Though Ockham’s dispute with church authority began with metaphysics, it soon became political. Consequently, he was summoned to the papal court in Avignon before he was able to finish his degree at Oxford University. Ockham’s ontological reduction was suspected of having unorthodox implications for the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which bread and wine is miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. For example, the universal term “man” refers to this or that man while grouping them with all the other men. His theory of mental language aimed to show how we can speak of universals without thereby presupposing that universals exist. He contended that human beings perceive objects directly through “intuitive cognition,” without the help of any universals. This helped him to advance a new version of nominalism, according to which universals, such as man, are not metaphysical realities but only concepts in the mind. Above all, Ockham used the Razor to interpret Aristotle in a more radically empiricist manner than did his predecessors, accepting into his ontology only individual substances and individual qualities. Although Ockham did not invent the Razor, he wielded it so systematically and with such striking effect that it came to bear his name. His claim to fame was “Ockham’s Razor,” the principle of parsimony, according to which plurality should not be posited without necessity. William of Ockham ( c. 1285/7– c. 1347) was an English Franciscan philosopher who challenged scholasticism and the papacy, thereby hastening the end of the medieval period.
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