In Our Time - Ockham's Razor

Episode Date: May 31, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophical ideas of William Ockham including Ockham's Razor. In the small village of Ockham, near Woking in Surrey, stands a church. Made of grey stone, it has a pitched roof and an unassuming church tower but parts of it date back to the 13th century. This means they would have been standing when the village witnessed the birth of one of the greatest philosophers in Medieval Europe. His name was William and he became known as William of Ockham.William of Ockham’s ideas on human freedom and the nature of reality influenced Thomas Hobbes and helped fuel the Reformation. During a turbulent career he managed to offend the Chancellor of Oxford University, disagree with his own ecclesiastical order and get excommunicated by the Pope. He also declared that the authority of rulers derives from the people they govern and was one of the first people so to do. Ockham’s razor is the idea that philosophical arguments should be kept as simple as possible, something that Ockham himself practised severely on the theories of his predecessors. But why is William of Ockham significant in the history of philosophy, how did his turbulent life fit within the political dramas of his time and to what extent do we see his ideas in the work of later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and even Martin Luther?With Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford; Marilyn Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University; Richard Cross, Professor of Medieval Theology at Oriel College, Oxford

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.com.com. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the small village of Occam near Woking in Surrey stands a church, made of grey stone. It has a pitched roof and an unassuming church tower. Parts of it date back to the 13th century. This means it would have been standing when the village witnessed the birth

of one of the greatest philosophers in medieval Europe. His name was William, and he became known as William of Ockham. In the following 63 years, William of Ockham managed to offend the Chancellor of Oxford University, disagree with his own ecclesiastical order, and get excommunicated by the Pope. He also declared that the authority of rulers derived from the people they govern, and were so brilliantly reductive with the theories of his colleagues that Ockham's razor remains a philosophical principle today. But why exactly is William O'Ockham significant in the history of philosophy?

How did his turbulent life fit within the political dramas of his time, and to what extent do we see his ideas in the work of later thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes, and even Martin Luther? With me to discuss William Wockham, Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Baleigh at College Oxford, Marilyn Adams, Regis Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, and Richard Cross, Professor of Medieval Theology at Oriel College Oxford. Anthony Kenny, William Wockham was born about 1285,

intellectually speaking, what sort of world was he born into? Well, it's quite an exciting world. It's about universities are still comparatively new things. They've been going for just ever 100 years, the two greatest ones being Oxford and Paris. And Occam comes to Oxford at a time when Oxford is beginning to take over from Paris, I think, as the centre of exciting philosophical arts. ideas.

Ockham was a member of the Franciscan order. Simultaneously with the invention of the universities, you have the introduction of these new itinerant preachers, begging friars, mendicant friars, as they're called. In two great orders, the Dominicans founded by St. Dominic and the Franciscans founded by St. Francis. and probably the best-known medieval philosopher is Thomas Aquinas, who was a Dominican mainly at Paris. Now you have a succession of Franciscans at Oxford.

In the generation before William Ockham, you have John Duns Scotus, who, in my view, it was probably the most brilliant philosopher ever to have taught in Oxford, Scotus had a very elaborate system of metaphysics. And in particular, he believed that in each of us, indeed, in every material object, there were two essential elements. There was a common nature, the common human nature which all four of us sitting around this table share,

but also an individuating principle. Some people called it a haxiatas, a thisness. And my hexiatas makes me not just a human being, but this human being. This individuating principle, which became very much associated with Duns, Scotus and his pupils, very much excited Gerard Manley Hopkins in the 19th century, probably the best-known modern admirer of Scotus. and Hopkins wrote several poems about the business that everything had, whether they were kingfishers or beetles or bugs or human beings above all.

