William Of Ockham Research Articles

Phtlotheus Boehner. The Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei et defuturis contingentibus of William Ockham, edited with a study on the mediaeval problem of a three-valued logic. Franciscan Institute publications, no. 2. The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure College, St. Bonaventure, N. Y., 1945, XI + 139 pp.

Phtlotheus Boehner. The Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei et defuturis contingentibus of William Ockham, edited with a study on the mediaeval problem of a three-valued logic. Franciscan Institute publications, no. 2. The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure College, St. Bonaventure, N. Y., 1945, XI + 139 pp. - Volume 11 Issue 3

The Realistic Conceptualism of William Ockham

Students of medieval scholasticism are accustomed to apply the name ‘conceptualism’ to Ockham's doctrine concerning the nature and scope of universals. This seems to be an apt designation, provided that its meaning is not burdened with idealistic connotations. Unfortunately, quite a number of neo-scholastics qualify conceptualism as a doctrine which severs the bond between thought and reality, and is therefore essentially idealistic. Small wonder, then, that such a conceptualism imputed to William Ockham falls an easy prey to their violent, and to a large extent justified, attack against idealism in general. However, as far as Ockham's conceptualism is concerned, their victory in this regard is an illusion, for the simple reason that his alleged idealistic conceptualism does not exist. Hence it appears to us that Ockham's genuine conceptualism enjoys, for the time being, a relative security from neo-scholastic criticism.

William of Occam and the Prehistory of English Materialism

William of Occam and the Prehistory of English Materialism

The Tractatus De Successivis Attributed to William Ockham, Edited with a Study on the Life and Works of Ockham. Philotheus Boehner

<i>The Tractatus De Successivis Attributed to William Ockham, Edited with a Study on the Life and Works of Ockham</i>. Philotheus Boehner

Concerning William of Ockham

The purpose of the following reflections is not polemical, in spite of the fact that the criticism of any philosopher of the past may seem prejudiced to his modern disciples. My intention is rather to point out that the traditional interpretation of William of Ockham as a nominalist and as a skeptic is correct. The reason for insisting on such a point at this time is the series of publications which Father Philotheus Boehner has been contributing to the study of Ockham, and in particular the article which appeared in the first volume of Traditio.

The Tractatus de Successivis attributed to William Ockham. Edited with a Study of the Life and Works of Ockham by Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M. Franciscan Institute Publications, No. 1. St. Bonaventure, New York, The Franciscan Institute, 1944. Pp. 122. $2.00.

The Tractatus de Successivis attributed to William Ockham. Edited with a Study of the Life and Works of Ockham by Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M. Franciscan Institute Publications, No. 1. St. Bonaventure, New York, The Franciscan Institute, 1944. Pp. 122. $2.00. - Volume 2

Ruth L. Saw, William of Ockham on terms, propositions, meanings. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 42 (1941-1942), pp. 45–64.

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Ockham's Political Ideas

William Ockham, the Venerabilis Inceptor and the Doctor plus quam subtilis, started his academic career simply as a theologian and philosopher who did not have, or at least did not evince, the slightest interest in political questions. By 1324 or at least by 1327, he had composed all his purely theological or philosophical works of which we have any knowledge. In all these writings there is no trace of any political idea worth mentioning. Even the struggle about the Franciscan ideal of poverty had left no impression on the lines written by Ockham prior to 1327. While he was in England he was either too remote from the theatre of war or (and this seems to be more likely) he was too much engrossed in the construction of his conceptualistic system of philosophy and theology. In any case, we know from his own words that he did not take part in the struggle about poverty—not even to the extent of reading the pertinent documents—before or during his enforced stay at Avignon until the beginning of 1328.

The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought

The chief reason for the lack of intelligibility in a course in the history of political thought is the absence of any standard by which the great writers in the field may justly be compared. The usual course in the history of political thought is thoroughly historical and scrupulously indifferent to philosophical analysis; at best, a semblance of comparative analysis is achieved by simply telling the student that different needs of different periods suggest different and equally valid theoretical constructions. The question of natural law, for example, is handled in something like the following fashion. The Aristotelian notion of natural law is no sooner inadequately in the mind of the student than it fails to survive the downfall of the Greek city states. The student is told that Aristotle's notion of natural law restricted his vision and blinded him to the inevitable growth of the empire of Philip, his own student. The Stoics, whose views were perfected by Cicero, held to a notion of natural law much more in keeping with the needs of a world civilization. The Church adopted the Stoic conception of natural law. Subsequently, after the writings of Aristotle had been discovered, St. Thomas Aquinas wedded natural law to the law of the Church. The Renaissance and Reformation liberated men's minds from the shackles of Mediaeval Scholasticism. The concept of natural law came gradually to be abandoned; it is already repudiated in the writings of William of Occam and Marsilius of Padua, and its disappearance is complete in Machiavelli. Accustomed to the tradition of 1066 and All That, the student gathers that this disappearance was “a good thing.” In the eighteenth century, there is a revival of natural law.

The Notitia Intuitiva of Non-existents according to William Ockham: With a Critical Study of the Text of Ockham's Reportatio and a Revised Edition of Rep II, Q. 14–15

The following study has a threefold aim: (1) to give an historically exact interpretation of the frequently misunderstood teaching of Ockham on the notitia intuitiva as regards non-existents; (2) to substantiate this interpretation by a revised edition of one key text; (3) to prepare the ground for this edition by a short critical study of the text of the Reportatio Ockham.

The Logic of William of Ockham

The Logic of William of Ockham

The Meaning of Simplicity in Physics

In the fourteenth century William of Occam in the course of his attack on the medieval scholastic philosophy enunciated his famous “razor”: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (hypotheses should not be multiplied unnecessarily). This is the classic claim for the description of nature in terms of the minimum possible number of fundamental concepts. It was presumably so recognized by Newton in the third book of his “Principia” in 1687 when he wrote: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”

The Logic of William of Ockham

The Logic of William of Ockham

The Theory of Continuity of William of Ockham

Ockham realized the value of a careful study and application of the mathematical theory of continuity, even though he possessed no conclusive empirical evidence that it adequately explained the continuity experienced in the world of sense. He also clearly perceived a relation of continuity to infinity, since continuity, as a property of an order which is possible only to a series of terms, must have an infinite number of terms. “A continuous series must have an infinite number of terms.”

The Logic of William of Ockham.

The Logic of William of Ockham.

William of Ockham's Nominalism

William of Ockham's Nominalism

The Logic of William of Ockham.

The Logic of William of Ockham.

Review of Book: The Logic of William of Ockham

Review of Book: The Logic of William of Ockham

The Logic of William of Ockham

The Logic of William of Ockham

William Ockham's Political Philosophy

William Ockham's interests were turned to political philosophy by the circumstances of his life. As early as 1323, he became entangled in the controversy of his order on evangelical poverty with the pope, John XXII, who by his bull, Ad conditorem canonum, issued on December 8, 1322, withdrew from the Franciscans the right of holding property in the name of the Holy See, granted to them by Innocent IV in 1245, and by Nicholas III in 1279. The case seems trifling, yet it involved the interpretation of the life of Christ himself, whom the sons of St. Francis tried to imitate by substituting the use of property for its ownership. The “Spirituals” stood for the original views of the order and considered the papal bull as dragging them down to worldliness and abasement. Ockham in a sermon delivered at Bologna attacked the pope's conception of apostolical poverty. John XXII, in a bull dated December 1, 1323, and addressed to the bishops of Ferrara and Bologna, ordered his arrest and held him in Avignon for four years for trial. In August, 1325, a commission of six theologians, one of whom was Durandus de St. Porciano, at that time bishop of Meaux, was appointed to investigate his theological and philosophical doctrines. In 1326 the commission declared fifty-one articles taken from his Commentary to the Sentences as heretical. On April 13, 1328, Ockham signed the protest of the general of the Franciscan order, Michael Cesena, also under arrest, against the papal bull of 1322, which condemned the tenet of evangelical poverty. The night of May 24, 1328, brought a dramatic turn in his life. He succeeded in escaping from the papal prison in the company of Cesena and Bonagratia of Bergamo, the famous civil and canon lawyer, and fled to Pisa to seek the protection of Louis of Bavaria, emperor of Germany and archenemy of the pope.