Was William of Occam a realist or a nominalist? Explain.
William of Occam was a Franciscan monk, born in Britain. He accepted Aquinas’s concept of faith and reason. William believed in keeping things simple, that is, complex explanations should be avoided as should be unnecessary assumptions. He went beyond the empiric understanding of Aristotle.
William of Occam represents an important turning point in the history of psychology because he changed the question regarding the nature of knowledge to a psychological problem from a metaphysical problem. He thought how the human mind classifies experience and he believed that our mind responds to similar objects in a similar fashion.
Occam’s philosophy marks the end of the Scholastic period and his philosophy gives a hint of the upcoming Renaissance. Though he was a highly empirical theologian, he remained a Franciscan monk throughout his life and believed in God. However, he said that God’s existence can never be proved by studying the nature, because there is nothing in nature that proves his existence. Thus, God’s existence must be accepted or believed on faith.
William of Occam was a nominalist. Occam’s razor is referred to the belief that assumptions should be thrown away from arguments or explanations. Occam applied this razor to the debate between the Realists and the Nominalists and he sided with the Nominalists, being highly critical of the Realists’ assumption of the Universals.
He was critical of the universals in which the Realists believed. William argued that those so called ‘universals’ were nothing except “verbal labels”. He gave the logic that because all similar beings have similar features, those general labels or features could be used to describe the sensory experiences. However, the use of those general labels does not mean that they exist as a pure form or essence or idea that exists beyond our experiences.
William further reasoned that we should trust our senses to gather information about our surroundings to know our world better rather than to stay in oblivion, thinking about an “assumptive” world that lurks outside the realm of our physical understanding.