Thinker · Scholastics

Ockham

c.1287 – 1347 · Scholastics · Faith meets reason

He took the most rigorous tool reason had built, a principle of economy, and turned it on the cathedral that the schools had spent a thousand years raising. Where his predecessors saw a world thick with real shared natures and necessary connections that the mind could read off by pure thought, Ockham saw a universe of bare individuals, held together by nothing but the free choice of an all-powerful God who could have made it all otherwise. Trim every explanation to the fewest things that do the work, he argued, and most of the metaphysical furniture vanishes. What is left is a world reason can no longer deduce, only observe, and a faith that no longer needs reason's permission to be true.