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On pain of infinite regress, therefore, extrinsically virtuous acts of will must ultimately lead back to an intrinsically virtuous act of will. In his early work, On the Connection of the Virtues , Ockham distinguishes five grades or stages of moral virtue, which have been the topic of considerable speculation in the secondary literature: [ 48 ].

The difficulty in understanding this hierarchy comes at the fourth stage, where it is not clear exactly what moral factor is added to the preceding three stages. And, whether they realize it or not, that is what all human beings are ultimately aiming at in their actions. We are not free to choose for or against our final end; that is built into us by nature.

But we are free to choose various mean s to that end. All our choices, therefore, are made under the aspect of leading to that final goal. To be sure, sometimes we make the wrong choices, but when that occurs it is because of ignorance, distraction, self-deception, etc.

In an important sense, then, someone like Aquinas accepts a version of the so called Socratic Paradox: No one knowingly and deliberately does evil. Although he is very suspicious of the notion of final causality teleology in general, he thinks it is quite appropriate for intelligent, voluntary agents such as human beings. Thus the frequent charge that Ockham severs ethics from metaphysics by denying teleology seems wrong.

For Ockham, as for Aristotle and Aquinas, I can choose the means to achieve my ultimate good. But in addition, for Ockham unlike Aristotle and Aquinas, I can choose whether to will that ultimate good. The natural orientation and tendency toward that good is built in; I cannot do anything about that. But I can choose whether or not to to act to achieve that good. I might choose, for example, to do nothing at all, and I might choose this knowing full well what I am doing.

But more: I can choose to act knowingly directly against my ultimate good, to thwart it. For Ockham, this is required if I am going to be morally responsible for my actions. But for Ockham these conclusions are not just required by theory; they are confirmed by experience. The Spirituals, among whom were Ockham, Michael of Cesena, and the other exiles who joined them in fleeing Avignon, tried to preserve the original ideal of austere poverty practiced and advocated by St.

Francis himself c. The Conventuals, on the other hand, while recognizing this ideal, were prepared to compromise in order to accommodate the practical needs of a large, organized religious order; they were by far the majority of the order. The issue between the two parties was never one of doctrine; neither side accused the other of heresy.

Rather, the question was one of how to shape and run the order—in particular, whether the Franciscans should or even could renounce all property rights. The ideal of poverty had been and still is a common one in religious communities.

Typically, the idea is that the individual member of the order owns no property at all. Rather it belongs to the order. The original Franciscan ideal went further. Not only did the individual friar have no property of his own, neither did the order.

Anything donated to the order, such as a house or a piece of land, strictly speaking remained the property of the original owner who merely granted the use of it to the Franciscans.

Or, if that would not work—as, for example, in the case of a bequest in a will, after the original owner had died—the ownership would go to the Papacy. Both the Spirituals and the Conventuals thought this ideal of uncompromising poverty was exhibited by the life of Jesus and the Apostles, who—they said—had given up all property, both individually and collectively.

Francis regarded this as the clear implication of several Scriptural passages: e. Of course, if everyone lived according to this ideal, so that no one owned any property either individually or collectively, then there would be no property at all. The Franciscan ideal, then, shared by Conventuals and Spirituals alike, entailed the total abolition of all property rights. Not everyone shared this view. Outside the Franciscan order, most theoreticians agreed that Jesus and the Apostles lived without individual property, but thought they did share property collectively.

Nevertheless, Pope Nicholas III, in , had officially approved the Franciscan view, not just as a view about how to organize the Franciscan order, but about the interpretation of the Scriptural passages concerning Jesus and the Apostles.

His approval did not mean he was endorsing the Franciscan reading as the correct interpretation of Scripture, but only that it was a permissible one, that there was nothing doctrinally suspect about it. Nevertheless, this interpretation was a clear reproach to the Papacy, which at Avignon was wallowing in wealth to a degree it had never seen before. But, as Mollat [] puts it perhaps not without some taking of sides : [ 55 ].

