English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tendency to adopt the doctrine of a 4 twofold truth ’ which was fatal to the presupposition of Scholastic philo¬ sophy—the essential identity of the content of faith and that of knowledge. Nor can it be doubted that a part at least of Ockham’s own interest in the distinction was the freedom of scientific inquiry which it promised and which constituted its positive significance for his successors in English philosophy. The later Bacon and Hobbes draw the same sharp and absolute line of distinction between the spheres of faith and knowledge, the only difference between these philosophers and William of Ockham being that the religious interest in the distinction which was apparently primary for him is in them entirely sub¬ ordinated to the scientific interest in intellectual freedom. Probably it was the union in Ockham of these two interests, no less than his struggle against the papal authority, that appealed so powerfully to Luther, who spoke of William as ‘mein lieber Meister Ockham.’ But it is as the ‘renewer of nominalism’ that Ockham is best known in the history of philosophy. The doc¬ trine of realism, variously modified, had finally established itself as the orthodox doctrine of Scholastic philosophy. The victory of nominalism which marked the close of the Scholastic age was the result of the persistence with which Ockham urged the claims of a theory ofknowledge and reality which lay nearer to experience than that which underlay the doctrine of realism, and at the same time recognised and reinterpreted the truth which that doctrine contained but had never succeeded in expressing. The knowledge of existence is always, Ockham contends, intuitive, never abstract or conceptual; the real is always individual, never universal. The realists have abstracted the universal or common element from the individual things in which alone it really exists ; they have hypos- tatised these abstract universals, and attributed to them a higher degree of reality than that possessed by the individual things whose properties they are. Ockham’s fundamental principle is that 4 plurality is not to be predicated without necessity ’ (Non est ponenda pluralltas,