My understanding is that those who are inclined to take a negative view of Ockham do so primarily because of his stance on the question of the ontological status of universals. Ockham was a nominalist, which means that he thought that universals were not real entities existing independently of human minds, but were instead human inventions concocted for the sake of linguistic convenience. (What I am referring to as "universals" are what you are calling "categories" in this videos. The contemporary philosophical debate about universals and realism vs. nominalism is a fascinating topic, by the way.) Scholasticism was characterized, by contrast, by a realist answer to the question of universals. Scholastics like Aquinas were Aristotelian realists who thought that universals were real things, but that they only existed as instantiated in various particulars. Ockham thought that this Aristotelian realist position had the implication that god would not destroy any entity exemplifying some universal without also destroying that universal - and hence also destroying *every* particular that exemplified that universal. This would mean, for instance, that God could not damn any one person to hell without also damning all of humanity to hell, which Ockham thought was an absurd and illegitimate limitation on the power of God. Because of things like the Condemnation of 1277, Ockham and those following him began to emphasize power as more central to the nature of God than reason, and this view required him to reject realism about universals. So why is this bad? Well, for one thing, if universals are not real entities, then that means that every object in the world is radically individuated and that one cannot legitimately compare any two objects to each other. There are no universals - and hence no essences - that could make such a comparison legitimate. And if one cannot legitimately compare entities, then that has *extremely* wide-ranging skeptical consequences. It means that there cannot legitimately be such a thing as science, since all science rests on the ability to compare things and point to relations between them. Reason is, in a sense, powerless to accomplish much of anything - since any real power of ratiocination would depend on the real existence of universals. It doesn't take long for the idea that God can only be known by faith to emerge from this. Ockahmism really undermines the possibility of _any_ kind of rational theology. That is what nominalism leads to. That is why Ockham painted himself into a corner with his blistering critiques. *There was no escape available for him from those critiques because his critiques had undercut the very basis for such an escape.* There are intellectual historians who have attempted to draw parallels between Ockham's thought and schools of thought like logical positivism and even nihilism. Given the extreme skeptical consequences of Ockham's philosophical position, I am inclined to agree with such an assessment.

Thanks for this. I have always had a great liking of Ockham. What you have brought out about him confirms it.

even as an atheist I find your lecture quite even handed between denominations, esrly heresies and in dealing with pagans. thank you for posting.

Nice job Professor - That's the best I've ever heard Ockham explained - To the Professor! hear hear! - Just like of Inkling yore

@RyanReevesM

8 жыл бұрын

JALMAR169 // NIce....you can just send the beer to me in the mail. :)

@JALMAR169

8 жыл бұрын

Ryan Reeves WE could send you a ration of finely crafted NW micro brew - But think the rocking and bouncing would probably bruise the ambrosia.....not the same effect of a ship board single malt headed for India - So in lieu of the shipment we will hoist one to the Professor just like we did on Tolkien's twelvity third - - -"to the Professor" I wonder if Wm of Ockham preferred ale.......Or was he a mead bibbler???

Thanks bro! This is really going to help with my presentation on Ockham. Will be sure to cite you of course!

Agreed; Thanks For The Up-Loaded-Teaching!

Thoroughly enjoyed that, thank you.

I think it was not Aristotle that was being attacked but the use of him by the scholastics.

It's less like adding new chess pieces to the already established game so that you can win, and more like adding the pieces necessary to make the game playable by anyone. In taking the pieces away, the game was made unplayable. I'm not saying that is what William of Ockham intended, but it was the result. The ultimate question at stake here is, is the world intelligible. Aristotle and the Scholastics both argued that the answer was yes, and they reasoned out what was necessary for the world to be logically intelligible. There is no other view that provides a truly intelligible world. Every other attempt to provide a logical framework that explains the world intelligibly has failed and this is precisely why we live in a 'post-modern' world that no longer believes there is such a thing as an intelligible world. In essence what Ockham did was re-introduce metaphysical skepticism, which lead eventually to epistemological skepticism, and in our day has produced even linguistic skepticism. The death of objective meaning.

@RyanReevesM

8 жыл бұрын

+Joshua Cooley // Hey Joshua. That's a good balance to the illustration. It may have been better to overstate that the analogy is what Ockham believed realists were doing. What you counterbalance is what the realists would have said BACK to Ockham. It's a very interesting debate, though.