It was this act that provoked John XXII to issue his first contribution to the dispute, his bull Ad conditorem in There he put the whole matter in a legal framework. For example, it is one thing for me to own a book but to let you use it for a while. Ownership in that case means that I can recall the book, and even if I do not do so, you should return it to me when you are done with it. But it is quite another matter for me to own the book but to grant you permanent use of it, to agree not to recall it as long as you want to keep it, and to agree that you have no obligation to give it back ever.

There is no practical difference in that case between your having the use of the book and your owning it; for all intents and purposes, it is yours. Notice the criticism here. It is a legal argument against the claim that the Papacy as an institution can own something and yet the Franciscans as an order, collectively, have a permanent right to use it.

The complaint is not against the notion that an individual friar might have a right to use something until he dies, at which time use reverts to the order or as the Franciscans would have it, to the Papacy. This would still allow some distinction between ownership and mere use. Rather the complaint is against the notion that the order would not own anything outright, but would nevertheless have permanent use of it that goes beyond the life or death of any individual friar, so that the ownership somehow remained permanently with the Papacy, even though the Pope could not reclaim it, use it, or do anything at all with it.

John XXII argues that this simply abolishes the distinction between use and ownership. Special problems arise if the property involved is such that the use of it involves consuming it—e. In that case, it appears that there is no real difference between ownership and even temporary use. For things like food, using them amounts for practical purposes to owning them; they cannot be recalled after they are used. In short, for John XXII, it follows that it is impossible fully to live the life of absolute poverty, even for the individual person much less for a permanent institution like the Franciscan order.

Ockham disagreed. Instead, Adam and Eve there had a natural right to use anything at hand. This natural right did not amount to a property right, however, since it could not have been used as the basis of any kind of legal claim. The owners can then give permission to others to use what the owners own, but that permission does not amount to giving them a legal right they could appeal to in a court of law; it can be revoked at any time.

For Ockham, this is the way the Franciscans operate. Their benefactors and donors do not give them any legal rights to use the things donated to them—i.

Rather the donation amounts only to a kind of permission that restores the original natural not legal right of use in the Garden of Eden. For a list of translations to , see Spade [], pp. The following major items deserve particular mention:. The following list includes all works cited in this article, plus several other noteworthy items:. For the update to this entry published in the summer of , Claude Panaccio has become a co-author, having made significant revisions to Sections 3.

He will continue maintain and keep the entry current. Life 1. Writings 3. Logic and Semantics 3. Metaphysics 4. Natural Philosophy 6. Theory of Knowledge 6.

Ethics 7. Political Philosophy 8. Life Ockham led an unusually eventful life for a philosopher. Clearly, things had become intolerable for Ockham in Avignon. Book I survives in an ordinatio or scriptum —a revised and corrected version, approved by the author himself for distribution. Seven Quodlibets based on London disputations held in —24, but revised and edited in Avignon — Summa of Logic c.

A large, independent and systematic treatment of logic and semantics. A detailed, close commentary. The Work of Ninety Days — Letter to the Friars Minor Short Discourse — Dialogue c. Several lesser items are omitted from the above list. Logic and Semantics Ockham is rightly regarded as one of the most significant logicians of the Middle Ages.

Without it no science can be fully known. It is not worn out by repeated use, after the manner of material tools, but rather admits of continual growth through the diligent exercise of any other science. For just as a mechanic who lacks a complete knowledge of his tool gains a fuller [knowledge] by using it, so one who is educated in the firm principles of logic, while he painstakingly devotes his labor to the other sciences, acquires at the same time a greater skill at this art.

For Ockham, there are three main kinds of supposition [ 19 ] : Personal supposition, in which a term supposits for refers to what it signifies in either of the first two senses of signification described above.

Simple supposition, in which a term supposits for a concept it does not signify. For Ockham the nominalist, the only real universals are universal concepts in the mind and, derivatively, universal spoken or written terms expressing those concepts. Material supposition, in which a term supposits for a spoken or written expression it does not signify. Metaphysics Ockham was a nominalist, indeed he is the person whose name is perhaps most famously associated with nominalism.

But nominalism means many different things: A denial of metaphysical universals. Ockham was emphatically a nominalist in this sense. Ockham was likewise a nominalist in this sense. Depending on what one means, Ockham was or was not a nominalist in this sense. On the contrary, there are at least as many distinct whitenesses as there are white things. He certainly believed in immaterial entities such as God and angels. Thus, from the very fact that Socrates is white and Plato is white, Socrates is similar to Plato and conversely.

