William of Ockham

Introduction

William of Ockham is the English Franciscan philosopher and theologian whose body of work in the early fourteenth century became one of the major bodies of late-medieval scholasticism. He is conventionally associated with three distinctive doctrines: nominalism (the denial that universals have any extramental reality), the methodological principle of parsimony now universally known as Ockham's razor (that explanations should not multiply entities beyond what is necessary), and a theological voluntarism (that emphasized God's absolute freedom and produced a separation of natural and supernatural orders of knowledge).

The combination of these doctrines produced a system that diverged from both Aquinas's Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis and Duns Scotus's Franciscan-Augustinian alternative. Ockham's nominalism collapsed the moderate realism of both predecessor systems; his methodological parsimony reduced the metaphysical apparatus the earlier scholastics had employed; his voluntarism separated the orders of nature and grace and prepared the conditions for early-modern fideism and, eventually, for early-modern empiricism.

Ockham's life was also one of the more politically engaged of medieval philosophers. His decades-long conflict with Pope John XXII over the Franciscan doctrine of evangelical poverty made him a public figure in late-medieval ecclesiastical politics; his eventual flight from the Avignon papacy to the court of Louis IV of Bavaria in 1328 produced political-theological writing on the relations between secular and spiritual authority that influenced subsequent late-medieval and early-modern political theory.

Life

William of Ockham was probably born around 1287 in the village of Ockham (now in Surrey), England, the source of his standard name. He entered the Franciscan order in his youth and was probably educated at the Franciscan house at London. He studied theology at Oxford from approximately 1309 to 1321; he lectured on Peter Lombard's Sentences at Oxford from approximately 1317 to 1319 (the resulting Ordinatio of his commentary on the Sentences is one of the major works of his career).

The Oxford career was interrupted by ecclesiastical objections to certain of his positions; in 1324 he was summoned to the Avignon papal curia to answer charges of heresy. The investigation continued for several years and was interrupted by the larger dispute over Franciscan poverty that came to dominate Ockham's life. He was at Avignon during the early phases of Pope John XXII's conflict with the Franciscan order over the doctrine that Christ and the apostles had owned no property; the doctrine was Franciscan orthodoxy, the pope rejected it, and the order's defenders (especially Michael of Cesena, the Minister General of the order) were drawn into public conflict with the papacy.

In May 1328, Ockham, Michael of Cesena, and several other Franciscans fled from Avignon to the court of Louis IV of Bavaria, who had been excommunicated by John XXII for political reasons and was therefore a natural protector of opponents of the Avignon papacy. The flight made Ockham permanently a political-ecclesiastical exile; he spent the remaining nineteen years of his life at Louis's Munich court, producing the body of political-theological writing that includes the Dialogus, the Opus Nonaginta Dierum, and the various tracts on papal power and the proper relations of church and state.

The later years were spent at Munich. Ockham continued to write through the 1330s and 1340s; the Dialogus (composed in stages over many years) is the most extensive single political work. The Munich circle of Franciscan exiles maintained their position against the Avignon papacy throughout this period, though the political fortunes of Louis IV declined in the 1340s.

Ockham died in Munich in 1347, probably from the early phases of the Black Death that was sweeping through Bavaria. The traditional date is April 9 or 10, 1347; some scholarship has proposed alternative dates ranging from 1347 to 1349. The precise location of his burial is not known.

The problem he worked on

Ockham's intellectual project was the systematic reform of scholastic philosophy and theology on a more parsimonious basis than the dominant Thomist and Scotist systems had provided. The reform proceeded along several lines simultaneously: the ontological reform of nominalism (eliminating universals from the ontology); the methodological reform of parsimony (eliminating unnecessary explanatory entities); the theological reform of voluntarism (emphasizing God's absolute freedom and reducing the necessary metaphysical structure between God and creation); and the political-ecclesiastical reform of his late writings (limiting papal authority and defending the Franciscan doctrine of poverty against papal opposition).

The combination produced one of the most distinctive systems in the history of scholastic philosophy. Where the Thomist framework had been confident in natural reason's capacity to demonstrate truths about God and creation, Ockham's framework restricted natural reason's reach: most of what the Thomist tradition had claimed to demonstrate (the existence of God, the nature of God's attributes, the doctrines of metaphysics and natural theology) Ockham took to be undemonstrable by natural reason alone and therefore properly received only through revelation.

