"In the small village of Ockham, near Woking in Surrey, stands a church. Made of grey stone, it has a pitched roof and an unassuming church tower but parts of it date back to the 13th century. This means they would have been standing when the village witnessed the birth of one of the greatest philosophers in Medieval Europe. His name was William and he became known as William of Ockham.
In the following 63 years William of Ockham managed to offend the Chancellor of Oxford University, disagree with his own ecclesiastical order and get excommunicated by the Pope; he also declared that the authority of rulers derives from the people they govern and was so brutally reductive with the theories of his colleagues that ‘Ockham’s Razor’ remains a philosophical principle today.
But why is William of Ockham significant in the history of philosophy, how did his turbulent life fit within the political dramas of his time and to what extent do we see his ideas in the work of later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and even Martin Luther?"
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