Likewise, if both are black, or hot, [then] they are similar without anything else added. Emphasis added. It is in this sense that the object of a science is universal, and this is what Aristotle had in mind. This is not the sense in which Aristotle was speaking. One recent author, describing the theory as it occurs in Aquinas, puts it like this: [ 40 ] Consider, for example, blueprints.

In a blueprint of a library, the configuration of the library itself, that is, the very configuration that will be in the finished library, is captured on paper but in such a way that it does not make the paper itself into a library.

Rather, the configuration is imposed on the paper in a different sort of way from the way it is imposed on the materials of the library. What Aquinas thinks of as transferring and preserving a configuration we tend to consider as a way of encoding information. And the historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich has dismissed the common assumption that the Ptolemaic model was so epicycle-heavy that it was close to collapse. So the reasons for preferring Copernican theory are not so clear.

It certainly looked nicer: Ignoring the epicycles and other modifications, you could draw it as a pleasing system of concentric circles, as Copernicus did. By making the orbits ellipses, Kepler got rid of all those unnecessary epicycles. This is a situation rarely if ever encountered in science. Much more often, theories are distinguished not by making fewer assumptions but different ones. Circular orbits seemed a more aesthetically pleasing and divine basis for the universe, so Kepler adduced them only with hesitation.

But Darwin was not the first to propose evolution from a common ancestor his grandfather Erasmus was one of those predecessors , and his theory had to assume a much longer history of the Earth than did those which supposed divine creation. The fact that our universe sports physical constants, such as the strength of fundamental forces, that seem oddly fine-tuned to enable life to exist, is one of the most profound puzzles in cosmology.

The judgement may then depend on where you look: Different theories may have predictive strengths in different areas. But as with so many scientific ideas that have fallen by the wayside, it has been deemed necessary not just to discard it but to vilify and ridicule it so as to paint a triumphant picture of progress from ignorance to enlightenment.

Quantum mechanics works exceedingly well as a mathematical theory for predicting phenomena, but there is still no agreement on what it tells us about the fundamental fabric of reality. If all of our ideas come through representations, how do we know what, if anything, is behind these representations? Something other than physical objects could be causing them.

For example, God could be transmitting representations of physical objects to our minds without ever creating any physical objects at all—which is in fact what Berkeley came to believe. This view, known as idealism, is radically skeptical, and most philosophers prefer to avoid it. Ockham preempts idealism through the notion of intuitive cognition, which plays a crucial role in his four-step account of knowledge acquisition.

It can be summarized as follows. The first step is sensory cognition: receiving data through the five senses. This is an ability human beings share with animals.

The second step, intuitive cognition, is uniquely human. Intuitive cognition is an awareness that the particular individual perceived exists and has the qualities it has. The third step is recordative cognition, by which we remember past perceptions.

The fourth step is abstractive cognition, by which we place individuals in groups of similar individuals. Notice that, if an apple is set in front of a horse, the horse will receive data about the apple—the color, the smell, etc. The horse will not, however, register the reality of the object.

Suppose you project a realistic, laser image of an apple in front of the horse and he tries to take a bite. On the contrary, Ockham asserts that intuitive cognition is non-propositional. Rather, it is a matter of registering that the apple really has the qualities we perceive. Ockham writes:. Intuitive cognition is such that when some things are cognized, of which one inheres in the other, or one is spatially distant from the other, or exists in some relation to the other, immediately in virtue of that non-propositional cognition of those things, it is known if the thing inheres or does not inhere, if it is spatially distant or not, and the same for other true contingent propositions, unless that cognition is flawed or there is some impediment.

While intuitive cognition is itself non-propositional, it provides the basis for formulating true propositions. The human mind, registering the existence of things—both that they are and how they are—can therefore formulate assertions about them. Strictly speaking, when one has an intuitive cognition of an apple, one is not yet thinking of it as an apple , because this requires placing it in a group.

In normal adult human perception, all four of the above steps happen together so quickly that it is hard to separate them. Intuitive cognition secures a causal link between the external world and the human mind. The human mind is entirely passive, according to Ockham, during intuitive cognition.

