William of Occam Concepts

Data Mining the Web: Uncovering Patterns in Web Content, Structure, and Usage

by Zdravko Markov and Daniel T. Larose · 5 Apr 2007

the quality of the clustering it describes? Interestingly, there is a natural answer to this question, known as Occam’s razor. In the fourteenth century William of Occam formulated a very general principle stating that “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, among several alternatives, the simplest is usually

The Productive Programmer

by Neal Ford · 8 Dec 2008 · 224pp · 48,804 words

accidental complexity with software, but you can continually try to minimize it. NOTE Maximize work on essential complexity; kill accidental complexity. Occam’s Razor Sir William of Occam was a monk who disdained ornate, elaborate explanations. His contribution to philosophy and science is known as Occam’s Razor, which says that given multiple

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

by Johnjoe McFadden · 27 Sep 2021

about uncovering those bones – the simple building blocks of our universe – with a tool known as Occam’s razor, named after a Franciscan friar called William of Occam, who lived seven centuries before Penzias and Wilson. My own interest in simplicity began at a biology research meeting held at my workplace at the

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could find any information that might save the reputation of our locally inspired razor. My search soon revealed that the razor was indeed named after William of Occam, born in the nearby Surrey village in the late thirteenth century. After joining the Franciscans he studied theology in Oxford where he developed his preference

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plainly adverse to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain experience, and fraternal charity. I have decided that some of them should be inserted here. William of Occam, ‘A Letter to the Friars Minor’, 13341 Escape On the night of 26 May 1328, three friars, tonsured and dressed in the grey robes of

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travelled widely between European courts as representatives of their order. The third fugitive, who was around forty and slight of build, was the English scholar William of Occam. Although more than a decade younger than his Franciscan brothers, William’s dangerous ideas had already brought him notoriety and a charge of heresy. The

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show that his theological scientia could explain even miracles. The taste of God Aquinas’s final philosophical sleight of hand would, a generation later, earn William of Occam his charge of heresy and, a century or so later, spark the great schism of Western Christianity. It concerned the miracle of the Eucharist, or

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will remember that Aquinas had cleverly manipulated Aristotle’s notion of universals in order to incorporate the miracle of the Eucharist into his Christianised science. William of Occam’s nominalist philosophy denied that universals existed. With universals dismissed as mere names, William went on to dismiss ten of Aristotle’s twelve categories, reducing

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Bergamo was charged with taking the letter to Avignon. After arriving in the papal city and delivering the letter he publicly criticised Pope John XXII. William of Occam surely witnessed this event. The Pope responded by exercising his powers of dominion and threw the lawyer into the palace prison. He then summoned Michael

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easy to imagine the group poring over manuscripts together by candlelight in the stone-cold college library.i Heytesbury and Dumbleton were heavily influenced by William of Occam’s nominalist logic.7 Yet once again, Occam’s biggest impact on science at this time was his freeing of mathematics from its philosophical shackles

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soon described by colleagues as a ‘celebrated philosopher’ and was twice appointed rector of the University of Paris. He would certainly have been there when William of Occam may have passed through its cloisters. Sadly, we know very few facts about Buridan’s life, except for several scandalous rumours. Most centred on his

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Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, and Metaphysics. Buridan’s major work was Summulae de dialectica, which became the standard textbook that spread William of Occam’s nominalist logic across European universities where it became known as the via moderna or ‘new way’. In the words of the historian T. K

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the bowstring, the moving arrow generated a kind of whirlwind in the air surrounding the arrow, which continued to propel the arrow along its path. William of Occam had already spotted the flaw around a decade or so before Buridan’s deliberations.13 He pointed out that two arrows travelling in opposing directions

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a mechanical heavens operating according to terrestrial laws (as William had proposed). However, Buridan pondered an even more revolutionary, and potentially heretical, idea by importing William of Occam’s observational equivalence of motion and rest to argue that the earth, rather than the stars, might move. Like everyone else, Buridan had noted that

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to stand still in the heavens to provide Joshua with more daylight hours in which to slaughter his enemies. Despite Oresme’s theological foot-dragging, William of Occam’s via moderna had, by the 1340s, taken huge strides towards escaping the tangled thickets of Aquinas’s scientific theology. If progress had continued then

