Ockham and Ockhamism

Long thought to be the most important medieval philosopher and theologian after Scotus and the founder of late medieval Nominalism, the meaning and influence of William of Ockham’s thought have become matters of intense debate in recent years. After a survey of the changing assessment of Nominalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a new understanding of twelfth-century Nominalism with related elements in the thought of Augustine and Anselm, this book examines the reception of Ockham’s thought at Oxford and Paris, the crisis over Ockhamism at Paris in the 1335 to 1345 period, and concludes with an examination of the legacy of Ockhamist thought in the late medieval period.

William J. Courtenay, Ph.D. (1967) Harvard University, is C. H. Haskins Professor of Medieval History and Hilldale Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published numerous books and articles in medieval intellectual history and on medieval universities, among them Adam Wodeham (Brill, 1978), Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1987), Capacity and Volition (Lubrina, 1990), and Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century(Cambridge, 1999).