Objects in the world cause us to be aware of their existence, and this explains and justifies our belief in them. Despite his insistence on the causal link between the world and our minds, Ockham clearly recognizes cases in which intuitive cognition causes false judgment. This is because your intuitive cognition of the stick is being affected by your simultaneous intuitive cognition of the water, and this causes a skewed perception.

In addition to leaving room for error on his account, Ockham also leaves room for skepticism: God can transmit representations to human beings that seem exactly like intuitive cognitions.

Given that direct realism cannot rule out skepticism any more than representationalism can, one might wonder why Ockham prefers it. In the end, it is a question of simplicity. Whereas Ockham never uses his razor against metaphysical realism, he does use it against representationalism.

Intuitive cognition is necessary to secure a causal link between the world and the mind, and, once it is in place, there is no need for a middle man. The intelligible species is an unnecessary hypothesis.

Representationalists typically hold that the intelligible species emanates from the universal essence of the thing. In fact, many metaphysical realists would argue for the superiority of their view precisely on the grounds that universal essences provide a basis for intelligible species, and intelligible species are necessary for us to know what we are perceiving. They would ask: how else do we ever identify apples as apples instead of just so many distinct individuals? As we have seen, Ockham argues that there is no universal essence.

There is therefore no basis for an intelligible species. Each object in the world is an absolute individual and that is how we perceive it at first. Just like toddlers, we are bombarded with a buzzing, booming confusion of colors and sounds. But our minds are powerful sorting machines. We remember perceptions over time recordative cognition and organize them into groups abstractive cognition. This organizational process gives us a coherent understanding of the world and is what Ockham aims to explain in his account of logic.

Although the human mind is born without any knowledge, according to Ockham, it does come fully equip with a system for processing perceptions as they are acquired. This system is thought, which Ockham understands in terms of an unspoken, mental language. Ockham might compare thought to a machine ready to manipulate a vast quantity of empty boxes.

As we observe the world, perceptions are placed in the empty boxes. Then the machine sorts and organizes the boxes according to content.

Two small boxes with similar contents might be placed together in a big box, and then the big box might be conjoined to another big box. For example, as perceptions of Rover and Fido accumulate, they become the concept dog , and then the concept dog is associated with the concept fleas. Dogs cause the same kinds of concepts in all human beings. Thus, mentalese is universal among us, even though there are different ways to speak and write words in different countries around the world.

While written and spoken language is conventional, signification itself is natural. He abandoned ficta theory, however, because it presupposes a representationalist epistemology, which in turn presupposes metaphysical realism.

Medieval pubs received wine in shipments of wooden barrels sealed with hoops. When the shipment arrived, the pub owner would hang a barrel hoop outside the front door to communicate to the townspeople that wine was available. Although the hoop did not resemble wine in any way, it was significant to the townspeople.

This is because the presence of the hoop was caused by the arrival of the wine. Likewise, dogs in the world cause concepts in our minds that are significant even though they do not resemble dogs. It must be noted that there is a drawback to both the barrel hoop analogy and the box illustration: they portray concepts as things. For convenience, Ockham often speaks of concepts loosely as though they were things. However, according to intellectum theory, concepts are not really things at all but rather actions.

Perceiving a dog does not cause an entity to exist in your mind; rather, it causes a mental act. Today we would say that it causes a neuron to fire. Repeated acts cause a habit: the disposition to perform the act at will.

So, repeated perceptions of dogs cause repeated acts of dog-conceiving and those repeated acts cause a dog-conceiving habit, meaning that you can engage in dog-conceiving actions whenever you want, even when there are no dogs around to perceive.

Ockham has a lot of ideas about how the linguistic operators work, which he develops in his version of supposition theory. Although supposition theory was a major preoccupation of late medieval logicians, scholars are still divided over its purpose. Some think it was an effort to build a system of formal logic that ultimately failed. Others think it was more akin to a modern theory of logical form. Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein , Ockham asserts that many philosophical errors arise due to the misunderstanding of language.

