Olivi, in the fray against the Aristoteleans had declared that “entities are not
unnecessarily multiplied,” and argued that from the multiplicity of concepts
one cannot deduce the multiplicity of beings (EP, 1967: 5:536–537). And
Ockham’s Franciscan contemporary Peter Aureoli, in the thick of debate with
Thomists and ambivalent toward Duns Scotus, also argued that the constitutive
elements of things are to be limited. Aureoli’s epistemology held that universal
concepts have psychological reality but no objective grounds; knowledge of
individuals is preferable because of its clarity. Ockham represents a movement
in formation, reaping the fame and putting the others in his shadow—the usual
consequence of the law of small numbers. If Ockham was especially radical,
it was because he used the “razor” most ruthlessly to get rid of metaphysical
essences as well as other abstractions that had proliferated within the dense
networks of the field.
Ockham’s strategic stroke is to carry out this destruction while creating a
new turf on which intellectuals can work. By classifying acts of language,
Ockham points the way to a new field of logic. He breaks out of the old
Porphyrian-Aristotelean hierarchy of forms and classification of syllogisms,
opening up considerations of the logic of possibilities, conditionals, and other
innovative topics. This constitutes a structural break in the organization of
intellectual life. For these topics in logic can now be pursued as specialties,
whereas the Porphyrian logical hierarchy was part of an overarching meta-
physical system.
Ockham lays down that propositions are composed of terms, and these
have meaning only when they signify, that is, when there is an object for which
they substitute within the proposition. Words carry three main types of repre-
sentation: other words, concepts, and things. Ockham concentrates his attack
on universal concepts. No one ever observes an essence; what they think they
observe always coincides with a particular thing. Ockham asserts that a con-
cept is only a confused, indistinct way of referring to individuals, as a near-
sighted person looks at objects far away blurs them together; universal con-
cepts are merely terms which we use when we cannot pick out the actual thing
we are talking about. Accordingly God, who has perfect perception, has no
ideas but can see everything in its particularity. One can find here an echo of
Duns’s God, who can perceive every haecceitas.
In many ways Ockham is a radicalization of Duns, but ruthlessly pruned
of metaphysical abstraction. Like Duns, Ockham stresses primacy of the will
but takes it to more radical conclusions. Since there are no universal essences,
nothing impedes God from making the world in any fashion at all, and nothing
impedes him from changing it by a miracle or destroying it at any moment.
The moral good is good solely because it is God’s will; God could make stealing
or adultery right if he willed it. Other thinkers such as Mirecourt were to press486 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths