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Met on the Via Moderna
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
Somewhere about 1970 Gordon Leff changed his mind about William of Ockham. Earlier, in the article The fourteenth century and the decline of scholasticism’ and the survey Medieval Thought, Ockham had appeared in the conventional role of demolisher of the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation; apologist of pure will in God and man; lock-picker of the Pandora’s box of moral and theological bugs in which the teaching of his successors consisted. Sceptic and/or fideist, he might be credited with clearing the way for natural science, and indeed for Renaissance and Reformation; but in himself he was an apostle of negation, carrying a whiff of the diabolic. Leff made public his change of heart in the massive exposition of Ockham of 1975 and the essay, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook, which came out the following year. Ockham was still the author of a ‘metamorphosis of scholastic discourse’ because he had excluded all but empirical knowledge of individual things and had refused to accept that rational proof could be found for more than marginal items of revealed truth. But he had, it seems, believed that ‘nature’ and ‘right reason’ were terms which might be properly used of the physical and moral worlds; random incursions of God’s potentia absoluta (what God might do) into the system of salvation constructed by his potentia ordinata (what God had actually done) were no longer to be anticipated; and Ockham was not responsible for the aberrations of some followers.
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References
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