This elaborate metaphysical system, of which I've only just picked up the tiny corner, was quite influential in Oxford when Occam came, but Occam didn't like it at all. Before we get back to Occam's opposition to Scotus, can you bring in, you say the centre of, as it were, philosophical power, please excuse the crudeness of that phrase, had moved from the parish letter, let us say, of Abelar, to the Oxford of Duns Scotus. But the umbrella was Aristotle, wasn't it? Can you tell us, is that right? And if so, can you give it, can you say, put it in better words than that? Well, Thomas Aquinas at Paris, I think was the most efficient Aristotetian. Scholar of the 13th century, the person most effective in bringing together the Christian tradition derived through St. Augustine and the Church Fathers, with the newly discovered, rediscovered works of Aristotle. and the texts of Aristotle, which started out being forbidden in the University of Paris at the beginning of the 13th century,

had by now become the standard texts in the arts subjects in philosophy. But the standard text to lecture on in philosophy was something called the sentences of Peter Lombard, a collection of authoritative texts with comments that was what everybody started their lecturing life by lecturing on, and we have, from most of the great philosophers and theologians of the age, we have their commentaries on the sentences and works also about Aristotle. Marilynne Adams, and we don't know much about Occam's early life,

but you probably know more than anyone else. Can you tell us something about his early education? and then Anthony Kennedy Kennedy had given the background to Oxford what he did when he got there. Well, you're right that we don't know much about his early life. We think we know that he was born in Occam and that he must have entered the Franciscan order at an early age. I think they're 12 to 14 years old,

and so he would have been sent up to Oxford, you know, at a fairly early stage because it really covered what you call grammar school. We call high school as well as a university education, a college education in those days. He was, he lectured on the sentences between 1317 and 1319, and during that period he was ordained deacon in Southern Cathedral, which was then in the Diocese of Winchester, it seems, and he was licensed to hear confessions, as the friars would have been licensed to do at that time. So he, he was licensed to do. So he,

He lectured the sentences during that time, and then at that point, he became a bachelor. He got his bachelor's degree. And then he went to a London study house probably where he taught philosophy and wrote a number of works on logic and physics while he was waiting in the queue to take up a position as regent master. That was how you got your MA by being a teacher doing a full stint of teaching at the university. But the friars were allowed only one chair each, and so he had to stand in the queue, and John Lutterall was not very much in favor of Ackham, and there were others in the queue, so Ackham waited.

And so he waited until 1324 when other events took their course. Can you tell us about one of the things that Ockham interested himself in, his answer to the problem of universals? What is the problem, and what was his answer? Well, the problem is really a problem about whether similarity has. to be grounded in the identity of metaphysical components. So if each of us is a human being, we're similar, we're maximally similar with respect to being human being, with respect to rational animality. But does that similarity between two individuals among individual human beings

have to be grounded in a common metaphysical constituent, which we all share? And if it does, then would there have to be another constituent, which makes us to be the very individuals that we are, the hexity as as Tony was saying. And so Occam, so that was the dominant theory, it was the theory that had been defended by Scotus, who was the most prominent Franciscan

theologian and philosopher in those days. And Occam argued that the trouble with that theory is that you will not be able to give an adequate account of the connection between the common element and the individuating element, an account that will make a philosophical sense that will avoid contradiction.

And for that reason, he denied that similarity needs to be grounded in identity of metaphysical constituent. Can you say that again, in other words, and then tell us how significant that was? Okay. You and I are both human beings. So we're very similar with respect to rational animality. We're both rational animals.

is there something rational animality that we both share? But if there is, since we're different rational animals, there must be something which makes us different rational animals. That would be the hexiety to which we referred to earlier. And Occam says, well, if an individual such as you is composed of the common human nature plus a melicity, which makes you to be mel, right, then we have to give an account of what the connection between human nature and the individuator is. And he thinks that we can't, that any attempts to give such an account will end in contradiction.

And was this proposition of thought to be, was it controversial at the time? It was very controversial in his time and he argued for it relentlessly. I think it was, it's important to notice that he argues for it on the ground that the contrary views, which he considers at great length that takes up four different questions of the sentence commentary. Basically, it was the view that he attacks is what he calls the common opinion,

and he argues that for it at great length, and he makes a special target of his attack. And Scotis, who gave the most coherent and elaborate and sophisticated formulation. Richard Cross, I understand that Occam's ideas about universals made it difficult to explain the Holy Trinity. Why was that, and how did he get rounded? Well, there are various reasons why this might be the case.

I mean, just in principle, if one denies universals, then there are going to be some problems that arise with the Trinity. And in Occam's particular case, because of the particular way in which he denied it in terms of the inability to explain the connection between what's shared and what's particular. And here's how it goes. Here's the easy case, first of all. And this has got a long history in Christian theology, in fact, before Occam.

