The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www history of philosophy.

Today's episode, a close shave, Occam's nominalism.

William of Occam devoted the last two decades of his life to defending the Franciscan ideal of absolute poverty,

and the first part of his career was also about making do with less.

In the works he wrote before his fateful trip to Avignon, he wrote about a wide range of issues in theology, logic, and metaphysics.

And the metaphysics he defended was deliberately impoverished.

He sought to eliminate the unnecessary entities

postulated by other scholastics, especially Duns Skotis.

Aukam's very name is synonymous with this endeavor. Even people who know nothing about medieval

philosophy will probably be familiar with Aqam's razor, by which people usually mean that we

should not provide complex explanations when simpler ones will do.

Aukam himself formulates the principle in several ways.

For instance, plurality is not to be posited without necessity.

If you think about it, crediting this to Occam as if it were a brilliant innovation is a bit odd.

It's not as if philosophers before his time had reveled in deliberately postulating as many entities

as possible for no good reason.

Admittedly, some thinkers, like the late antique neoplatinists, seem to have had a taste

for the Baroque, but even they were at pains to give arguments

for each entity they introduced into their systems.

As for Occam's contemporaries, they would readily have agreed with him that it is bad philosophical

policy to posit superfluous principles or beings.

In fact, John of Reading, an opponent of Occam and follower of Dunscotus's teachings, called this guideline

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