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major ports of Europe were affected. Within a handful of years, more than half of all Europeans were dead, including Thomas Bradwardine, Jean Buridan and William of Occam. Although the universities mostly survived, a shortage of teachers caused a collapse of basic education, and literacy levels plummeted. The first epidemic burned itself out

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of medieval English scholars known simply as ‘The Calculators’ as well as to a movement known as the via moderna that had been inspired by William of Occam.6 Rather like the rediscovery of Greek texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Duhem and his colleagues uncovered an entirely forgotten period of science

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and composer, they also knew to expect some philosophical interludes between the verses. Philosophy was Landini’s other great love, particularly the revolutionary nominalism of William of Occam whose ideas had trickled into Italy along the well-trodden trade, pilgrim and diplomatic routes. Landini even incorporated Occam’s philosophy into his lyrics. In

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thinkers of the Italian Renaissance who were already turning their backs on the scholastic philosophers. Despite being a member of this movement, Landini rushed to William of Occam’s defence. At the end of a long invective against ‘an ignorant man’ who has been rousing the ‘ignorant masses’ against the great philosophers of

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by the sounds of street vendors and the ‘venerable shadow disappeared into the air’. This wonderful story, uncovered only in 1983, demonstrates how, by 1380, William of Occam’s philosophy had seeped out of Oxford, Avignon, Paris and Munich, to infiltrate the fast-beating heart of the trecento. How and why Landini became

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theology and ancient philosophy texts soon exhausted, printers turned their attention to modern works on the science and philosophy of the via moderna. Most of William of Occam’s major philosophical and theological works were printed around this time. His Ordinatio, on the first book of Peter Lombard’s The Four Books of

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father of the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, humanism. Petrarch was born in Tuscany but spent most of his early life in Avignon, overlapping with William of Occam’s enforced sojourn in the city. Like Occam, he attacked the papacy as corrupt and hypocritical. Though educated in the scholastic tradition, Petrarch grew to

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’s The Supper at Emmaus (painted around 1600) where the anonymous innkeeper is probably the most imposing figure in the scene. Humanism and Hermes While William of Occam’s nominalism was an inspiration for the pioneers of humanism, as the Renaissance developed it increasingly turned its back on the scholastic philosophers and Aristotle

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years before Luther arrived in Erfurt, so it was his pupils, Johannes Nathan and Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von Usingen, who introduced Luther to the writings of William of Occam. Luther’s formative university years were hugely influenced by Occam, whom he later referred to as his ‘dear master’, insisting that ‘Occam alone understood the

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to Luther. Like St Augustine, Luther considered man to be hardly worth knowing because humanity was mostly a heap of depravity. With many echoes of William of Occam’s nominalism, he claimed that the ‘natural condition of the world is chaos and upheaval’ because ‘in His own nature God is immense and incomprehensible

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’s favour. Science and cultural revolution In many ways, there were only bad choices available to any believer confronted by the unknowable omnipotent God of William of Occam and his nominalist followers. The first was to adopt the head-in-the-sand approach by carrying on as before regardless of reason and putting

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ethics, Terminism [nominalism] prevailed here under the dominant influence of Jean Buridan.’ So there is no doubt that Copernicus was exposed to the ideas of William of Occam, his razor and his followers while at Kraków. In 1496, aged twenty-three, Copernicus left Kraków without graduating and travelled to Italy to study canon

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. Also that year, de Benevento published a collection of the works of the nominalist Albert of Saxony ‘in honour of Brother William of Occam’. Bologna was clearly awash with the works of William of Occam and the via moderna scholars during Copernicus’s education in the city. Although Copernicus came to Bologna to study canon law

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bites people with his sarcasms.’ Kepler arrived in Tübingen in 1589. The university had been founded in 1477, a little over a hundred years after William of Occam’s death, by Gabriel Biel, the Occamist philosopher described as an ‘articulate spokesman of the via moderna and… a discerning user of nominalism’.3 Biel

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predecessors Kepler had, either explicitly in wielding the razor, or implicitly via mathematical beauty or harmony, adopted simplicity as his primary criterion for model selection. William of Occam’s compass was his determination to reduce the parts list of the world to its minimum. Neither Copernicus nor Kepler were particularly concerned with numerical