If you think that there aren't shared natures or shared properties, then it's very hard for you to give an account of how it is that there's just one God, because you might think, well, the Trinity looks like this. There are supposed to be three divine persons. They all share something, let's call it the divine essence. And in addition, the persons will include some other feature that distinguishes them from each other. Now, if you think that in principle there couldn't be shared,

essences, properties, or whatever. Then it looks like you've almost ruled out the Trinity on philosophical grounds straightforwardly, just from the word go. Put in that way, it didn't quite affect Occam. It's affected other earlier nominalists, and there's a big history of this in Christian theology going right the way back, in fact, to the fourth century.

The specific issue with Occam has got to do with the inability of an account that accepted universals to explain how it is that you could have two sort of metaphysical components of one thing. So the problem that arises for Occam is that we have these three divine persons with their shared common nature, plus some other constituent. But we've ruled out, as it were, on philosophical grounds the fact that there could be two such constituents in any one person. So that's a particular problem for him.

And how does he get rounded? It's quite a neat side step, I think, the way he gets rounded. Oh, is it? I think he just says, well, in this case, our philosophy can't tell us, you know, it can't be fully generalizable and theology must be an exception. That's right. That's a side step, isn't it, really? I suppose it's a side step. I mean, it's a particularly unsatisfactory position, I think, for a medieval philosopher to want to adopt, because part of the whole program that they had and that they'd been building up, I think, with some reasonable success, was that whether or not you could show that Christianity was true, you could certainly show that it was co-histor. and that it's reasonable. And Occam, as we're cutting right at the core of that. Anthony Kennedy set us off quite firmly with Dunscoats.

Can you say what it was, briefly, what it was about Dunscoats that Occam disagreed with and why that was significant? Well, I suppose it was fundamentally a philosophical thing. In terms of theology, I mean there are always marginal differences between different thinkers. But theoretically, I think they're quite close, in fact, and there aren't many places where Ockham radically disagrees

with a theological position of Scotus. The real philosophical meet has got to do with, really, the things we've been talking about already, Ogham just thought Scotus' position on various things was incredibly wasteful and extravagant and that we could do without some of the entities that Scotus proposes, as well as thinking, of course, that Scotus' position was in fact

unintelligible, which was his real problem. That said, I mean, even on philosophical things, they agreed on a large number of questions. For example, there's a standard arisotelan analysis of material substances into matter and form, which is used to explain change, so that when something changes, well, there must be in some sense the same thing

that persists through the change, otherwise nothing would have changed. And so the idea is that, you know, at the most general level, we can say that there is matter or stuff, and that this persists through various changes, and that, as it were, the changes are explained by different structures had by the matter at different times. Well, there was a great medieval debate

about how much reality we should allow to matter and form so that we might say, in me, there is the matter, and the form and me, and that makes three things. And fundamentally, Scotus and Occam agreed on that against Thomas Aquinas, who thought that you should only account the one thing, me and that matter and form are just abstractions. Now, but both Scotus and Occam think that that wouldn't be sufficient

to explain the persistence of the one thing across the change. So there they agree, say, against the Dominican Aquinas. Although Anthony Nicani, there's no record of Occam's rise of the phrase being used in connection with his works at the time, It did come in, and it was, it has seemed to be appropriate. How did he exercise this? How did he use this and shave things off with regard to Duns-Colter? So how is he supposed to have done?

Well, I think you're right that his idea was that his predecessors, in particular Dunscoats, had grown a huge metaphysical, fuzzy beard, which needed cutting off, and we'd get back down to the bare bones of reality. But it was not just his immediate predecessors that he was deconstructing in this kind of way. Aristotle, for instance, had a system of ten different categories, substance, quantity, quality, and so on. And Ockham thought this was far too many, that all you really needed was substance and quality.

and he thought that there was a great deal of incoherence in the notion of quantity, of there being a real accident of quantity, because if you had something gradually growing, this would suggest a lot of tiny little entities coming into a momentary existence, going out of existence and so on. He didn't believe, as Marilyn was talking about, I didn't believe in the universals that were a fundamental in Scotus position, and he had a number of fairly plausible arguments against them.

