Portal:Philosophy/Selected philosopher/5
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, from Ockham, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley. He is considered, along with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, one of the major figures of medieval thought and found himself at the center of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although commonly known for Ockham's Razor, the methodological procedure that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. A pioneer of nominalism, some consider him the father of modern epistemology, because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence. He denied the real existence of metaphysical universals and advocated for the reduction of ontology.