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Provides deep context for Ockham's Science & Razor, March 15, 2007
This review is from: Demonstration and Scientific Knowledge in William of Ockham: A Translation of Summa Logicae III-II: De Syllogismo Demonstrativo, and Selections from the Prologue to the Ordinatio (Hardcover)
Demonstration and Scientific Knowledge in William of Ockham: A Translation of Summa Logicae III-II: De Syllogismo Demonstrativo, and Selections from the Prologue to the Ordinatio by John Lee Longeway (University of Notre Dame Press) makes available for the first time an English translation of William of Ockham's work on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, which contains his theory of scientific demonstration and philosophy of science. John Lee Longeway also includes an extensive commentary and a detailed history of the intellectual background to Ockham's work. He puts Ockham into context by providing a scholarly account of the reception and study of the Posterior Analytics in the Latin Middle Ages, with a detailed discussion of Robert Grosseteste, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Giles of Rome. In a series of appendices, Longeway includes shorter translations of some important related work by Giles of Rome and John of Cornwall.
In his introductory discussion, Longeway examines the exact character of the highest sort of demonstration (demonstratio potissima), the relations of the empirical sciences to mathematics, natural causation and the manner in which natural laws come to be known, the possibility of natural knowledge, our knowledge of God, and the relation of theology to the other sciences. Longeway discusses the way in which scientific epistemology and theory of demonstration corresponds to the metaphysical position of its interpreter, in particular to the Neoplatonism of Grosseteste, the radical Aristotelianism of Giles of Rome and Albert the Great, the more moderate Aristotelianism of Aquinas, and the nominalistic empiricism of Ockham. Throughout the book, Longeway makes a case for Ockham's importance as the founder of empiricism in the West.
Demonstration and Scientific Knowledge in William of Ockham will interest philosophers and historians of science and logic, as well as those who study medieval philosophy or early modern philosophy.
The medievalist needs no convincing that William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1347) is worthy of study. At one time Ockham's views might have been regarded as a clever but uninstructed sign of the decay of Scholastic discourse, but, with the work of such scholars as Philotheus Boehner, Ernest Moody, and Marilyn McCord Adams, those days are now receding into the past. Nonetheless, outside the small circle of students of medieval philosophy and logic, a translation of Ockham's work on the theory of demonstration, even combined with a broader study of its Scholastic background, may seem to require some justification.
This is unfortunate, for contemporary philosophers should find Ockham a fascinating figure. He is the founder of European empiricism. Like Locke and Hume, he relied on the logical analysis of language to ground a rejection of Platonic metaphysics, and he found the source of all our concepts and knowledge of the natural world in our experience of particulars. Moreover, he avoided that error of Early Modern empiricism that now seems most objectionable: the attempt to construct our public world from purely subjective experience. Ockham is a direct realist, relying on the causal relation between concept and object to establish the concept's reference. In his view, what makes belief cognition is the right causal relation between the knower and what is known, not the possession of a sufficient justification for one's belief. Indeed, the accusation of skepticism brought against him, and the skeptical bent of some of his later followers, arises from a typical justificationist misapprehension of his response to skepticism, for Ockham manages without the implausible claim that we can ever have a subjective guarantee that any of our beliefs about the natural world is infallible.'
Ockham's theory of scientific demonstration, the subject of the texts translated and discussed here, presents his conclusions in philosophy of science. In their discussion of demonstration, Ockham and his predecessors approached some of the most fundamental problems of a scientific empiricism, both ancient and modern. How are concepts of natural things formed on the basis of sensory experience? What is the relationship between the notions of everyday people, from which a scientist necessarily begins his research, and the more sophisticated scientific conceptions of these things-- can we and the scientist even be said to be speaking of the same things? How are causal principles rooted in the real natures of things, and how is it possible to know them? How does functionality occur in the natural world? What is the nature and function of scientific knowledge, and how is it related to knowledge of a more ordinary sort? All these questions are dealt with from the standpoint of a scientific realism rooted in the conviction that scientific explanation captures the causal structure of reality.'
But the texts translated here are not only philosophical documents. They depend on, and purport to interpret, Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, and they should be of considerable interest to the modern interpreter of Aristotle. Ockham focuses on a problem that has recently come to the fore in the literature on the Posterior Analytics --how does one demonstrate an attribute of a subject?
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