William of Ockham (also Occam, Hockham, or any of several other spellings, pronounced /ˈɒkəm/) (c. 1288 - c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. He is considered — along with Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the Islamic scholar Averroes — to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controver...
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William of Ockham (also Occam, Hockham, or any of several other spellings, pronounced /ˈɒkəm/) (c. 1288 - c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. He is considered — along with Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the Islamic scholar Averroes — to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is April 10.
William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at a young age. He is believed to have studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname...
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