Not everyone agreed with Barker when he wrote those words. Few students of the Politics would agree with him today. Disagreement comes from different sides. On one hand--the "rights" hand, one might call it--Karl Popper argued in 1945 in The Open Society and its Enemies that Aristotle's essentialism was less interesting than Platonism but equally congenial to modern totalitarianism. On the other hand--call it the "anti-rights" hand --scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre and the legal historian Michel Villey would have it (...) that the whole modern conception of rights, especially human or natural rights, is a pernicious fabrication of the Enlightenment, with roots going back no further than the similarly pernicious nominalism of William of Ockham. As far as the current consensus is concerned, then, whether one favors rights or not, and whether one admires Aristotle or not, there are no rights--or at least no individual natural rights--in Aristotle. (shrink)

Ockham is sometimes regarded as the chief source for a view of rights as arbitrary powers of radically isolated individuals. In fact he provides a quintessentially “reasonable” conception of natural or human rights, one which suggests a promising answer to the question of what such rights are, namely, capacities for reasonable activity. This view of personal rights is complemented by Ockham’s equally reasonable and suggestive account of what is naturally “right” for human communities in different human conditions. The unusual situation (...) in which Ockham developed these ideas—as a theologian attacking the doctrinal pronouncements of a reigning pope—raises problems for extracting a systematic philosophical theory from his voluminous output, but the polemical setting of his political writings also gives them a certain relevance to current disputes about the place of secular thought in religious contexts. (shrink)

The English Franciscan, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349), was one of the most important thinkers of the later middle ages. Summoned to Avignon in 1324 to answer charges of heresy, Ockham became convinced that Pope John XXII was himself a heretic in denying the complete poverty of Christ and the apostles and a tyrant in claiming supremacy over the Roman empire. Ockham's political writings were a result of these personal convictions, but also include systematic discourses on the basis and functions (...) of spiritual and secular power as well as exhaustive discussions of Franciscan poverty and the general problem of papal heresy. Ockham emerges in this study as a man deeply committed to natural and Christian human rights, who found these fundamental values so seriously menaced in his time that their survival could be assured only by radical, even revolutionary, personal action and by a basic reworking of traditional political thought. (shrink)

The English Franciscan, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349), was one of the most important thinkers of the later middle agesThis book provides a coherent account of Ockham's aims and the principles operating in all his political works.

This is an accessible language edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the major prose work of the English 16th century.

THIS essay is concerned with two theses about enjoyment to be found in William of Ockham: Enjoyment is a certain kind of love, and Enjoyment is a cause of pleasure, not the same thing as pleasure or an effect of it. Its own thesis is that Ockham’s extensive discussions of such topics in human nature as love, pleasure, and volition, as well as cognition, deserve not only more attention but more varied attention than they typically receive: Ockham can fruitfully be (...) read as a contemporary philosopher of mind, as a pre- and possibly super-Humean founder of behavioral science, and as a committed philosophical theologian ; further, in each of these ways he can well be taken either in the abstract or as a pivotal historical figure in such larger late medieval-early modern movements of thought as involve a conception of what human beings are and what they can or should do. In view of this spread of aspects, one might wish for a unifying definition of Ockham’s own essential philosophical-psychological nature. The present study is not intended to provide such a definition. Its aim, rather, is to present Ockham as a sort of intellectual revolving door between positions, disciplines, and philosophical concerns which are now largely separated, or as a craggy mountain standing between secular or "modern" thought and vast but nebulous ranges of ideas looming in the distance beyond. An affinity for such ideas is not, to be sure, exclusively medieval, yet Ockham’s peculiar position as a defender of traditional spiritual truths and values who at the same time inaugurated an eminently influential via moderna in philosophy and theology suggests that we may find vantage points in his work for insights not easily available elsewhere. Whether we in corporate these into a system like Ockham’s, or a different system, or no system may be less important than seeking the insights in the first place. (shrink)