He took metaphysical realism to be a prime example. Medieval logicians recognize three types of supposition—material, personal and simple—but their metaphysical commitments affect their analyses. Most everyone agrees about material supposition. They therefore have a different account of personal and simple supposition. In addition to three types of supposition, medieval logicians recognize two types of terms: categorematic and syncategorematic.

Syncategorematic terms do not refer to anything at all. Among categorematic terms, some are absolute names while others are connotative names. Ockham describes the difference as follows:. Properly speaking, only absolute names, that is, concepts signifying things composed of matter and form, have definitions expressing real essence.

Although the distinction between absolute and connotative terms seems minor, Ockham uses it for radical purposes. According to the standard reading of the Organon , Aristotle holds that there are ten categories of existing things as follows: substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion.

Ockham bases his interpretation on the thesis that only substances and qualities have real essence definitions signifying things composed of matter and form. The other eight categories signify a substance or a quality while connoting something else. They therefore have nominal essence definitions, meaning that they are not existing things. Consider quantity. Suppose you have one orange. It is a substance with a real essence of citrus fruit.

Furthermore, it possesses several qualities, such as its color, its flavor, and its smell. The orange and its qualities are existing things according to Ockham. But the orange is also singular. Is its singularity an existing thing? For mathematical Platonists, the answer is yes: the number one exists as a universal essence and inheres in the orange.

Ockham, in contrast, asserts that the singularity of the orange is just a short hand way of saying that there are no other oranges nearby. Ockham eliminates the rest of the categories along the same lines. The sacrament of the altar is the miracle that is supposed to occur when bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

The problem is to explain why the bread and wine continue to look, smell, and taste exactly the same despite the underlying change. According to the standard account, the qualities of the bread and wine continue to inhere in their quantity, which remains the same while substances are exchanged.

According to Ockham, however, quantity is nothing other than the substance itself; if the substance changes then the quantity changes. So, the qualities cannot continue to inhere in the same quantity.

Nor can they transfer from the substance of the bread and wine into the substance of Jesus because it would be blasphemous to say that Jesus was crunchy or wet! Needless to say, this solution was a bit too clever. One question scholars continue to ask is why Ockham allows for two of the ten categories to remain instead of just one, namely, substance.

It seems that qualities, such as whiteness, crunchiness, sweetness, etc, can just as easily be reduced to nominal essences: they signify the substance itself while connoting the tongue or nose or eye that perceives it. Of course, if Ockham had eliminated quality, he really would have had no basis left for saving the miracle of transubstantiation.

Perhaps that was reason enough to stay his razor. Despite his departures from orthodoxy and his conflict with the papacy, Ockham never renounced Catholicism. He steadfastly embraced fideism, the view that belief in God is a matter of faith alone. Although fideism was soon to become common among Protestant thinkers, it was not so common among medieval Catholics. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Augustine proposed a proof of the existence of God and promoted the view that reason is faith seeking understanding.

While the standard approach for any medieval philosopher would be to recognize a role for both faith and reason in religion, Ockham makes an uncompromising case for faith alone.

In the first book of his Sentences , Peter Lombard raises the issue of whether and in what sense theology is a science. Most philosophers commenting on the Sentences found a way to cast faith as a way of knowing.

Ockham, however, makes no such effort. As a staunch empiricist, Ockham is committed to the thesis that all knowledge comes from experience. Yet we have no experience of God.

It follows inescapably that we have no knowledge of God, as Ockham affirms in the following passage:. In order to demonstrate the statement of faith that we formulate about God, what we would need for the central concept is a simple cognition of the divine nature in itself—what someone who sees God has. Nevertheless, we cannot have this kind of cognition in our present state.

Just as we now have knowledge of others through intuitive cognitions of their individual essences, those who go to heaven if there ever are any such will have knowledge of God through intuitive cognitions of his essence. Until then we can only hope.

The Trinity is the core Christian doctrine according to which God is three persons in one. Christians traditionally consider the Trinity a mystery, meaning that it is beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Ockham goes so far as to admit that it is a blatant contradiction. He displays the problem through the following syllogism:. For Ockham, however, this syllogism establishes that theology is not logical and must never be mixed with philosophy.