For instance, he said, if the common human nature is present in you, Melvin Bragg, then if you drop dead, all human beings would die too, because the common human nature, which is a part of you, would have disappeared. So we would all flop dead at the same time. He had a lot of clever arguments like that against Scotus. Now, I think that the sort of historical importance of this, not just in philosophy, has to do with the relation between philosophy and theology

that which it was talking about. And you get in Thomas Aquinas, you get a very fine metaphysical structure and epistemological structure designed to show that Christianity is rational, that the highest form of human thought, namely Aristotelianism, is in full accord with divine revelation, and moreover,

that human thought can, of its own nature, tell us quite a lot about God, about the world, about ethics, and so on. And Scotus, in a sense, can be seen, as pushing Aquinas a bit further in that he has an even more elaborate metaphysical system which is supposed

to tell us a great deal also about God as well as about the cosmos we live in. For Occam not only in the case of the Trinity but in the case of many Christian doctrines like predestination the Eucharist

and everything, Malcolm will tell you the tremendous amount of philosophical difficulty in understanding these. And you almost think he's going to say, so we'd better throw over these doctrines. But always at the last line, he says, so we cannot explain how this works in any way, but we must believe it on the world of God. I mean, that early treatise that you edited, Marilyn, on predestination, ends in precisely that way, does it not? It does, but I think that one can put this in a perhaps more sympathetic light,

that is to say. Aquinas and Scotus had philosophical intuitions and predispositions which led them to formulate conceptual frameworks which they thought accommodated Christian doctrines

in various ways. Akham, coming on as a philosopher and he was a brilliant philosopher, thought that he could attack their philosophical theories on rational grounds and show them to be incoherent at various points. Those are, of course, controversial claims, but that was what he sincerely believed, and he was certainly entitled to be confident of his own philosophical expertise.

So I think it's a methodological issue here for Ackham. If you take reason as far as it will go, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to say, oops, Christian doctrine says this, so I better modify my philosophical intuition in a way that I've just argued is totally. incoherent? Or shall I just say, I don't know how to resolve them, but these are two desiderata that must be preserved, and we'll wait to see if we can come up with a more adequate theory eventually. In other words, it's one thing when, as with in a scientific theory, you get new data, and so you think, oh, we need to complicate our metaphysical assumptions. And the medievals all did that with their Aristotelian framework. With the Eucharist, for example, they complicated their

their metaphysical framework. But, Akham thought this couldn't be because it was contradictory. Back to the life, I'm going to speed forward a bit here. In 13th century, John Lutrell, the Chancellor

of Oxford, picked a fight with the Oxford Donns and lost his job. And then he, in order to please the Pope, one of the two popes, there was a Pope at Avignon and a Pope at Rome there, that's another program, but there's one at Avenue. He sent his thesis off there and

Ockham was summoned to Avignon to face what seemed to be heretical charges, 56 heretical charges that Plutral had sent to them. He was eventually acquitted of charges of heresy, although thought it to be controversial, which indeed he was. But when he was in, I'd like to come to you now, Mr. Rastard, when he was in Avignon, he fell into the argument about the nature

of the Franciscan Order's relationship with the papacy over the issue of wealth and property. So we can leave theology behind for a second. We have this brilliant man, not as Bernard de Gauntly has done Scutus, but this brilliant man who was attacked by his own chancellor at the university. He was summoned to Armino by one of the two popes, there were soon to be three, but one of the two popes, he was cleared eventually of heresy, but then he fell in with a political argument, really, to do with wealth and property, and whether the whether the gospel said that the apostles had held everything in common

and that they had no money, no, and the original teaching of St. Francis should be followed through. Now, can you tell us how he got involved in that, Richard, and what he did about it? Okay, well, there's a kind of long background to this, which I'll try to do pretty quickly. Yeah, pretty quickly, that's right. Okay, so when the Franciscans are set up, the idea is that they don't own anything. And this turns out to be immediately unworkable, even during Francis's lifetime, because they're set up fundamentally as a preaching order, and in order to have preachers, you need education.