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can see that Galileo taught mathematics and physics in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition and was aware of the nominalist philosophers including the Merton Calculators and William of Occam, whom he refers to several times.3 In 1592, he obtained a position at the more prestigious University of Padua, where he lectured on mathematics

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attempts leaving wounds that, according to Sarpi, revealed ‘the style of the Roman Curia’ (the Vatican court). He was also a nominalist and admirer of William of Occam, illustrating how Occam’s ideas remained in circulation in the seventeenth century as part of the intellectual background of what later came to be known

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orbit the earth. These were stunning discoveries. The heavens were not the home of gods and angels but a realm not unlike the earth, as William of Occam had speculated nearly three hundred years earlier. Galileo wrote up his astronomical observations in his short book Sidereus Nuncius or Starry Messenger. Late in January

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the humanist trust in human creativity. René Descartes, the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century (born a generation before Robert Boyle in 1596), had, like William of Occam, distilled contemporary philosophy to its minimalist basis insisting that, by this approach, he would ‘conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects

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as ‘the Monster of Malmesbury’, who published his infamous Leviathan in 1651 when Boyle was twenty-four. Hobbes (1588–1679) was a nominalist who took William of Occam’s reductionist approach further than anyone had previously dared.10 He accepted Occam’s unknowable God and elimination of universals and insisted that concepts such

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generalised to reach conclusions in the method known today as induction. Bacon was not of course the first person to use inductive arguments. For example, William of Occam made an inductive argument three centuries earlier16 when he wrote that ‘Every human being can grow, every donkey can grow, every lion, and so for

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of plants, animals and creeping things. In many ways, the biblical account of creation was the last vestige of Aquinas’s science of theology that William of Occam had taken his razor to six hundred years earlier. Aquinas had interpreted the biblical creation story within Aristotle’s philosophy, equating Aristotle’s final cause

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laws of physics would be different for different observers depending on how they move. Einstein found this idea unsettling. Rebuilding physics from the bottom up William of Occam stripped medieval scholastic philosophy, and its theological science, down to the simple premise that God is omnipotent, and then examined the consequences. Centuries later, René

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This is actually impossible as special relativity prevents any object with mass accelerating to light speed. 17 A Quantum of Simplicity … man is a quantum… William of Occam, c.13201 In 1874, a twenty-year-old student named Max Planck (1858–1947) visited the University of Munich to discuss the possibility of a

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truth. Feyerabend went on to argue that, in public education, science should not have any privileged status in school classes over mysticism, magic or religion. William of Occam would surely have disagreed. He insisted that there was a stark difference between science and religion, as science is based on reason, religion is based

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different ways of using language, or ‘language games’, whose meaning is derived solely from their use. This argument seems to have much in common with William of Occam’s nominalist insistence that words refer to ideas in our heads, rather than universals or essences that exist in the world. Seven centuries earlier Occam

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the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians and people all around the world irrespective of language and culture. It is not relative to anything. This is why William of Occam’s freeing of mathematics from the shackles of incommensurability and metabasis prohibitions (Chapter 5) was so important. Centuries later, it allowed Galileo and Newton to

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on photosynthetic microbes and algae, lived, died and were fossilised to become the rolling hillsides of the chalky North Downs in Surrey where the young William of Occam perhaps walked as a child. Arthropods, molluscs, worms, anemones, sponges, jellyfish, echinoderms and the squid-like belemnites and their cephalopod cousins, the spiral-shelled ammonites

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physics might, like living organisms, evolve. The English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79) made a similar claim. Even medieval theologians, such as William of Occam, argued that God might have created worlds different from our own. The physicists John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Seth Lloyd have all proposed that

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modern scientist, simply unscientific. Yet, as we have discovered, this steadfast preference for simplicity within science is a relatively recent innovation and owes everything to William of Occam who blew away the dusty cobwebs of medieval doctrine to provide space for a leaner and sharper science. With Occam’s razor in hand, that

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Kim, Axel Theorell. I would particularly like to thank my agent Patrick Walsh together with his wonderful team for keeping faith in the story of William of Occam and his razor through very trying times. Lastly, I would like to thank my brilliant editors Jamie Colman, Sarah Caro, Caroline Westmore and Martin Bryant

