What has been said so far should make appear forlorn the hope that philosophers would be challenged by scientists to think hard about the universe. But even if such a challenge had been forthcoming, it would have hardly found significant echo among contemporary philosophers. They are heirs to two main trends—empiricism and rationalism—within both of which the universe was handled as an orphaned child unable to attract proper attention.

The empirical trend has no better starting point than William Ockham. This may seem paradoxical because Ockham's own starting point was theological. But since the starting point was extreme, it invited the other extreme, amply illustrated by subsequent empiricists, where both theology and cosmology ceased to have intellectual appeal. As one of the “spiritualist” branch of Franciscans, Ockham nurtured a quasi-mystical urge to see God's direct action everywhere, an urge that made him see each event as a miracle performed by God himself. Ockham sought a philosophical justification for this miracle mongering by denying to things the ability to function as secondary causes. He thereby abolished natures as consistent entities with appropriate effects. He indeed explicitly claimed that it was possible to have starlight without stars. The abolition of individual natures brought him dangerously close to abolishing Nature, or the Universe. He certainly rejected the argument widely entertained by his medieval predecessors that the unity of the universe was due to an internal connection among all things. According to Ockham, the unity of the universe was merely the circumstance that “some things stand farther apart from one another than others.”

Such was one of Ockham's very few utterances on the universe.