And in order to have education, you need some money. And so this kind of rumbles on in the Franciscan order for quite a while. It sort of gets resolved, first of all, in 1279, so a little bit before Ockham. And there it's agreed that, following the teaching of another Franciscan Bonaventure, that the Franciscans, just like Christ and the apostles, don't own anything, though they can use things. And that gets to say they can use things without owning them. Some Franciscans, okay, so everyone's happy with this,

but some Franciscans still want to go a bit further and say, well, if we can use things, then we must put a limit on how much we can use, and we must use the very least possible to be in accordance with the teachers of Francis. So these are the so-called spiritual Franciscans. They're fundamentally based in the south of France. Now the Pope in 1323 was John the 22nd

who had spent a lot of his life in the south of France and was dealing with these rather hippie-like Franciscans who had the further disadvantage of believing a lot of strange apocalyptic prophecies about the end of time and so on and prophecies which they tended to interpret in a way that was strongly antipathetic to the church hierarchy. So we're down there, that's putting it nice. I mean, okay, the prophecies, I'll just tell you about that very quickly.

No, we haven't got time. No time on the prophecies. Absolutely. The issue is that the difference between the Franciscan's view of the ownership of property and that of the Pope. This becomes a picture and a big political argument, which generates it, goes into all sorts of other areas. Now, where did he stand on that? Okay. So what happens is, Occam's in Avignon. John the 22nd has just said

something which seems to overturn the teaching of 1279 which is that the Franciscans have a right to use the things they use and Occam says this is in conflict with the teachings of an earlier pope Nicholas III in 1279 and therefore that for saying this because it amounts if you say you have to write to use something

that amounts to saying you own it and says property although John 22nd very cleverly didn't use the word property here. Occam thought if you've got a right to use then that's property and therefore the Pope has fallen into heresy because he is contradicted the teachings

of an earlier Pope. Now John the 22nd himself could argue that the teachings of the earlier Pope were just administrative and nothing dogmatic but at any that was Occam's view. Anthony Kenny so the Occam down there Avenue declares that the Pope having been hauled to Avignon

as a possible potential heretic. He declares the Pope to be a heretic. Yes, that's right. Quite bold, really. Yes. It was much more common in the Middle Ages for people to denounce popes as

erroneous, heretical and so on than it has become in recent years. Even saints like St. Catherine of Siena and so on were quite willing to tell off popes when they were going wrong. Now, Ockham, I think,

The interest, long-term interest of this, is that in denouncing the Pope's a heretic, Ockham reflected quite a bit on the nature of natural rights. He's one of the originators. The Pope's a heretic, sorry, don't interrupt, Jan. I've been rushing this because there's so much in this as well. Pope's a heretic because he's denying the fact of the matter, which is that the original persons involved in the foundation of Christianity were, in fact, those who,

did not want to have wealth and property. And the Pope denies that. And that in brief... Well, I think the particular point in which Hockham was attacking him was that the poet was denying the distinction between ownership and use.

Hitherto, the Franciscan position had been based on the idea that though following St. Francis, we must not own anything, we can use things. You have to use things in order to live. John the 22nd says this is a bit of sophistry,

It's a fudge, and if you can use something, if you have a right to use something, you own it. Well, Ockham, it seems to me, had the better of the argument here. He said, if you're sitting, if you're a guest sitting at somebody's table, you have the right to eat the food placed in front of you by your host, but you don't own that food. You can't take it home in a doggy bag, as it were. And so the distinction between ownership and use is, I think, well, defended by Ockham,

and he distinguished among the natural rights you have, natural rights that you can't give up, like the right to life, and natural rights that you can give up. He agreed there was a natural right to own property, but by joining the Franciscan Order, you gave up this natural right. Richard, do you want to come back in on?

Well, yes, and I think one could probably take it a little bit further as well, in the sense that, um, Occam tithes all of this material in to a sort of wider political question about democracy is now a good time for that one? Yes.

Yeah, good. So again, there's a kind of backstory here which we do have to have a little bit of. And so the backstory goes like this. Do we think that political society is natural or artificial? And if you look in Aristotle, for example, he's quite insistent at the beginning of the politics that it's natural.

So if you have enough people living together in some kind of proximity, naturally you will get some kind of polity out of this. It will just emerge. What the form of that is is a different question. And this is very starkly in contrast to the kind of Christian view you might find in, say, Augustine, who really thinks that political society is a consequence of the fall if Adam hadn't fallen,

and there would have been no need for rulers with legislative and executive powers and so on. So in the Middle Ages, you very much find Aquinas defending Aristotle's line, and how he does it is by means of the following very neat theological question. If Adam hadn't sinned, then would there have been a need for political societies, political institutions?

