Contribution of Ockham's logic to fourteenth century’s philosophy

Abstract

William of Ockham was an English philosopher of the fourteenth century with contributions to the logic of terms and the nominalist movement, marked by the critical sense of the Early Middle Ages by post-Thomism. In the Middle Ages, the conceptualist discourse of Peter Abelard generated problems of use of beings and universals, with Ockham being the philosopher who advocated the method of not using entities for generalizations or hasty conclusions, known as Ockham's razor. This article aims to present the contributions of William de Ockham's philosophy to the theory of knowledge and to the path of logic in experimental and intuitive knowledge. As a scholastic, Ockham maintains the Aristotelian style in writing and relies on theological foundations in his logic, but as a Franciscan, at Oxford University, he improves questions of platonic realism and approaches Roger Bacon's experimentalism in the scientific method. Ockham met John Duns Scotus, whose logical debates contributed to the development of terminist logic and theory of assumption. The post-Tomist philosopher supports his logic in the particular evidences of the singular, by the use of the term supposition and paves the way for British empiricism. Ockham contributes to Education by its relationship to logical explanations through experiences.