@abdulnur5047

8 жыл бұрын

+Ryan Reeves my brother u teach by explaining it better than as clear as it gets jazak'allah

@sophiaperennis2360

8 жыл бұрын

+Joshua Cooley I think from this we can simply infer that Ockham was wrong, simply because the logical conclusion of his thinking leads to absurdity (hence why he does not provide an alternative. Because he can't). It is a bit like arguing that one cannot speak of truth, because the existence of said truth cannot be shown to exist, without taking into account one is affirming truth in the process of arguing the negation of truth. With this in mind, we can thus say that truth cannot not exist, which is the "common sense" (to paraphrase Chesterton) position people like Aquinas adopted, vis his ideas on Being and so forth.

@joshuacooley1417

7 жыл бұрын

Agreed Sophia. With Ockham and with his contemporary Marsilius of Padua we begin to see the emergence of an idea that will come to define the dialogue between faith and reason through out modernity. It is specifically the idea that natural truth and spiritual truth can be two different truths that do not have to agree. In other words, intellectually you can believe something to be false, or without solid basis, and yet still adhere to it as a matter of faith. For the first time intellectuals divorced faith and reason and allowed them to stand in disagreement rather than trying to find the harmony between them. I suspect that this was allowed in Ockham's thought because of his radical voluntarism. There had always been disagreements over the primacy of will vs. the primacy of intellect, but Ockham seems to have taken the idea of the primacy of will in God to a pretty extreme degree. In his views there is essentially no "reason" to God's ordering of creation, or the the plan of redemption. God's will is utterly and completely free even from his own intellect and thus what he wills is essentially arbitrary and it could have been anything. We accept what he actually willed, and he works within that construct, but there is no reason why he willed that nor any reason why he didn't will something else. Thus the world doesn't really have to be intelligible in his view, nor does the plan of salvation.

adorable kids, you are very blessed!

Will you please give time frames example 400ad etc.. when talking about fathers or people in general, thank you for your videos, God bless

20:00 And what would the equivalent of the Toad be in terms of Scholastic philosophy, if William's analogy were right?

Thank you.. that was a very enlightening and awesome perspective

Very interesting. Ockham seems to stand at the cross roads between faith and reason. Can we say that? What I take from your video is that Ockham peered down the road of reason and philosophy and realized that these were not the correct tools for interpreting his theology. A "non-overlapping magisteria" sort of reaction. Would you say that he had equal respect for both reason and faith? Probably not, but I'm wondering what his opinion is about reason, given that he seems to utilize it so effectively but then ultimately rejects it as a means of inquiry into his faith.

@RyanReevesM

8 жыл бұрын

KarlHeinzofWpg // Hey, Karl. Great questions! He certainly is at a crossroads and is peering ahead to where he felt Scholasticism was going. He is certainly hitting the break peddle, but mostly on basing things on Aristotle. You are right that he is very much in favor of faith and reason, but he was opposed rather to a certain way people before him used reason. So he is not attacking reason itself by any means.

Aristotle had some great ideas but had no biblical basis; Ockham was a great revolutionary THX!!! Wish I had you in Seminary...

It is rational to believe the truths of Christianity that could not have been discovered without revelation from God, because we have rationally certain evidence that God, who can neither be deceived nor deceive, has revealed them for our salvation. Therefore faith is rational and christian faith and reason do not conflict.

Believe or vishes is not a option of understanding then acting? Did Okham said what could replase it during practical understanding like analysing results of experiment? :)

Thanks !

Ryan, (or any one else who can answer) I have a question about theism and deism. I was raised in the Russian Orthodox church, but do not consider myself part of any religion, however, I am not an atheist. Far from it. My question is concerning a synthesis between theism and deism. I feel like one can live in a deistic reality and nothing will intervene but at the same time there is almost an over hanging net of grace so to speak, that one can accept and have ones existence effected by it. The idea that reality is neither theistic or deistic but rather, what one makes of it. It is important to state that this grace, as i called it, is not acting in any way, it is just there, completely stagnant. A crude metaphor would be that you are taking a math exam and there is a calculator on your desk. You dont have to use the calculator but it is there. It will never say use me but its very presence implies its usefulness. Furthermore, If you decide to use it it will not do anything that you do not directly will. Again, a very crude metaphor but it may help shed light. Have there been any theologians with a similar out look? If this does not make sense I apologize. The closest I have found with this idea is the grace perfecting nature of Aquinas. Thank you for any help you can give.

