WILLIAM OF OCKHAM
Born at Ockham
in Surry (
Some Notes on His
Philosophy:
(a) He is most famous for
a principle or rule of scientific or philosophical method which has come to be
named after him (and which has given its name to a program on the A.B.C.): Ockham's Razor: principles are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity --don't suppose the existence of entities or factors to explain
something if you can get away without them: other things being equal, the
simplest explanation is to be preferred.
Not that it was invented
by Ockham (it's already in Aristotle), but he did
make continued and effective use of it.
(b) His philosophy is
characterized in general by an emphasis on the
necessity for experience
to know anything apart from self-evident principles, and a preference for
the particular, individual, concrete
singular over the abstract and the universal:
-- All knowledge of the
world is by intuition,
intuitive cognition, either sense experience or experience of my inner
states.
-- Intuitive knowledge
for its part is always of individual singular things: there are no universals to be known, only
singulars exist, every positive thing existing outside the mind is by that very
fact singular.
To explain knowledge
there is no need to posit anything apart from individual knowers
with their individual thoughts and individual things with their properties.
Seeing there is no need to posit anything apart from ..., by Ockham's Razor we ought not to posit anything apart from... .
Which
is to say that Ockham is not a realist --no
universals either in the mind of God or in the things or in our minds. (Ockham still talks about the Divine
Ideas, but interprets them as God's ideas of individual things).
--Ockham
then is not a realist but a
nominalist
or terminist:
·
All
we need are signs or names or terms pointing out, standing for, referring to a plurality.
·
The
signs in each occurrence are singulars, so also are each of the plurality that
is pointed out.
·
He
does make a few distinctions however:
1.
We
need to distinguish between the terminus conceptus
which stays the same across languages, the natural sign on the one hand, and
the written or spoken word or term which is conventional and relative to the language
in question e.g. dog or canis; man, homo, homme, uomo.
` The work of the
terminus conceptus or natural sign is taken according
to Ockham by confused mental images, e.g. of dog, or
human being, which because of their confusion are capable of standing for
practically any dog or human. There are two kinds of ideas, then: clear ideas
of singular individuals which Ockham identifies with acts of mind in
accordance with his Razor, and confused ideas which because of their confusion
are capable of standing for a plurality, once again identified with acts of
mind. Compare Abelard.
2.
Furthermore,
Ockham does not deny that different singulars are
similar: it is because they are similar that the same confused term or
intention of the mind (intentio animae)
will do. But N.B. similarity does not exist, only things which are
similar.
3.
Thirdly,
terms don't supposit or stand for or refer until we
put them into propositions, and what they stand for depends on the
proposition. E.g. in "man is a
noun" --'man' supposits for itself considered as
a spoken or written word. "every man is an animal" --'man' here supposits for any
individual human being (not for anything they have in common: we are
saying, every individual human being is an animal) 'man is a species' --'man' here supposits for an idea or notion or intention of my mind,
the concept which is the species homo sapiens.
Species as such do not exist, only individual people.
4.
This
all adds a further bit of sophistication, but without taking away the nominalism.
5.
6.
(c) In his philosophy Ockham makes extensive use of an idea he gets from
theology, the idea of the omnipotence of
God, which idea is also strongly emphasized in his theology and in his
ethics (cf. the beginning of the Creed, " I
believe in God the Father Almighty...").
(i)
In philosophy this works among other things to
re-enforce his empiricism: whatever is distinguishable God in God's
omnipotence could make to exist separately e.g. God could separate heat from fire,
and even bring about the intuition of a non-existent object, e.g. a star. There are no necessary connections out there
in nature: the only way you can find out what goes with what is to open your
eyes and see. The simple intuition of
one thing does not give us any knowledge of another thing, there is nothing
like intrinsic physical necessity or if there is we can't know it, all we
perceive is one thing followed by another thing. Cf. Hume, later on.
(ii) This also works to re-enforce Ockham's
rejection of the Platonic Neo-Platonic Augustinian doctrine of the Divine Ideas:
God in God's creative activity is not guided by or ruled by ideas or patterns
of creation --to say this would be to limit or circumscribe the divine freedom
and omnipotence.
(iii) It determines also his conception of the nature of moral
obligation: what is good is good because God wills it,
God doesn't will it because it is good. "By the very fact that God wills something,
it is right for it to be done". God could make adultery or murder right if
God wanted to, or even command a person to hate God. As a matter of fact God
doesn't. But the moral order is contingent on God's choice, rather than vice
versa, and God could, if God had wanted to, have imposed a different moral law.
This position =
"theological voluntarism".
(d) Despite the view on
causality, by applying the kind of reasoning we have learned from experience we
can prove the existence of a first efficient cause of the conservation of the
world.
The argument from final
causality, however, doesn't work: non-intelligent action can be explained as
following from the necessity of nature --you don't need final causality, so you
shouldn't introduce it. Only if we presuppose God's existence can we speak of
all beings directed to their several ends.
Furthermore, even though
we can prove the existence of a first efficient cause, we can demonstrate
neither the unity, nor the infinity nor the supreme perfection nor the
omnipotence nor omniscience of God. Philosophical knowledge of God can only be
based on experience of creatures. In so far as creatures are good, for example,
we can argue that God is good, but not that he is infinitely good. Not that Ockham denies this latter and the rest, but they are part
of his faith, not something that philosophy can prove.
So
also for the immateriality and immortality of the soul. We have intuitive
knowledge of our own feelings as well as of our voluntary acts and intellectual
operations; but there is no intuitive or scientific demonstration of an
immaterial soul which though it be the form of our body would be immortal
--these latter also are to be taken on faith.
Influence:
This experience
emphasizing, no-nonsense, aware of its limits way of doing philosophy took off
quickly and spread far and wide in the fourteenth and into the fifteenth
centuries and became the dominant trend in the majority of European centres of learning. The followers of Ockham,
"nominalists" or "terminists",
termed their approach the
via moderna
over against the via antiqua, the left-over Thomists
and Scotists and such mostly in the
religious orders.
The philosophical scene
in the aftermath of Scotus had become altogether too
cluttered up with distinction on distinction and scholastic debate on scholastic
debate, and probably needed something like this to clean it out.
Whatever its value as
philosophy however it had the effect of splitting off faith from philosophical
reason and so had a mostly deleterious effect on the enterprise of theology. It
may seem a good idea to get reason out of theology and ethics, but when we do
so, what we are left with is authority of one kind or another. In effect it meant the temporary demise of
the fides quaerens
intellectum of Augustine and John the Scot and
Anselm --why Gilson regards it as marking the end of the golden age of
scholasticism.
On the other hand, it did have a beneficial effect on the development of the natural sciences, (and politics and law), both by directing energies away from theology into more mundane pursuits and because of its emphasis on experience.