Charters, I greatly admire, respect and enjoy your posts. I had a hard time following this particular post, I will admit. I do know the flaw of the greeks was they did not discover inductive logic and to a large degree this was the flaw of the midddle ages.
Read about Ocham below. I can only speak of what I understand. In experimentation double blind studies have a good reason. To protect the experiment from contamination. And I am familiar with cannons law of parsimony.
Now I think I know that Ockham thought up a very sophisticated THOUGHT. But when one is using deductive logic or inductive for that matter and interweaves it with a nonsensical fairy tale i.e.religion it contaminates the logic completely.
Ockham may have discoverd a very esoteric logic which can be used by scientists today, but with regard to his general overall philosophy there is really nothing there, say as compared to shakespear, plato or socrates.
And so it is with all the middle age thinkers. There thinking alwasy had to be woven around a nonsensical dogma which renderred it pretty mush psychobable.
Cheers
William of Ockham, the Franciscan school man, nominalist, and "doctor invincibilis," was born at Ockham in 1280 and died in Munich on April 10, 1349. Of his early life, little is known. From the scarce data, it may be concluded that he entered the Franciscan order at an early age. He received his bachelor's degree at Oxford, and his master's at Paris, where he taught from a date between 1315 and 1320. The tradition that he was a pupil of Duns Scotus is probably correct. There is no evidence that he returned to England and taught at Oxford. In any case, it is with Paris that his principal teaching activity is connected. His doctrines had taken such hold there by 1339 that the philosophical faculty felt obliged to issue a warning against them. By that time he himself had left Paris. The question of poverty which so deeply agitated his order determined the later course of his life. He threw all his strength into the defense of the ideal of absolute poverty. But it was not long before their common ground of opposition to the pope drew the extreme Franciscans together with the Emperor Louis the Bavarian, the opponent of John XXII. At the chapter of the order in Perugia, Ockham and Bonagratia were the chief supporters of the general Michael of Cesena. They supported his strict views, and afterward they spent some time in the dioceses of Ferrara and Bologna, urgino, considering the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles as a necessary ideal. In December, 1323, he was summoned with some others to appear before the pope at Avignon, and was imprisoned there for over four years. On May 25, 1328, Michael of Cesena and Bonagratia made his escape and fled to Italy. Deposed and excommunicated, they made common cause with the emperor, who was then in Italy. In 1329 a general chapter held in Paris deposed Michael of Cesena from his office, and two years later he and his adherents were expelled from the order. Ockham became one of the emperor's principal advisers and literary defenders. The political ideas which he had already represented in Paris were now developed and adapted to the circumstances of the time. In stepping outside the range of pure theology, he never forgot that he was a theologian. The belief that John XXII. was a heretic and no true pope, that the poverty of Christ and the apostles was an article of faith, were as much a part of his fixed belief as that the State and the rights of the emperor were independent of pope and Church. After the unfortunate issue of Louis' visit to Rome, the Franciscans followed him to Munich in Feb., 1330 and took up their abode in a neighboring house of the order, where most of the political writings of Ockham were composed. In 1342 Michael of Cesena died, transmitting the seal of the order and his claims to its headship to Ockham. The death of Louis on Oct. 11, 1347 , the loss of some of the Munich group, and the reconciliation of the new Emperor Charles IV. with the papacy, left Ockham increasingly alone. Eventually, the time came when he was the only one of the old leaders left. He was once more cited in 1349 before the papal tribunal, but the negotiations came to naught with his refusal to admit that Louis was a heretic and schismatic. Clement VI. demanded that the order should take action. A chapter held in Whitsuntide, 1349, asserted that but few brothers remained who had supported Michael of Cesena and Louis; that " William the Englishman," who was prominent among these, had sent back the seal of the order to the general, and that he and the others, while they could not conveniently appear in Rome, petitioned for release from their excommunication. On June 8, 1349, The pope offered to grant this request on condition of their subscribing a formula which was somewhat less stringent than that which had been usual since John XXII. Trithemius, Wadding, and others assert that Ockham signed this and was absolved. However, there is no documentary evidence to this effect, and Jacobus de Marchia says expressly that the three principal leaders "remained excommunicated heretics." This is more probably the case, whether Ockham remained inflexible or death intervened too soon to allow his acceptance of the terms of peace. The date of his death is uncertain; he was undoubtedly alive in the spring of 1349, and thus the date given on his monument (of later construction) in the former Franciscan chapel at Alunich (April 10, 1347) cannot be right. The day and month may be accepted, but the year will be either 1350, or more probably 1349. This would account for the theory that he had announced his readiness to make submission, but died before it could be accomplished.
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