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

Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Keeping It Real, Responses to Occam.

What does it mean to be an influential philosopher?

The obvious answer would be that influential philosophers have followers,

card-carrying members of traditions whose cards were stamped with the names of the founders.

Many Platonists participated in the legacy of the founders. Many Platonists participated in the legacy of the One Plato.

The Epicureans still celebrated the great man's birthday centuries after his death,

and to this very day Germany has its fair share of Kantians and Heidegarians.

But influence doesn't need to work that way.

Philosophers can make their mark on history by inspiring thoughtful criticism, as Plato provoked Aristotle and

Kant provoked Hegel.

William of Occam was certainly influential in the first way, in that many self-siled nominalists have looked to him for inspiration even down to modern times.

But among his contemporaries his impact is shown above all by the criticism he attracted.

Fellow nominalists disputed the fine points of his thought, and others mounted a spirited defense

of realism, insisting that he had cut too deeply with his famous razor.

One particularly important critic was a man we have already met, Walter Chattan, who was at Oxford at the same time as Occam.

His objections seemed to have had an unparalleled

influence on Occam himself. We saw that he convinced his more famous Franciscan colleague

to give up the early theory that universals are pseudo entities in the mind called

Fichta and that was only one of several cases in which Chattan's arguments persuaded

Achaum to change his teachings. Both Chattan's arguments persuaded Occam to change his teachings.

...