The Franciscans, as I said, were the primary critics of St Thomas. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk and scientist, pointed out that reason does actually need experience in order to have something to reason about -- a hint of modern empiricism in the Middle Ages!

But St. Thomas’ severest critic was John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), a Franciscan monk and professor at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He believed that the authority of the church was everything. The will is supreme and intellect is subordinate to it. Although a conceptualist (like Thomas), of the thing, the idea, and the name, he felt that it was the individual thing that was the most real. His student William would take that and run with it.

William of Occam in England (1280-1347) was another Franciscan monk. Like Roger Bacon, he believed that, without sensory contact with things, the universal is inconceivable. In fact, he said universals are only names we give groups of things -- a return to the nominalism of Roscellinus.

William is best known for the principle that is named for him: Occam’s razor. “Don’t multiply causes unnecessarily.” usually interpreted to mean that the simplest explanation is the best. Over time, this came to mean “if you don’t need a supernatural explanation, don’t use it!”

The result of William's thinking is skepticism: Without universals, there are no generalizations, categories, classifications, theories, laws of nature, etc. All we can have is an accumulation of facts about individual entities. We will see this again in the philosophy of David Hume.

William of Occam, although he was a devout Christian, is often considered the turning point from the religious worldview of the Middle Ages to the scientific worldview of the Renaissance and the Modern era.

You could say that philosophy rested a while around this time, not for a lack of ideas, but because of over a hundred years of Troubles. There was a great famine in Europe from 1315 to 1317. The economy spiralled downward and the banks collapsed in the first few decades of the 1300s. The Hundred Years War began in 1337 and lasted about 120 years (despite the name). The Black Death, a plague carried by the fleas on rats, came from the Near East and killed over one third of the population between 1347 and 1352. Peasant revolts in England, France, and elsewhere were cruelly suppressed between 1378 and 1382. The Church was split between two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon, between 1378 and 1417.

But these events, horrible as they were, turned out to be temporary setbacks, and an even greater explosion of intellectual activity was about to begin!

© Copyright 2000 by C. George Boeree