William of Ockham is, along with Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, among the most prominent figures in the history of philosophy during the High Middle Ages. He is probably best known today for his espousal of metaphysical nominalism; indeed, the methodological principle known as “Ockham's Razor” is named after him. But Ockham held important, often influential views not only in metaphysics but also in all other major areas of medieval philosophy—logic, physics or natural philosophy, theory of knowledge, ethics, and political philosophy—as well as in theology.
Ockham's is not much concerned with answering skeptical doubts. He takes it for granted that humans not only can but frequently do know things, and focuses his attention instead on the “mechanisms” by which this knowledge comes about. Ockham's theory of knowledge, like his natural philosophy, is broadly Aristotelian in form, although—again, like his natural philosophy—it is “Aristotelian” in its own way. For most Aristotelians of the day, knowledge involved the transmission of a “species” between the object and the mind. At the sensory level, this species may be compared to the more recent notion of a sense “impression.”
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