No abstract

Given his known predilection for ontological parsimony, Ockham’s ontology of artifacts is unsurprisingly reductionist: artifacts are nothing over and above their existing and appropriately ordered parts. However, the case of artifacts is notable in that they are real objects that human artisans produce by bringing about a real change: they spatially rearrange existing natural thing(s) or their parts for the sake of some end. This article argues that the human contribution to the nature and production of artifacts is two-fold: (1) the artisan’s cognitive grasp of her expertise and her decision to deploy that expertise are the two efficient causes necessary to explain the existence of an artifact, and (2) the purpose that the artisan had in mind when she decided to make an artifact fixes the function(s) of the artifact such that an artisan’s purpose is the final cause necessary to explain what an artifact is. Artifacts indeed exist, owing what they are and that they are to intelligent and volitional human activity, which Ockham never denies. The article submits that a myopic focus on Ockham’s indisputable reductionism does not exhaust what is metaphysically interesting and relevant about artifacts.

This paper reconstructs William of Ockham's (c. 1287Ockham's (c. -1347 account of the ontology of social groups. Across his writings, Ockham mentions kingdoms, religious orders, crowds, people, armies, and corporations. Using the political community as a case-study against the background of Ockham's metaphysics of parts and wholes, it is argued that at least some social groups are identical to a plurality of many human beings who have decided to order themselves with respect to another in some particular way. In this regard, a social group is a structured aggregate that is nothing over and above its existing and ordered parts, and, at least in the case of the political community, is like an artefact inasmuch as it is partly dependent on the volitional acts of its members to exist at all.

The chapter starts out with a brief discussion of the similarity alleged to exist by the editors of William Ockham's Ordinatio between a series of opinions canvassed by Ockham on the nature of universals and a series of opinions listed by James of Viterbo on the nature of concepts. It then proceeds to expound James's little known theory of concepts and universals, and concludes that, despite interesting parallels between his views and those of the Veneralibilis Inceptor, James's theory is still very much committed to the realist assumptions that Ockham thought metaphysics needed to dispense with.