Tarnas, R. (1991). The passion of the western mind: Understanding the ideas that have shaped our world view. New York: Ballantine Books.

Many people have heard of Ockham’s Razor. Basically it states that the simplest explanation is usually the best—to put in very simple terms. Few,  however, understand who Ockham was nor the circumstances that led to his ground-breaking philosophical leap.

While Aquinas saw possible integration of ancient philosophy with Christianity, Ockham is viewed as the man responsible for “cutting the link between theology and philosophy” (p. 205). The problem as Ockham saw it is that the only reality that can be known for certain is human thought and language. (This is challenged by later philosophers, but this blog is limited to Ockham’s position.) He held that there is no way to know the transcendent Forms (Ideas) or universals; these are merely concepts, not real entities (the nominalist viewpoint.)

Other thinkers such as Duns Scotus proposed two separate realities—that of the particular (individual entity) and its corresponding universal on the metaphysical plain. However, Ockham felt that universals as concepts were derived from the only humanly perceived reality—that of “concrete individual beings” (p. 203):

For Ockham, the issue was no longer the metaphysical question as to how ephemeral individuals came from real transcendant Forms, but the epistemological question as to how abstract universal concepts came from real individuals . . . the problem of epistemology, grammar, and logic—not of metaphysics or ontology. (p. 203)

This differentiation still plagues Western thought. For example, I started reading a book by Steven Pinker (The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature). I’ve taken a break from it because I need to be doing research on other topics; however, much of Pinker’s book is about how the mind categorizes concepts. Many of the concepts he writes about are very abstract. The goal is to seek the most general law with the fewest exceptions to explain linguistic phenomena and human thought. Arguments between those who believe in an innate universal grammar and those who believe that children learn strictly from their environment still seem incapable of providing elegant explanations.

So what happens at this time (14^th Century) is a split occurs:

• The via antiqua is characterized by the philosophical position of Aristotle and Aquinas in which there are two realities: revelation through God and empirical through direct experience.
• The via moderna is characterized by the path of Ockham in which all knowledge comes through sensory perception of a concrete world. In Ockham’s belief, there was no “divine light” through which man could understand underlying metaphysical entities.

It was not at all Ockham’s intent to deny Christian faith. In fact, he was a devout Franciscan who advocated strongly the necessity of the acetic life and poverty of the Church. Some of his beliefs may have inspired the great reformers:

Ockham not only upheld radical poverty against the secular wealth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he also defended the right of the English King to tax Church property (as Jesus, in “rendering unto Caesar,” had submitted to temporal authority), condemned the Church’s infringement on individual freedom, denied the legitimacy of papal infallibility, and outlined the various circumstances in which a pope could be rightfully deposed.  (p. 206)

References

Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature.Toronto, ON: Penguin Group (Canada).