William of Ockham
William of Ockham was a Franciscan logician who taught at Oxford that only individual things exist and that no more of them should be supposed than necessary, was summoned to Avignon to answer for it, and spent his last twenty years in Munich writing that the pope was a heretic and the emperor did not need him. He was born about 1287 in the Surrey village his name records, entered the Franciscans as a boy, and lectured on the Sentences at Oxford around 1317 to 1319 without ever being licensed as a master, which is why the later title was the Venerable Inceptor. What he taught was that universals - humanity, whiteness - are names for the way the mind groups individuals and not things in the world, that knowledge begins in the intuition of particulars, and that God's freedom is such that nothing in creation had to be as it is, which put theology and natural philosophy on different footings and made the second an empirical science. The rule of economy is his in spirit though the phrase is later. His chancellor accused him of heresy and in 1324 he was called to the papal court at Avignon, where a commission examined his writings for four years without a verdict. While he waited the head of his order, Michael of Cesena, was called to the same court over the Franciscan doctrine that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing, which John XXII had declared heretical, and asked Ockham to read the pope's bulls. He read them and concluded that the pope was the heretic. In May 1328 he, Michael and two others fled Avignon by night to Pisa and the court of Louis IV of Bavaria, who was fighting the same pope over his election as emperor. The line that he would defend the emperor with his pen if the emperor defended him with his sword is the tradition. He was excommunicated and lived in the Franciscan house at Munich until his death in April 1347, probably of the plague, writing the political works that argued that imperial power came from the people and not from Rome, and that a general council could judge a pope. The conciliarists, Wycliffe and Luther read them.
- Lived: 1287 CE – 1347 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: philosopher, theologian, friar