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–31 (Scholars Press, 1988). 14. Chroust, A.-H., ‘Hugo Grotius and the Scholastic Natural Law Tradition’, New Scholasticism, 17, 101–33 (1943). 15. Trachtenberg, O., ‘William of Occam and the Prehistory of English Materialism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 6, 212–24 (1945). Chapter 5: The Kindling 1. Etzkorn, G. J., ‘Codex Merton 284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman

by Timothy Ferriss · 1 Dec 2010 · 836pp · 158,284 words

.7 kg * 80%. OCCAM’S PROTOCOL I A Minimalist Approach to Mass It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. —William of Occam (c. 1288–1348), “Occam’s Razor” 100 FEET OFFSHORE, MALIBU, CALIFORNIA I was sitting on my surfboard 20 feet to the side of Neil Strauss

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) metric conversion Wells, H. G. West, Mae WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) WHR (waist-to-hip ratio) Wie, Michelle, 27.1, 27.2 Wilde, Oscar William of Occam Williams, Ted, 35.1, 37.1 Wilson, Clyde wine, 7.1, 8.1 and sleep Wired WOE (ways of eating) Wolfer, Lee, 1.1, 25

A History of Western Philosophy

by Aaron Finkel · 21 Mar 1945 · 1,402pp · 369,528 words

philosophy; though Francis, even more than Dominic, had disliked learning, the greatest names in the immediately following period are Franciscan: Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam were all Franciscans. What the friars accomplished for philosophy will be the subject of the following chapters. CHAPTER XIII Saint Thomas Aquinas THOMAS AQUINAS (b

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the Franciscans were not inclined to accept the authority of Saint Thomas. The three most important of Franciscan philosophers were Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam. Saint Bonaventura and Matthew of Aquasparta also call for notice. Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-ca. 1294) was not greatly admired in his own day, but

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with space and time. I have treated the question as I see it, under the heading “Proper Names,” in my Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. William of Occam is, after Saint Thomas, the most important schoolman. The circumstances of his life are very imperfectly known. He was born probably between 1290 and 1300

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the new form of opposition to the Pope, in which the Emperor has mainly a role of decorative dignity. He was a close friend of William of Occam, whose political opinions he influenced. Politically, he is more important than Occam. He holds that the legislator is the majority of the people, and that

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sword. It is time now to turn to Occam’s purely philosophical doctrines. On this subject there is a very good book, The Logic of William of Occam, by Ernest E. Moody. Much of what I shall have to say is based on this book, which takes a somewhat unusual view, but, I

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theories, and said that each would explain all the facts known in his day, so that there was no way of deciding between them. After William of Occam there are no more great scholastics. The next period for great philosophers began in the late Renaissance. CHAPTER XV The Eclipse of the Papacy THE

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popes became politically subservient to France, the sovereigns hostile to the French king were necessarily hostile to the Pope. This led to the protection of William of Occam and Marsiglio of Padua by the Emperor; at a slightly later date, it led to the protection of Wycliffe by John of Gaunt. Bishops, in

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still had a certain spirit of independence. This led to their conflict with John XXII (1316-34), which we have already considered in connection with William of Occam. During this conflict, Marsiglio persuaded the Emperor to march on Rome, where the imperial crown was conferred on him by the populace, and a Franciscan

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, 136 and space, 71 and Spinoza, 572, 578, 595 and Stoics, 258 and substance. See also logical analysis Logic (Hegel), 731, 734, 742 Logic of William of Occam, The (Moody), 471 logical analysis, 472, 828–836. See also language Logos, 289, 309, 326, 351, 404, 405, 437 Lollards, 486 Lombard cities, 428, 429

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of Champeaux, French scholastic philosopher (1070 ?–1121), 436 William of Malmesbury, English historian (1090?–1143?), 403 William of Moerbeke, classical scholar (fl. 13th century), 453 William of Occam. See Occam William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine (fl. ca. 910), 411 Wilson, Thomas Wood-row, 28th President of the United States (1856–1924). 551

