Quotes About Ockham

That cannot be said of William of Ockham. Born a few years before Bacon's death in 1294, he carried the Aristotelian legacy of the Oxford Franciscans into direct conflict with the Church's most powerful figure, the pope himself.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

A century after Pisa, the monarchies that had used the arguments of Ockham and the conciliarists to beat the Catholic Church into submission would end up having the very same arguments used against them. A full-fledged theory of popular sovereignty broke surface for the first time in the sixteenth century in the writings of Almain and his colleague John Mair and then more explosively during the Reformation. It resurfaced again in the seventeenth century in authors like John Locke.

If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

Indeed, Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, exists at all. However, if one intends to identify a first cause of the existence of the world, one may choose to call that "god" even if one does not know the precise nature of the first cause.