William Of Ockham Quotes

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

Keep things simple.

It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.

When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate. (Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.)

Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate [Plurality must never be posited without necessity]

Plurality is never to be posited without necessity.

The years between Roger Bacon’s birth, in 1220, and Uthred’s death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek.

Ever since William of Ockham,119 scientists and philosophers have preferred simpler, more compact explanations over longer, more complex ones. For example, suppose you came home one day and your pool smelled like baboons. Would it make more sense to assume that an international crime organization put drops of baboon perfume in your pool as part of a complicated heist involving Justin Bieber and three professional basketball players, or would it make more sense to simply assume your pet baboon disobeyed your order and jumped in the pool to cool off?

William of Ockham’s principle: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Plurality should not be assumed without necessity

Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora [It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer]

idea of Occam’s razor, a rule of thumb in problem-solving that recommends a preference for simplicity. When choosing between alternative explanations or solutions to a problem, embrace the less complicated: it will probably be more accurate than an intricate or elaborate answer with lots of parts. The idea was set forth (in a somewhat different form) by the English friar William of Ockham in the fourteenth century; the “razor” is to shave away the unnecessary to focus on the essential.

It is futile to do with more things, that which can be done with less.

It’s been five centuries since Da Vinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away; seven centuries since William of Ockham noted that it is “in vain to do with more what can be done with less,” and two and a half millennia since Lao Tzu advised: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.

Know what you know. Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess. Andrew

The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent. It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky. The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.

Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face. Ask yourself now what it actually means. Consider the events of the following months and years and ask yourself whether she could have been doing anything other than using it to discourage thinking, to avoid facts and to postpone reality. You don’t need to be William of Ockham to conclude that this is the only – never mind the simplest – explanation for her choice of words. The truly nasty element of the whole enterprise is the way it treats the Brexit-supporting British public as idiots. Throw them a fatuous soundbite, the thinking goes, and they’ll be so busy chomping away on it that they won’t notice we haven’t got the first idea what Brexit is going to mean.

Omnis homo praeter Sortem currit, igitur Plato currit et sic de aliis a Sorte.

Two years later the logic of the struggle led (Pope) John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.

Cesena asserted that it was perfectly orthodox to teach that Jesus and the apostles owned nothing as their own. So why should his successors not do the same? The pope, for reasons obvious to any visitor to Rome or the sumptuous papal palace at Avignon, thought this a dangerous heresy and innovation. Cesena wanted to know, what did Brother William think? Ockham promised to look into the matter and get back to him. When he returned with his answer, he stunned both the pope and Cesena. There was no doubt, Ockham concluded, that the doctrine of apostolic poverty was sound. To Ockham, this was not a matter just of theology and belief, that realm “up there” in which the man of science avoids involving himself.

That night, on May 26, 1328, Ockham, Cesena, and another Franciscan companion slipped out of their rooms, mounted horses, and lit out of Avignon for the border. The trio did not stop until they crossed into Bavaria, where the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV was engaged in his own dispute with the pope. They met in Munich, where according to legend William of Ockham said to the emperor, “Defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen.” Ludwig accepted the

Pope John XXII, of course, had read “Feed my sheep” very differently. Like Boniface, he saw it as enshrining papal authority over the sheep of secular society, including its secular rulers. So William of Ockham proceeded to take his famous razor to Boniface’s arguments. The pope had no such plenitude of power, Ockham replied; the faithful are neither sheep nor slaves. Nor are there two swords, as Boniface had claimed. There is only one, the one that kings and magistrates use to govern and protect their subjects. In fact, Christ had specifically forbidden his apostles from exercising the same kind of authority over the faithful that kings exercised over subjects (Matthew 20:25–27).20 By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise.

For centuries, however, it was the supreme pontiff who called church councils into existence and ordered them to carry out the papal agenda, as part of his “fullness of power” over the Church. Certainly no bishop or abbot or professor of theology who attended one had ever thought of himself as an elected representative of the faithful, let alone as empowered to depose a pope if he felt so inclined. Yet that was exactly what William of Ockham claimed they were empowered to do. Council members were ex officio intermediaries between the faithful and the pope, acting on behalf of the body of the Church to protect it from harm.

In fact, there was no other kind of righteousness except through God.5 If that was true, then why had everyone else, including centuries of theologians, gotten it so wrong? How had the Church, after being founded on that rock of faith, gotten so far off track? Suddenly, Martin Luther thought he knew. Sitting on his bookshelf were the works of Aristotle and his scholastic followers: William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Luther’s own mentor Gabriel Biel. These were the vaunted intellectual giants of the medieval Church. He himself had taught their ideas for years, along with the works of Aristotle. Indeed, as Martin Luther would write later, “I have read [Aristotle] and studied him with more understanding than did Saint Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus.”6 However, by adopting Aristotle’s view of man and nature, the Church’s leading spokesmen had set that institution down the wrong path for centuries.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle’s logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham’s razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

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.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato’s theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. “A horse I see,” Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, “but not horseness”: words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

..et tamen nihil est sciens vel quiescens, nisi actualiter sit sciens vel quiescens.