HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 54: Robert Grosseteste
24 Nov 2020
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Philosophy at oxford had been dominated by franciscans since the says of robert. Grosseteste, the teachers there had little patience with the scholastic system-building of the dominican philosophers in paris. The danger of creating elaborate systems of theory, ockham learned from masters like henry of ghent and john duns scotus, they can have the unintended effect of limiting god"s power. Ockham was an audacious thinker, not so as to argue. The simpler the explanation, the better; the humbler the truth being propounded, the greater its likelihood to be in fact true. What especially interested ockham was the question of how we can know, absolutely, something to be true. He posited that there are two kinds of knowledge: intuition and abstraction. By intuition he meant, in general, sense perception: that which we perceive through our senses and which can be corroborated by the sense perception of others.
