de futuris contingentibus, P. Boehner, ed. (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1945), English trans. by Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann (New York, 1969); Dialogus inter magisitrum et discipulum (Lyons, 1495); and The De imperatorum et pontificum potestate of William of Ockham, C. K. Brampton, ed. (Oxford. 1927).

Collections are Guillelmi de Ockham Opera politica, vol. I, J. G. Sikes, ed. (Manchester, 1940), vol. III, H. S. Offler, ed. (Manchester, 1956), other vols. in preparation or in course of publication; and Ockham: Philosophical Writings, P. Boehner, ed. (Edinburgh, 1957), selections with English trans.

II. Secondary Literature. On Ockham and his work see Nicola Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, 1931); Léeon Baudry, Le Tractatus de principiis theologiae attribué à G. d’Occam (Paris, 1936); Guillaume d’Occam, I, L’homme et les oeuvers (Paris, 1950), with an excellent bibliography; and Lexique philosophique de Guillaume d’Occam (Paris, 1958); P. Boehner, Collected Articles on Ockham (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1956); Franz Federhofer, Die Erkenntnislehre des Wilhelm von Ockham (Munich, 1924); Martin Gottfried, Wilhelm von Ockham (Berlin, 1949); Robert Guelluy, Philosophie et théologie chez Guillaume d’Ockham (Louvain–Paris, 1947); Erich Hoch-stetter, Studien zur Metaphysik und Erkenntnislehre Wilhelms von Ockham, (Berlin, 1927); Georges de Lagarde, La naissance de l’esprit laīque au déclin du moyen áge, IV–VI (Paris, 1942–1946); Ernest A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (New York-London, 1935); Simon Moser, Grundbegriffe der Naturphilosophie bei Wilhelm von Ockham (Innsbruck, 1932); Richard Scholz, Wilhelm von Ockham als politischer Denker und sein Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico (Leipzig, 1944); Herman Shapiro, Motion, Time and Place According to William Ockham (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1957); Cesare Vasoli, Guglielmo d’Occam (Florence, 1953), which contains a good bibliography; Paul Vignaux, Justification et prédestination au XIV^e sièecle (Paris, 1934); Le nominalisme au XIV^e siècle (Montreal, 1948); and “Nominalisme” and “Occam,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 15 vols. (Paris, 1903–1950), XI, cols. 733–789, 864–904; Damascene Webering, The Theory of Demonstration According to William Ockham (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1953); and Sytse Zuidema, De Philosophie van Occam in zijn Commentaar op de Sententien, 2 vols. (Hilversum, 1936).

Ernest A. Moody