For him, faith was the highest means of understanding – but this started to drive a wedge between faith and reason after Aquinas had so painstakingly brought them together. He said that human reason and empiricism could tell us nothing about God, because our intellects are so puny compared to his – and so the only way to understand God was via faith. William of Ockhamīut Ockham was still Christian. This distinction between empiricism and reason was something that was going to employ an awful lot of philosophers’ time in the coming centuries. Here’s an example: how do you know which is bigger, the inner or outer of two concentric circles? You can measure them, or by using reason, you will know that the inner circle is smaller without having to even see them. Humans could only know anything via empiricism or reason, not via speculation about things that humans can’t possibly know about. You’ve heard of Ockham’s Razor – used to cut away anything unnecessary – well, universals were unnecessary. He wasn’t the first to say this, but he was the most influential. This position was called nominalism – universals are just names. Augustine said that forms were transcendent Aquinas, immanent and Ockham that they didn’t exist. In the 14th century, William of Ockham (1285-1347) discussed the problem of universals (Plato’s forms or ideas). But philosophy and culture were about to change again – from Aquinas and Dante to Ockham and Petrarch. Danteĭante (1265-1351) did for culture what Aquinas did for philosophy his Divine Comedy was meant to promote Christianity, but his cosmology was Greek – concentric zones up to heaven and down to hell, with humans on earth at the centre. This was the first real challenge to the power of the church, but those challenges were going to increase in number. There was a reaction against this – a wave of spirituality (still Christian), led by people like Meister Eckhart, who stressed the internal communication with God, without the need for church finery. Those at the top of the church hierarchy were extremely rich. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the church was becoming more materialistic and interested in worldly power. They had brought philosophy into theology, and taken the first steps towards ending the church’s dominance (exactly the opposite of what they wanted). Thus here there is an individuality without intelligence, not, as in the case of the plant, where each unit of the individual is itself a mass of such units on the contrary, here there is indifference in more extended difference and distinction.By reconciling the two giants of ancient philosophy with Christianity, Augustine and Aquinas, although culpable in the torture and murder of many thousands of innocent people, were world-changers who allowed us to eventually start to break away from myth again, via the Renaissance (the ‘re-birth’ of culture, due to the rediscovery of classical art, literature and philosophy), the Reformation and the Enlightenment. For the form or the absolute concept is not itself unity or universality again. For since this subsumption itself is one-sided, not intuition subsumed under the concept in the like way over again, life here is an empirically real, infinitely dispersed life, displaying itself in the most manifold forms. “The concept of the living thing subsumed under intuition is the animal. Universals: a common name for objects or things, like “redness” or “wealth” Metaphysical: beyond the physical realm Nominalism: theory of mind and language universals are just names for convenient categorizations of the world for realistic interaction with them Empiricism: true knowledge only comes through the senses A few definitions… Lived from 1280 to 1349 Born in the town of Ockham in Surrey, England Member of Franciscan order Studied theology at Oxford Awesome with logic Background on Ockham
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