Ockham William (c.1285–1347), also written William Occam, known as the More than Subtle Doctor, English Scholastic philosopher known equally as the father of nominalism and for his role in the Franciscan dispute with Pope John XXII over poverty. Born probably in the village of Ockham near London, William Ockham entered the Franciscan order at an early age and studied at Oxford, attaining the rank of baccalarius formatus. His brilliant but controversial career was cut short when John Lutterell, former chancellor of Oxford University, presented the pope with a list of fifty-six allegedly heretical theses extracted from Ockham’s writings. The papal commission studied them for two years and found fifty-one open to censure, but none was formally condemned. While in Avignon, Ockham researched previous papal concessions to the Franciscans regarding collective poverty, eventually concluding that John XXII contradicted his predecessors and hence was ‘no true pope.’ After committing these charges to writing, Ockham fled with Michael of Cesena, then minister general of the order, first to Pisa and ultimately to Munich, where he lived until his death, writing many treatises about church–state relations. Although departures from his eminent predecessors have combined with ecclesiastical difficulties to make Ockham unjustly notorious, his thought remains, by current lights, philosophically and theologically conservative. On most metaphysical issues, Ockham fancied himself the true interpreter of Aristotle. Rejecting the doctrine that universals are real things other than names or concepts as ‘the worst error of philosophy,’ Ockham dismissed not only Platonism, but also ‘modern realist’ doctrines according to which natures enjoy a double mode of existence and are universal in the intellect but numerically multiplied in particulars. He argues that everything real is individual and particular, while universality is a property pertaining only to names and that by virtue of their signification relations. Because Ockham understands the primary names to be mental (i.e., naturally significant concepts), his own theory of universals is best classified as a form of conceptualism. Ockham rejects atomism, and defends Aristotelian hylomorphism in physics and metaphysics, complete with its distinction between substantial and accidental forms. Yet, he opposes the reifying tendency of the ‘moderns’ (unnamed contemporary opponents), who posited a distinct kind of thing (res) for each of Aristotle’s ten categories; he argues that – from a purely philosophical point of view – it is indefensible to posit anything besides particular substances and qualities. Ockham followed the Franciscan school in recognizing a plurality of substantial forms in living things (in humans, the forms of corporeity, sensory soul, and intellectual soul), but diverged from Duns Scotus in asserting a real, not a formal, distinction among them. Aristotle had reached behind regular correlations in nature to posit substance-things and accident-things as primitive explanatory entities that essentially are or give rise to powers (virtus) that produce the regularities; similarly, Ockham distinguishes efficient causality properly speaking from sine qua non causality, depending on whether the correlation between A’s and B’s is produced by the power of A or by the will of another, and explicitly denies the existence of any sine qua non causation in nature. Further, Ockham insists, in Aristotelian fashion, that created substance- and accident-natures are essentially the causal powers they are in and of themselves and hence independently of their relations to anything else; so that not even God can make heat naturally a coolant. Yet, if God cannot change, He shares with created things the ability to obstruct such ‘Aristotelian’ productive powers and prevent their normal operation. Ockham’s nominalistic conceptualism about universals does not keep him from endorsing the uniformity of nature principle, because he holds that individual natures are powers and hence that co-specific things are maximally similar powers. Likewise, he is conventional in appealing to several other a priori causal principles: ‘Everything that is in motion is moved by something,’ ‘Being cannot come from non-being,’ ‘Whatever is produced by something is really conserved by something as long as it exists.’ He even recognizes a kind of necessary connection between created causes and effects – e.g., while God could act alone to produce any created effect, a particular created effect could not have had another created cause of the same species instead. Ockham’s main innovation on the topic of causality is his attack on Duns Scotus’s distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ orders and contrary contention that every genuine efficient cause is an immediate cause of its effects.
Ockham is an Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, taking for granted as he does that human cognitive faculties (the senses and intellect) work always or for the most part. Ockham infers that since we have certain knowledge both of material things and of our own mental acts, there must be some distinctive species of acts of awareness (intuitive cognitions) that are the power to produce such evident judgments. Ockham is matter-of-fact both about the disruption of human cognitive functions by created obstacles (as in sensory illusion) and about divine power to intervene in many ways. Such facts carry no skeptical consequences for Ockham, because he defines certainty in terms of freedom from actual doubt and error, not from the logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of error.
In action theory, Ockham defends the liberty of indifference or contingency for all rational beings, created or divine. Ockham shares Duns Scotus’s understanding of the will as a self-determining power for opposites, but not his distaste for causal models. Thus, Ockham allows that (1) unfree acts of will may be necessitated, either by the agent’s own nature, by its other acts, or by an external cause; and that (2) the efficient causes of free acts may include the agent’s intellectual and sensory cognitions as well as the will itself. While recognizing innate motivational tendencies in the human agent – e.g., the inclination to seek sensory pleasure and avoid pain, the affectio commodi (tendency to seek its own advantage), and the affectio iustitiae (inclination to love things for their own intrinsic worth) – he denies that these limit the will’s scope. Thus, Ockham goes beyond Duns Scotus in assigning the will the power, with respect to any option, to will for it (velle), to will against it (nolle), or not to act at all. In particular, Ockham concludes that the will can will against (nolle) the good, whether ignorantly or perversely – by hating God or by willing against its own happiness, the good-in-general, the enjoyment of a clear vision of God, or its own ultimate end. The will can also will (velle) evils – the opposite of what right reason dictates, unjust deeds qua unjust, dishonest, and contrary to right reason, and evil under the aspect of evil. Ockham enforces the traditional division of moral science into non-positive morality or ethics, which directs acts apart from any precept of a superior authority and draws its principles from reason and experience; and positive morality, which deals with laws that oblige us to pursue or avoid things, not because they are good or evil in themselves, but because some legitimate superior commands them. The notion that Ockham sponsors an unmodified divine command theory of ethics rests on conflation and confusion. Rather, in the area of non-positive morality, Ockham advances what we might label a ‘modified right reason theory,’ which begins with the Aristotelian ideal of rational self-government, according to which morally virtuous action involves the agent’s free coordination of choice with right reason. He then observes that suitably informed right reason would dictate that God, as the infinite good, ought to be loved above all and for his own sake, and that such love ought to be expressed by the effort to please him in every way (among other things, by obeying all his commands). Thus, if right reason is the primary norm in ethics, divine commands are a secondary, derivative norm. Once again, Ockham is utterly unconcerned about the logical possibility opened by divine liberty of indifference, that these twin norms might conflict (say, if God commanded us to act contrary to right reason); for him, their de facto congruence suffices for the moral life. In the area of soteriological merit and demerit (a branch of positive morality), things are the other way around: divine will is the primary norm; yet because God includes following the dictates of right reason among the criteria for divine acceptance (thereby giving the moral life eternal significance), right reason becomes a secondary and derivative norm there. See also ARISTOTLE , DIVINE COMMAND ETHICS , DUNS SCOTU. M.M.A. Ockham’s razor, also called the principle of parsimony, a methodological principle commending a bias toward simplicity in the construction of theories. The parameters whose simplicity is singled out for attention have varied considerably, from kinds of entities to the number of presupposed axioms to the nature of the curve drawn between data points. Found already in Aristotle, the tag ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity’ became associated with William Ockham (although he never states that version, and even if non-contradiction rather than parsimony is his favorite weapon in metaphysical disputes), perhaps because it characterized the spirit of his philosophical conclusions. Opponents, who thought parsimony was being carried too far, formulated an ‘anti-razor’: where fewer entities do not suffice, posit more! See also CURVE-FITTING PROBLEM , OCKHA. M.M.A.