26 May 1328: William of Ockham Secretly Flees Avignon

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

00:01

I haven't sent one of these to the list in a while, but this
one involves someone very special in the world of engineering,
security, and virtually all other aspects of understanding why
buidling execssive complexity into any system is a bad thing.

Via Wikipedia.

[snip]

William of Ockham (also Occam or any of several other spellings) (c. 1288 – 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and 
scholastic philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. As a Franciscan, William was devoted 
to a life of extreme poverty.

Ockham has been called "the greatest nominalists that ever lived", and along with Duns Scotus, his opposite number from 
the realist camp, one of the two "greatest speculative minds of the middle ages", as well as "two of the profoundest 
metaphysicians that ever lived" (Peirce, 1869). One important contribution that he made to modern science and modern 
intellectual culture was through the principle of parsimony in explanation and theory building that came to be known as 
Ockham's razor. This maxim, as interpreted by Bertrand Russell (1946, 462—463), states that if one can explain a 
phenomenon without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it. That is, one should 
always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible number of causes, factors, or variables.

A pioneer of nominalism, some consider him the father of modern epistemology and modern philosophy in general, because 
of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or 
forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental 
existence. Ockham is sometimes considered an advocate of conceptualism rather than nominalism, for whereas nominalists 
held that universals were merely names, i.e. words rather than existing realities, conceptualists held that they were 
mental concepts, i.e. the names were names of concepts, which do exist, although only in the mind.

Ockham is also increasingly being recognized as an important contributor to the development of Western constitutional 
ideas, especially those of limited responsible government. The views on monarchial accountability espoused in his 
Dialogus* (written between 1332 and 1348) greatly influenced the Conciliar movement and assisted in the emergence of 
liberal democratic ideologies.

In logic, Ockham worked towards what would later be called De Morgan's Laws and considered ternary logic, that is, a 
logical system with three truth values, a concept that would be taken up again in the mathematical logic of the 19th 
and 20th centuries.

[snip]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.