Contributions

Nominalism

Ockham's most influential single doctrine is nominalism — the position that universals (humanity, redness, triangle) have no mind-independent reality; only individuals exist; universal terms are signs by which the mind groups together similar particulars. The position rejected both Thomist moderate realism (which located universals in the divine intellect as the formal principles of created things) and Scotist common natures (which gave universals a more attenuated but still genuine extramental reality).

The motivation was a combination of metaphysical parsimony and theological voluntarism. The metaphysical parsimony point: postulating universals as extramental entities adds ontological apparatus without explanatory gain; the same phenomena (the resemblances among individuals, the possibility of general thought and speech) can be accounted for without the apparatus. The theological voluntarism point: any extramental universals would constitute a metaphysical structure that constrains God's freedom; eliminating them preserves the absolute freedom of the divine will to create whatever individuals it chooses.

The nominalist framework had consequences in subsequent late-medieval and early-modern thought. The Thomist tradition treated nominalism as a fundamental error; the Lutheran Reformation appropriated nominalist categories; the early-modern empiricist tradition (Locke especially) operated within a nominalist framework that Ockham had shaped.

Ockham's razor

The methodological principle of parsimony — entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) — is universally known as Ockham's razor. The principle is not precisely formulated in Ockham's surviving works in the exact wording later attributed to him; the standard formulation is a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century crystallization of positions Ockham had taken in various places.

Whatever the precise textual situation, the principle is recognizably Ockhamist in spirit. Ockham consistently rejected scholastic distinctions and explanatory entities that he took to be unnecessary; the methodological commitment to parsimony was operative throughout his work and shaped the resulting system.

The razor has been continuously consequential in the methodology of philosophy and science. The principle is one of the canonical methodological rules of modern scientific inquiry; the contemporary literature in the philosophy of science continues to engage its precise formulation, its justifications, and its limits.

Theological voluntarism

Ockham's voluntarism in theology emphasized God's absolute freedom (the potentia absoluta) against any account that would constrain it by antecedent metaphysical or moral necessity. The doctrine has two main consequences. First, the moral law is what it is because God wills it; the goodness of the actions God commands is not a property antecedent to and explanatory of God's commanding them, but is constituted by the commanding. Second, the metaphysical structures the Thomist tradition had postulated as necessary features of any creation God might produce (the rational structure of nature, the mediations between God and creatures) are not necessary but contingent expressions of God's freely chosen order.

The doctrine has been continuously controversial. Critics from the Thomist tradition through to the present have argued that voluntarist accounts of morality reduce the moral law to arbitrary divine command and make God's commands praiseworthy by definition rather than by their substantive content. Defenders have argued that voluntarism preserves the genuine freedom and transcendence of God against accounts that would constrain divine action by antecedent rational structures.

The historical consequences were substantial. The voluntarist trajectory in late scholasticism continued through Pierre d'Ailly and Gabriel Biel into the immediate background of the Lutheran Reformation; Luther's theological voluntarism is recognizably continuous with the Ockhamist tradition. The early-modern divine command theory (continued through into contemporary religious ethics) is in significant part a Reformation development of Ockhamist commitments.

Political philosophy

The political-theological writings of Ockham's Munich years (the Dialogus, the Opus Nonaginta Dierum, the Octo Quaestiones de Potestate Papae) developed arguments for the limits of papal authority and for the proper separation of spiritual and temporal power. The arguments were developed in the context of the Franciscan poverty controversy and the related dispute over papal authority but had systematic content beyond the immediate occasions.

The political theory has been influential in the subsequent late-medieval and early-modern tradition. Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis (1324) and Ockham's political works are conventionally treated as the two major late-medieval works on the limits of papal authority; the Reformation political theology continues the tradition; the early-modern theories of resistance to political authority (especially the Calvinist tradition through Beza and the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos) have Ockhamist roots.

Key works

• Ordinatio (or Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum, 1317–1319). The revised version of his Oxford Sentences commentary on Book I.
• Quodlibeta Septem (1321–1323). The Oxford disputations.
• Summa Logicae (composed in the 1320s). The systematic logic.
• Tractatus de Praedestinatione (1320s). The treatise on predestination, divine foreknowledge, and contingent futures.
• Opus Nonaginta Dierum (Work of Ninety Days, composed at Munich, 1332). The major response to Pope John XXII on the Franciscan poverty controversy.
• Dialogus (composed in stages over many years at Munich). The political-theological dialogue.
• Octo Quaestiones de Potestate Papae (Eight Questions on Papal Power, 1340s).