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible

by Lance Fortnow · 30 Mar 2013 · 236pp · 50,763 words

, automated creation of, 25 voice recognition, 23 Wallach, Eli, and Kevin Bacon, 31–32 Watson (computer), 156–57 weather prediction, 16 Wiles, Andrew, 7, 110 William of Occam, 19–20 Williamson, David, 45 wire, electric charge carried by, 113–14 workers, effect of P = NP on, 27 World War II, 125–26 Xbox

Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson · 28 Sep 2001

building models of social phenomena, an often-useful principle is the so-called Occam’s razor. The principal, popularized by the fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Occam, is that one should not increase the number of entities required to explain a given phenomenon beyond what is necessary. In other words, one should

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and, 266 Weimar Republic, 67, 70 welfare elites and Germany and, 200 white(s) ANC’s guarantees for, 210 elites, 13, 15 suffrage of, 4 William of Occam, 16 winners/losers, 91 policies of, 20 Witte, Sergei, 141 workhorse models, 99–113 World Bank, 192 World Politics, 81 World War I, 324 Germany

Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

by Tom Chivers · 6 May 2024 · 283pp · 102,484 words

World,” 112 “When I’m Sixty-Four,” 121, 123 Whitson, William, 31, 32 “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (Ioannidis), 122 Wiggles, the, 123 William of Occam, 204 Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, 170 Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, 65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 265–266 Wolf Hall (Mantel

Big Bang

by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words

, deferents, equants and eccentrics for each and every planet. Fortunately for Copernicus, simplicity is a prized asset in science, as had been pointed out by William of Occam, a fourteenth-century English Franciscan theologian who became famous during his lifetime for arguing that religious orders should not own property or wealth. He propounded

The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco · 26 Sep 2006 · 1,166pp · 373,031 words

conditorem canonum. And the Pope imprisoned him for a year.” “I have heard he is now close to a friend of mine in the curia, William of Occam.” “I knew him only slightly. I don’t like him. A man without fervor, all head, no heart.” “But the head is beautiful.” “Perhaps, and

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, the good magic will become functional?” “Yes,” I said, “how can it?” “I no longer know. I have had arguments at Oxford with my friend William of Occam, who is now in Avignon. He has sown doubts in my mind. Because if only the sense of the individual is just, the proposition that

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he allows himself, an act of pride. He wants to be truly the one who decides for heaven and earth. I knew of these whisperings—William of Occam had written me. We shall see in the end whether the Pope has his way or the theologians have theirs, the voice of the whole

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living? And what would become of the cult of the saints? It was the Minorites themselves who would open hostilities in condemning the Pope, and William of Occam would be in the front rank, stern and implacable in his arguments. The conflict was to last for three years, until John, close to death

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master shared with Marsilius and had expounded that morning. The life of these dissidents became precarious in Avignon, and at the end of May, Michael, William of Occam, Bonagratia of Bergamo, Francis of Ascoli, and Henri de Talheim took flight, pursued, by the Pope’s men to Nice, then Toulon, Marseilles, and Aigues

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conditorem canonum. And the Pope imprisoned him for a year.” “I have heard he is now close to a friend of mine in the curia, William of Occam.” “I knew him only slightly. I don’t like him. A man without fervor, all head, no heart.” “But the head is beautiful.” “Perhaps, and

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, the good magic will become functional?” “Yes,” I said, “how can it?” “I no longer know. I have had arguments at Oxford with my friend William of Occam, who is now in Avignon. He has sown doubts in my mind. Because if only the sense of the individual is just, the proposition that

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he allows himself, an act of pride. He wants to be truly the one who decides for heaven and earth. I knew of these whisperings—William of Occam had written me. We shall see in the end whether the Pope has his way or the theologians have theirs, the voice of the whole

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living? And what would become of the cult of the saints? It was the Minorites themselves who would open hostilities in condemning the Pope, and William of Occam would be in the front rank, stern and implacable in his arguments. The conflict was to last for three years, until John, close to death

…

master shared with Marsilius and had expounded that morning. The life of these dissidents became precarious in Avignon, and at the end of May, Michael, William of Occam, Bonagratia of Bergamo, Francis of Ascoli, and Henri de Talheim took flight, pursued, by the Pope’s men to Nice, then Toulon, Marseilles, and Aigues