Academically brilliant, he came to the attention of Luke Wadding, who requested that he be one of the first students to enter the newly established Irish Franciscan college of St Isidore in Rome on 7 September 1625. After his novitiate he studied at Cologne, then returned to Louvain to study under the Irish historians, John Colgan and Hugh Ward. We know nothing of his life before his entrance into the novitiate of the Irish Franciscans at St Anthony’s College, Louvain. John Pounce (also known as John Punch) was born in 1603 of Anglo-Irish parents. Was invented in 1639, substantially in its present wording, by the Scotist Commentator, John Ponce of Cork: a little-known man of great abilities and very independent disposition. Thorburn concludes that this is probably the root source of the phrase, that it There John Ponce of Cork says that there is a common axiom used frequently by the Scholastics entities must not be multiplied without necessity: “illud axioma vulgare, quo tam frequentei, utuntur Scholastici non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate“. The earliest quote similar to the Razor that he finds is in a commentary contained in Wadding’s edition of Duns Scotus’s philosophy (1639). Searching for a form of words similar to ‘Occam’s Razor’, Thorburn finds it cited as a general rule in an Inaugural Dissertation, De Stylo Philosophico Marii Nizolii by Leibnitz in 1670, and a similar version in Clauberg‘s Elementa Philosophice seut Ontosophia (Groningen, 1647). Thorburn finds the phrase first associated with Occam by Tenneman in his history Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (1812) which states that Occam followed the rule Entia non sunt multiplicanda prseter necessitatem without ascribing the actual words to Occam. The phrase associated with Occam relating to parsimony seemed to be ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’ (and variants thereof): ‘Entities should not be posited without necessity’. He also searched histories of medieval philosophy and found nothing. Thorburn discovered many places the phrase was not found: the works of Occam, Scotus, or Aquinas in “the two most popular textbooks of the Middle Ages, the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Bishop of Paris, +1164), and the Summulae Logicales of Petrus Hispanus” or in Abelard, Hales, Albert, Bonaventura, and Durand. That research suggested the origin lay with an Irish scholastic, John Punch. The paper is available from Mind 27 (1918), 345-353 and on wikisource. The other question is, who did originally say it? In 1918, William Thorburn published the result of his investigations into this question in Mind. The question, of course, is which entities are needed and which are not. Moreover, as usually stated, it is a sentiment that virtually all philosophers, medieval or otherwise, would accept no one wants a needlessly bloated ontology. As the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy reports:Īlthough the sentiment is certainly Ockham’s, that particular formulation is nowhere to be found in his texts. Occam’s (or Ockham’s) Razor is a form of the principle of parsimony (broadly, that theories should be as simple as possible but not simpler.) It states: ‘Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.’ (In Latin, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.) However it seems that William of Occam never said it. The back label on a bottle of “Occam’s Razor” wine
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