The standard scholarly edition is the Opera Philosophica et Theologica edited by the St. Bonaventure University Franciscan Institute (17 volumes, 1967–1988), the modern critical edition that superseded the earlier editions. The English translations include the Boehner-Wood translation of selected passages, Alfred Freddoso's translation of major works on metaphysics, and the recent translations by Paul Vincent Spade and others.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Duns Scotus (the immediate Franciscan predecessor whose technical apparatus Ockham modified); Aquinas (the dominant Dominican framework Ockham opposed); Augustine (the broad theological framework); Aristotle (especially the De Interpretatione and the Categories for the logical work); Henry of Ghent (the major immediate Augustinian counterpart, with whom Scotus and Ockham both engaged).

Influenced: The late-medieval via moderna (the way of the moderns) in scholastic philosophy and theology, especially through Pierre d'Ailly, Gabriel Biel, and the broader nominalist tradition; the Lutheran Reformation through Luther's reception of the Ockhamist-Biel theological framework; the early-modern political theology through Marsilius and the Reformation political theory; the early-modern empiricist tradition through the nominalist framework that Hobbes, Locke, and Hume extended; the broader history of methodology through the continued life of Ockham's razor; the contemporary engagement through the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, Paul Vincent Spade, Calvin Normore, Claude Panaccio, and the recent monograph literature.

Reception

The medieval reception was substantial. The via moderna (the way of the moderns) in late-medieval scholastic philosophy was defined by Ockhamist commitments; the via antiqua (the way of the ancients) preserved the earlier Thomist and Scotist positions; the dispute between the two ways shaped the second half of the fourteenth century and the entire fifteenth century in European scholastic education.

The Reformation reception was substantial. Luther was educated in the Ockhamist tradition (through Gabriel Biel at Tübingen) and his early theological development was shaped by Ockhamist categories; the Reformation appropriation of voluntarist theology is in significant part an Ockhamist development. The Counter-Reformation scholastic recovery returned to Thomism and treated Ockham more critically, though the technical apparatus continued to be engaged.

The modern reception has been mixed. The early modern philosophical canon (Descartes through Kant) engaged Ockham as a representative of the scholastic tradition more than as an independent figure; the nineteenth-century recovery began through the work of Etienne Gilson and the broader medieval philosophy recovery; the contemporary scholarly engagement, especially through the St. Bonaventure edition and the Anglo-Saxon analytic engagement (Marilyn McCord Adams's two-volume William Ockham, 1987; Paul Vincent Spade's work on Ockham's semantics and metaphysics; Calvin Normore on the philosophy of mind; Claude Panaccio's corpus on nominalism), has restored Ockham as a major figure in the history of philosophy.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Marilyn McCord Adams's two-volume William Ockham (1987), Claude Panaccio's Ockham on Concepts (2004) and Mental Language (2017), Paul Vincent Spade's corpus including the Cambridge Companion to Ockham (1999), Rega Wood's work on the Oxford context, and the work of Sukjae Lee, Susan Brower-Toland, and others. Active scholarly debates concern the precise interpretation of Ockham's nominalism (especially whether it is conceptualist or genuinely nominalist), the relation between Ockham's logic and his metaphysics, the systematic interpretation of the theological voluntarism, the precise historical relation between Ockham and the Lutheran Reformation, and the contemporary applicability of the principle of parsimony.

Further reading

• Scholasticism — the tradition Ockham reformed
• Duns Scotus — the immediate Franciscan predecessor whose technical framework Ockham modified
• Aquinas — the dominant Dominican framework Ockham opposed
• Free Will — the doctrine Ockham's voluntarism developed
• Bondage of the Will — the Reformation work that develops the Ockhamist theological tradition
• Empiricism — the early-modern tradition the Ockhamist nominalism prepared

The English Franciscan whose nominalism, methodological parsimony, and theological voluntarism made him the most influential single late-medieval philosopher and a major preparatory figure for early-modern empiricism.