@walexwetchina487

8 жыл бұрын

i guess the idea is essentially theism minus "direct" action by the deity. The deity being essentially inanimate.

Ryan, may I inquire whether you are a keen and active theologian/philosopher or primarily a historian? If the former, can you engage with us in examining the use by militant atheist scientists canonising Ockham's razor to attempt to demolish the current crop of Christians who are scientists and biblical scholars demonstrating that science does not establish beyond doubt that there is not and cannot be a creator? As a lifelong scholar in physical and biological sciences and theology and philosophy, I find myself agreeing that there is growing advances in science which make it more and more certain that science is not and cannot disprove the biblical data on creation ex nihilo and miracles. If not, can you direct me to authors/scholars who are working in this field?

We study go. when we study anything! Because, (whether we were created by the god of Moses, or by an alien) studying the world around us, inevitably brings us closer to discovering who god is.

What is Scholasticism summarized in layman's terms?

@brianchidester3334

7 жыл бұрын

It's a movement starting around the 11th century wherein the Latin West goes from training lawyers, medical practitioners, and theologians via apprenticeship to the setting up of the university system, with curriculum and degrees. In terms of philosophy and theology, the word "scholasticism" usually applies to the three century period between the 11th and 14th century when dialectic and the Aristotelian method gets strongly applied to Christian theology. Some of the leading writers of this movement include Anselm, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure.

@SuperGreatSphinx

7 жыл бұрын

Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics ("scholastics," or "schoolmen") of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending dogma in an increasingly pluralistic context. It originated as an outgrowth of and a departure from Christian monastic schools at the earliest European universities. The first institutions in the West to be considered universities were established in Italy, France, Spain, and England in the late 11th and the 12th centuries for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology, such as Schola Medica Salernitana, the University of Bologna, and the University of Paris. It is difficult to define the date at which they became true universities, although the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe are a useful guide, held by the Catholic Church and its various religious orders. Scholasticism is not so much a philosophy or a theology as a method of learning, as it places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions. Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions. In the classroom and in writing, it often takes the form of explicit disputation; a topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the form of a question, opponents' responses are given, a counterproposal is argued and opponents' arguments rebutted. Because of its emphasis on rigorous dialectical method, scholasticism was eventually applied to many other fields of study. As a program, scholasticism began as an attempt at harmonization on the part of medieval Christian thinkers, to harmonize the various authorities of their own tradition, and to reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of Aristotle but also of Neoplatonism. Some of the main figures of scholasticism include Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas's masterwork Summa Theologica is considered to be the pinnacle of scholastic, medieval, and Christian philosophy; it began while Aquinas was regent master at the studium provinciale of Santa Sabina in Rome, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. Important work in the scholastic tradition has been carried on well past Aquinas's time, for instance by Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina, and also among Lutheran and Reformed thinkers.

Nice.

can someone here give an example of an actual argument that scholastics were building upon flimsy "idealized concepts based only upon a figment of their imagination"? I'm not familiar enough with schoalistic reasoning of this era to have any idea what Ockham might have been trying to prevent...

Given to think about it, Plato and Aristotle most likely would have rejected the christian faith using their philosophy like philosophers in the ancient world actually did. So using Aristotle to reason about the christian god comes dangerously close to a joke. Moreover, as an engineer, I might be using more of Ockhams philosophy then I realised before. It might even explain my sometimes rather dull outlook on Plato. Thanks for making me (maybe) a little smarter.

28:00 But isn't this concept, proposed by William, to derive doctrines like the Trinity MERELY from Scripture WITHOUT using philosophy at all just an illusion. It might be difficult for us, with all your theological and philosophical and traditional knowledge, to read the Bible as if none of this existed (and I don't think the Bible was meant to be read that way) but if we actually did, we wouldn't come up with the Trinity as "one God in three persons", let alone with a view that would be decidedly non-modalist. Only when we try to have a synopsis, using philosophy to put all the pieces together, can we arrive at one or the other theologies of the Trinity or decided which of the various systems describes God best.

@turbopro10

8 жыл бұрын

+st r // perhaps that is what Ockham understood: that it may not be feasible to think your way to the Trinity; we get there by faith. as you may be aware, there are still lots of discussion on the Trinity.

@str.77

8 жыл бұрын

turbopro10 that's a false dichotomy.

It's like in other words don't blame God for your downfalls.. you need to go back and open that drawer and read that Bible again lol

William of Ockham was not a pioneer of "Scripture Alone" Protestantism as you imply in this letcure.