And the answer is yes, which is a way of saying that really political society is natural, It's not artificial. It doesn't require the exercise of will or any particular kind of consent or anything like that. Occam, in the light of this poverty dispute, really ends up defending a kind of modified Augustinian view. He certainly disagrees, I think,

with Aristotle and Aquinas that political society is natural. And his view is certainly that if Adam hadn't sinned, then there would have been no need for it. Why would there? Because nobody, people could just have used things without trespassing on the rights of others because they wouldn't have been sinful and so on. But in order to protect people

after the fall, when people tend to get rather bad dispositions and desires and avarice and such like things is held to rule their or govern their actions, well, then God gave two distinct rights. One was the right to own things, right, property rights. The other was the right, dominion over one,

political fate, as it were, the right to elect one's ruler. These two things, I think, in Occam's mind, go hand in hand. It's very neat and obviously designed to provoke his opponents, because now we have the Franciscans have given up their property rights. They're like the prelapsarian man. They're like Adam and Eve in the garden. And that, claiming that, implicitly claiming that kind of thing for oneself, obviously is designed to annoy, and clearly it did.

I'm a bit puzzled by what you said because you said that he, Ockham was denying that that society, political society was natural. On the other hand, you said that God had given us a natural right to choose our rulers.

Do these conflict, rather? Okay. Yes, but only as a result of, I mean, you're quite right, but the natural right is only one that, as it were, it's given to us by God deliberately. And so Ockham says, by an act of positive law.

Yeah, sort of add-on. Exactly, that's an add-on right, exactly. Thank you. But you took us, Richard, to, unknowingly to Munich, really. We've been in Oxford and Avenue in Munich, where to which Ockham flees when the Pope, he's one way or another excommunicated. He goes to Munich into the arms of Ludwig of Bavaria,

who is opposed, for his own reasons, the Holy Roman Emperor, is opposed to the Pope, and setting up a court of theologians, including Marcellius of, Padua and so on. Marlon, can you tell us how Occamenters in what could be called his political dimension as a thinker here and the arguments he brings to defend the position of the emperor vis-à-vis the Pope? Well, I think Richard has already begun to touch on this, that basically

Akam attacks the Pope in Avignon. They move to Pisa. They do not get the consent of the order. they moved to Munich and they live under the protection of Louis. Basically, Akham defends a dualism about church and state, whereas some people wanted to say that the secular authority derives his power from the Pope and others, like Marsilius, I gather, wanted to say that the Pope, the church should be subordinate to the state. Akham advocates a parallel system and he thinks, as Richard was already explaining,

that the state is basically, he has basically a liberal view of the state that after the fall, you wouldn't have to have property ownership if everyone would live by natural reason, but not everybody will, so we can have a state. And basically the initiative for forming a state is from the people. But he was also an advocate of stability. He thought that monarchy was for various predictable

reasons, predictable in England anyway, the best form of government probably, and that once a government is established, there's not a matter, it's not that the people can remove the monarch for just any reason. The monarch would have to do something really egregious for the, but then it would belong to the citizens to remove the egregiously bad ruler. And the Pope might be one of those citizens, and it might be that in a big emergency, he would be the only one organized enough and with enough resources to help remove, but it would not be Quay Pope that he would have that authority, but just Quay citizen.

And on the other side, he wanted to say that the church also, in a sense, exists to promote evangelical freedom, and that he was really against the idea that there should be a juridical conception of the church in which the Pope's primary responsibility would be to give lots and lots of rules. he argued that the freedom of the gospel is different from the old law. And therefore, if you multiply lots and lots of rules and obligations for Christians, then it will be just as burdensome as the old law, and that's not gospel liberty.

And that basically the church should be more minimalist in its rules and regulations and more pastoral in its exercise of authority. And that as a rule, the state should stay out of church business too. But if the pope, not just if he's a bad pope, There are lots of bad leaders, as we know. But if he's heretical, then it might be the role of a Christian ruler to participate in the removal of the Pope. But the regular or the normal situation is that these two systems go along in parallel. The church is concerned with spiritual affairs and the state is concerned with temporal affairs.

