William of Ockham Quotes on Knowledge
William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) developed the most rigorous late-medieval nominalism. Universals are not real entities outside the mind nor mind-independent constituents of created things — only individual substances and their qualities exist in nature — and the appearance of universals in human cognition is the work of mental concepts that signify many individuals at once without committing the cognizer to a Platonist or moderate realist ontology. The methodological corollary, Ockham's razor — entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity — is the practical expression of the nominalist commitment, and shapes the analysis of causation, divine omnipotence, the possibility of intuitive cognition of non-existents, and the political theology of papal authority Ockham developed during his exile in Munich at the imperial court.
Quotes
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“Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.”
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate -
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”
Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora. -
Attributed to William of Ockham:
“Every universal is a thought of the mind, and not anything outside the mind.”
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Attributed to William of Ockham:
“Nothing is to be posited as necessary in nature unless it is established either by self-evidence, or by experience, or by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”
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“Logic is the most useful tool of all the arts . 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.”
Summa Logicae (c. 1323) , Prefatory Letter, as translated by Paul Vincent Spade (1995) -
“Summa Logicae (c. 1323) , Prefatory Letter, as translated by Paul Vincent Spade (1995)”
Logic is the most useful tool of all the arts . 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 princip -
“The head of Christians does not, as a rule, have power to punish secular wrongs with a capital penalty and other bodily penalties and it is for thus punishing such wrongs that temporal power and riches are chiefly necessary; such punishment is granted chiefly to the secular power. The pope therefore, can, as a rule, correct wrongdoers only with a spiritual penalty. It is not, therefore, necessary ”
A Letter to the Friars Minor " (1334) as translated in A Letter to the Friars Minor and other Writings (1995) edited by A. S. McGrade and John Kilcullen, p. 204. -
“Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate”
Plurality is never to be posited without necessity . Quaestiones et decisiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi [Questions and the decisions of the Sentences of Peter Lombard] (1495), i, dist. 27, qu. 2, K; also in The Development of Logic (1962), by William Calvert Kneale, p. 243; similar statements were common among Scholastic philosophers, at least as early as John Duns ( Duns Sco -
“Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.”
It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer. Summa Totius Logicae , i. 12, cited in "Ockham's Razor" by Paul Newall at Galilean Library (25 June 2005) -
“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, ”
Opera Theologica (1986), edited by Gedeon Gal, Vol. I, p. 31.