(1285?–1347/49?). The reputation of William of Ockham in philosophy and theology has never been as great as that of his 13th-century predecessor Thomas Aquinas. The reason is that Ockham stood outside the mainstream of Catholic thought in his lifetime. He was born in about 1285, probably in Surrey, England. As a youth he entered the Franciscan order and remained in it his whole life. His first love was logic, which he studied thoroughly. A philosophical principle called “Ockham’s razor” has been attributed to him. It admonishes: Do not devise more explanations than necessary for any given situation.
Ockham studied theology at Oxford University, but he was forced to leave the school when his fellow theologians denounced his ideas. He fled to Avignon, France, where he became involved in the conflict over poverty between the pope and the Franciscans. He fled Avignon because of papal hostility and settled in Munich, Bavaria. There he continued to write on logic and against the church’s vast wealth until his death, probably from bubonic plague, in either 1347 or 1349.