William of Ockham (also spelled Occam) was a Franciscan monk and theologian who was among the most highly regarded and controversial European philosophers of his time. While much of his work was theological in nature and amounted to little more than ‘building castles in the sky’ — that is, speculating about issues that have no real content — Ockham did make at least one important and lasting contribution to human thought: the principle known as “Ockham’s Razor”. This principle — really just a ‘rule of thumb’ rather than a physical or logical law — promotes simplicity in explanations. This approach ran counter to the theological-style thinking that dominated the Thirteenth-Century intellectual world, which leaned toward explanations of extreme and unnecessary complexity.
Ockham is often thought of as a sort of Father of Scientific Thinking, since Ockham’s Razor is a characteristic feature of nearly all scientific theory-building. But Ockham himself would have seen Ockham’s Razor as merely a corollary of his more general views on parsimony and poverty. The Franciscans held up poverty as an ideal condition, and Ockham was trying to support this notion with abstract arguments that wove logic and religion into what probably seemed to him to be a fabric of truth, but today seems more like a pathetic tangle of nonsense. It is truly remarkable that later generations of thinkers could distill from this hodge-podge a principle of such clarity and usefulness that it would become one of our basic tools for understanding the world.
More biographical information about William of Ockham can be found here:
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