Living prior to the advent of Christianity, Aristotle never believed in the Trinity. He does, however, seem to believe in a supernatural force that lends purpose to all of nature. This is evident in his doctrine of the Four Causes, according to which every existing thing requires a fourfold explanation.

Ockham would cast these four causes in terms of the following four questions:. First Cause: What is it made of? Second Cause: What does it do? Third Cause: What brought it about? Fourth Cause: Why does it do what it does? Ockham writes,. If I accepted no authority, I would claim that it cannot be proved either from statements known in themselves or from experience that every effect has a final cause….

No doubt Ockham put his criticism in hypothetical, third-person terms because he knew that openly asserting that the universe itself may be entirely purposeless would never pass muster with the powers that be. Needless to say, Ockham rejects all of the alleged proofs of the existence of God. Ockham thinks that the most plausible version of each boils down to an infinite regress argument of the following form:.

If God does not exist, then there is an infinite regress. But infinite regresses are impossible. Therefore, God must exist. The reason Ockham finds this argument form to be the most plausible is that he fully agrees with the second premise, that infinite regresses are impossible. An extensive infinity is an uncountable quantity of actually existing things. Mathematical Platonists conceive of the set of whole numbers as an extensive infinity.

Ockham, however, deems the idea of an uncountable quantity contradictory: if the objects exist, then God can count them, and if God can count them, then they are not uncountable.

An intensive infinity, on the other hand, is just a lack of limitation. As a nominalist, Ockham understands the set of whole numbers to be an intensive infinity in the sense that there is no upward limit on how far someone can count.

This does not mean that the set of whole numbers are an uncountable quantity of actually existing things. Ockham thinks that infinite regresses are impossible only in so far as they imply extensive infinity.

According to Ockham, advocates of the ontological proof reason as follows: There would be an infinite regress among entities if there were not one greatest entity. Therefore, there must be one greatest entity, namely God.

One way to counter this reasoning would be to deny that greatness is an objectively existing quality. Ockham does not, however, take this approach. On the contrary, he seems to take the Great Chain of Being for granted. According to it, all of nature can be ranked on a hierarchy of value from top to bottom, roughly as follows: God, angels, humans, animals, plants, rocks.

The Great Chain of Being implies that greatness is an objectively existing quality. Bearing the Great Chain of Being in mind, it is evident what he means to say. If God and the angels do not exist, then human beings are the greatest entities, and there is no single best among us. Some scholars have interpreted Ockham to mean that the ontological argument succeeds in proving that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost exist, but not that they are one.

According to Ockham, advocates of the cosmological argument reason as follows: There would be an infinite regress among causes if there were not a first cause; therefore, there must be a first cause, namely, God.

An efficient cause brings about an effect successively over time. For example, your grandparents were the efficient cause of your parents who were the efficient cause of you. A conserving cause, in contrast, is a simultaneous support for an effect. For example, the oxygen in the room is a conserving cause of the burning flame on the candle.

Consider efficient causality first. If the chain of efficient causes that have produced the world as we know it today had no beginning, then it would form, not an extensive infinity, but an intensive infinity, which is harmless. Since the links in the chain would not all exist at the same time, they would not constitute an uncountable quantity of actually existing things.

Rather, they would simply imply that the universe is an eternal cycle of unlimited or perpetual motion. Ockham explicitly affirms that it is possible that the world had no beginning, as Aristotle maintained. Next, consider conserving causality. Conceiving of the world as a product of simultaneous conserving causes is difficult.

The idea is perhaps best expressed in a story reported by Stephen Hawking. According to the story, a scientist was giving a lecture on astronomy. After the lecture, an elderly lady came up and told the scientist that he had it all wrong.

It is in fact a tenet of belief that God is both an efficient and conserving cause of the cosmos, and Ockham accepts this tenet on faith. Each existing thing may be its own conserving cause.

Hence the cosmological argument is entirely inconclusive. It is worth bearing in mind that there were no philosophy departments or philosophy degrees in the Middle Ages. Wanting to be a philosopher, Ockham studied theology and ran through his theological exercises, all the while trying to carve out a separate space for philosophy. The one area where the two worlds collide inextricably for him is in ethics. Many people think God commands human beings to be kind because kindness is good and that God himself is always kind because his actions are always in conformity with goodness.