There was no response and, I venture to think, for the same reason. Green's fictitious quotation from Kant (so long beloved of Oxford examiners): "Macht zwar der Verstand die Natur, aber er schafft sie nicht". My note of April, 1915, asking for references to Ockham from readers of Mind, had the same fate as Prof. i.), referring to Aristotle's Physica (i.): "In principiis debet tanta paucitas, quanta sufficit ad salvandum ea, quæ sunt in natura necessaria".Ĥ. It is indeed possible that he has written them somewhere because the words had previously been used by his master Duns Scotus: a fact, with which Ueberweg does not seem to have been acquainted.
But there are no such clauses in the locus indicated and the Index gives no clue to their presence anywhere else. 1, for an assertion that: "He (P.A.) enounced the principle subequently known as the Law of Parcimony: Non est Philosophicum, pluralitatem rerum ponere sine causa frustra enim fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora". On the previous page (461) of §104, he refers to the Scotis Petrus Aureolus (†1322, Archbishop of Aix): In SS., ii., D. No reference is given and Ueberweg cannot always be trusted, even when he does give a reference. 462 in the first volume of the English translation by Morris (1872), and §36 page 307 of theil ii., in the new German edition of 1898. He combats the realising and hypostatising of abstractions ( Sufficiunt Singularia, etc.)": p.
Ueberweg indeed, whose History of Philosophy was first published in 1863 (ten years after the revised edition of Hamilton's Discussions in 1853), said in §16 of his second volume (§104 of the English translation by Morris and Porter): "William of Occam founds his rejection of Realism on the principle Entia non sunt multplicanda præter necessitatem.
He, like Aristotle and Francis Bacon, "took all knowledge to be his province".ģ. It must not, however, be supposed that Albertus Magnus was called the Universal Doctor, for a similar though opposite reason. But it seems likely that Ockham's most famous phrase in his own day was the: "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universalia omnino frustra ponitur": from which he probably became known as the Singular Doctor. And it was judicially applied by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere in 16. In England this phrase even became a legal maxim: as we may see in Wingate's Maxims of Reason (1658), no. So did the earlier historian Tenneman: Geschichte der Philosophie, p. He selects: "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora": as distinctive of Ockham in this connexion.
Nor does Stockl, in his very full Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, §§259-266, pp. 327-420) though one of them (Note 758) contains: "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate". Nor does Prantl, in his large collection of citations ( Geschichte der Logik, iii., pp. They do not even mention the common form of the Novaculum Nominalium. i., §216) and De Wulf (in his Medieval Philosophy, §368) all concur in giving another set of words, as those usually employed by Ockham: "Pluralitas non est ponenda (or Non est ponenda pluralitas) sine necessitate". 438, 443, 446): Erdmann (in his History of Philosophy, vol. Haureau (in his Philosophie Scholastique, vol. This disbelief is further justified by what I find, and cannot find, in laborious recent histories of Medieval philosophy. And my own fruitless inquisition for the formula, in those works of Ockham which have been printed, has led me to disbelieve that he ever used it to express his Critique of Entities.Ģ. We turn in vain even to Sir William Hamilton, facile princeps (among English writers) in philosophical learning or to his nearest rival, his disciple Dean Mansel. But nobody gives a particular reference to any work of the Singular and Invincible Doctor: sometimes also, as on the title-page of his De Sacramento Altaris (1513), described as the Venerabilis Inceptor (of "Terminism" ?). From the middle of the Nineteenth Century, nearly every modern book on Logic has contained the words: Entia non sunt multiplicanda, præter necessitatem: quoted as if they were the words of William of Ockham.