William of Ockham

In the early fourteenth century, when Europe’s universities were packed with monks and clerics arguing about God, logic, and the structure of reality, a quiet Franciscan friar from a small English village began to do something dangerous: he started cutting away at the grand systems of his time. It was not a physical blade he wielded, but a habit of mind, a principle that later generations would remember as a “razor”: do not multiply entities beyond necessity. His name was William of Ockham. To later philosophers, he would become a symbol of intellectual sharpness, the man who helped strip scholastic metaphysics down to essentials and who, in doing so, reshaped the background against which Western moral thought developed.

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