But what's the common thread in Occam's theories of each of them is an emphasis on personal liberty as a real value to be maintained with any body politic, secular or sacred. Anthony DeKine, was he just serving his master, Ludwig, or Louis, or Bavaria, whichever of NM you choose, in genuinely rethinking how political authority might work? Can we see this coming out of the drive of his thinking from the beginning? I don't think that he was a systematic thinker about politics in the same way as he was a systematic thinker about logic, language, and metaphysics.

I mean, certainly what he's left are much more like pamphlets and so on. But I do think that even though it comes out in this more or less informal way, I agree with Marilyn that the system he presents is in many ways a very attractive one. I mean, one can contrast it with what happened at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation. when you get the glorification of autocratic rulers, developing in England into a theory of the divine right of kings, and when you get a counter-reformation pope, with claiming at least absolute authority in all ecclesiastical matters,

even if he didn't always succeeding selling this to the Christian kings. It's a much more liberal view in Occam. The pope is a kind of constitutional monarch, responsible to general counsels and as Malin said, can be deposed if he goes into heresy and the right of monarchs to rule does not come directly from God to the monarch

so that to resist the king is to resist God it comes from God to the individual citizens who then pass it on if they so wish to a king. I think that, as you say, has a bias in favour of monarchy, but I didn't think he thought it was the only form. No, no, he doesn't.

No, it's just, he gives lots of arguments that that's probably the most useful. Because he is at the court of a monarch. Because governments are basically to be justified on the grounds of utility, he argues that they're useful. Richard Cross, how significant do you think these ideas will become in the history of political philosophy?

Well, I suppose one's looking at the beginnings of sort of modern democratic. theories. Marilyn's already said, liberal state, I think I heard you say that, Marilyn. I did. Yeah, so something like that. We're looking at the sort of birth around this time of those kinds of theories. And since we've

mentioned Scotus, I think I would say that in fact he is the origin of all of these. There's a very small, almost throwaway question in Scotus. Must be written about 1,305. So before Occam and before Marsilius, where he just says,

it looks to me probable that given that human beings are fallen they have property rights and they have the right to elect their own legislator because someone who's going to exercise so much power over them shouldn't be someone who just appears as it were in their lives arbitrarily so in a way they're all building on a really a very small just two-page-nothing thing in Scotus

and developing a load of democratic theories out of this and I suppose we get through eventually to Hobbes who I suppose has been reading Grotius who I suppose has been reading someone like Occam or Marcellius maybe and so you could argue that right here we're witnessing the beginnings of modern secular statecraft Anthony Kenny

Yes I think that that could be true though Marilyn would know better I don't know how widely known Occam's political tracks were at the time say of Grossius I don't have the impression that they were that they were as influential. That's my impression. And it's important to note

that he's going for a parallel system. It's not just that the state is independent of the church, but that the church is independent of the state. And I have the impression that theories according to which the church was dependent upon the state or established by the state or something were much more popular

in the immediate decades or centuries afterwards. The ironical sort of end of the of the story of the quarrel with the Pope, was that Occam, having denounced the Pope as a heretic, lived to see the Pope actually denounced by the church as a heretic. But for a quite different doctrine, of course,

for the Pope John 22nd had the idiosyncratic view that when a holy person dies, instead of going straight to heaven and seeing God, they are kept waiting until everybody's body is resurrected. and this had besides theological consequences, I think it had financial consequences for the masses for the death

and so on would be a bit of a problem. So the Pope was condemned as a heretic, recanted on his deathbed, the formal condemnation actually was the first act of his successor. But the succeeding Pope didn't remove the condemnation of Ockham. And I think when Ockham died of the black death,

he was still under the ban of the church, wasn't he? That's what, as best as we can tell, yes. And finally, and briefly, Mr. Cross, do you think that Ockham will be most, is most influential for his logic or for his political thought? I think probably logic could be what I would say. Not least because, you know, almost all early modern philosophers were nominalists.

and again, it's not necessarily that they are reading Occam, but access to the scholastic traditions, no doubt, fed right into this. I think Occam's logic is the next one, Anthony Kenney. I know it preoccupies you a great deal, but thank you very much for putting a quart into a thimble for us. Thank you very much, Marilyn Adams, Anthony Kenny and Richard Cross. And next week we'll be discussing the extraordinary life and poetry of Sigreitz-Sussu. Thanks for listening.

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