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This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on September 1, 1996. The length of the article is 8529 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: William of Ockham's account of a mental language that is redundancy-free should be regarded as primarily a semantics rather than as a psychological theory. Ockham's approach is simpler than that of Jerry Fodor because Ockham's mental language eliminates synonymy and ambiguity, whereas Fodor allows redundancy. Ockham's mental language is an idealization, as is Chomsky's linguistic theory, but this approach does not require the positing of abstract objects as some critics have charged.

Citation Details
Title: The puzzle of names in Ockham's theory of mental language.
Author: Deborah J. Brown
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1996
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: v50Issue: n1Page: p79(21)

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How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be?Thirteenth and fourteenth century Christian Aristotelians thought the answer had to be "transubstantiation."

Acclaimed philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, investigates these later medieval theories of the Eucharist, concentrating on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, with some reference to Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bonaventure.She examines how their efforts to formulate and integrate this theological datum provoked them to make significant revisions in Aristotelian philosophical theories regarding the metaphysical structure and location of bodies, differences between substance and accidents, causality and causal powers, and fundamental types of change. Setting these developments in the theological context that gave rise to the question draws attention to their understandings of the sacraments and their purpose, as well as to their understandings of the nature and destiny of human beings.

Adams concludes that their philosophical modifications were mostly not ad hoc, but systematic revisions that made room for transubstantiation while allowing Aristotle still to describe what normally and naturally happens. By contrast, their picture of the world as it will be (after the last judgment) seems less well integrated with their sacramental theology and their understandings of human nature. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor), entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, is the principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. Occam's razor may be alternatively phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity").The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question. ... Read more