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‘Occam's razor' is so named from William of Ockham (b.1286? - d.1347) - Franciscan monk, theologian, scholastic philosopher, nominalist and father of modern epistemology. His name suggests that he was born in Ockham - then a small village in Surrey - his ‘razor' is a tool used when reasoning out a problem or testing a hypothesis - sometimes expressed as ‘the simplest solution is the best' - but - ironically - this is a gross oversimplification in itself - the classic definition is rendered as ‘entities must not be posited without necessity.' What this means in practise is that if you want to test competing hypotheses - that predict the same outcome - the one with the least amount of assumptions should be preferred - the ‘razor' shaves away the un-necessary. Nobody really knows why his name became attached to the principle - the phrase ‘novacula Occami' doesn't appear until a couple of centuries after his death. Exactly the same sort of methodology had been used by - running backwards in time - Duns Scotus, Maimonides, Ptolemy and Aristotle - to name but four - but there is no doubt that William used variations on the theme heavily in his work - it has stuck anyway. ‘Occam's razor' is still relevant - it is used in modern science - particularly physics - for predicting theoretical outcomes. William had a fairly eventful life - seemingly having a rare talent to annoy the authorities - he ended up on the wrong side of the two major theological controversies of his lifetime. He studied - and ended up teaching - at Oxford - where he got into trouble for the first time - in 1324 - or thereabouts - he published a commentary on Peter Lombard's ‘The Sentences,' - standard practise at the time - you were nobody in medieval philosophy if you didn't - which upset the local synod of bishops - who branded it ‘unorthodox' - I suspect strongly they were too stupid to follow his reasoning - there is nothing particularly challenging about it from a doctrinal point of view - and sent him to Avignon to answer to a Papal court. At this point the pontiff was based in France - not Rome - John XXII was not impressed with him. Unfortunately for William he wandered straight into one of the biggest fallouts in 14th century Christianity - as a Franciscan monk - he held to the idea of ‘Apostolic poverty' - the rule used by the monks held to the founding ideal - according to St Francis - that Jesus and his followers had no personal property - therefore monks shouldn't either. This pissed the Papacy off in no small way - who were very fond indeed of ‘earthly riches' and it set about the Franciscans. To their shame the order did eventually cave in on the issue. William decided it would be really helpful to - when in Avignon - write and publish a treatise ‘proving' that St Francis was right and the Papacy was wrong - an argument lavishly backed up by scriptural sources. This was the final straw for John XXII and William was obliged to do a runner in 1328 - the same year - he was formally excommunicated - interestingly though his philosophical works were never banned. He ended up in Bavaria under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV - himself locked in a battle with the Pope over who had the ultimate authority - temporal and spiritual - in his territories. For the first time William seems to have done something to help himself - he spend time turning out densely argued treatises on why his patron was indeed correct in telling the pope to bugger off. He died in 1347 - as the leader of a band of ‘dissident' Franciscans - which was good timing on his part as the whole of Europe was just about to be ravaged by the plague. I can't think of another razor named after a medieval philosopher - Gillette ‘Aquinas' anyone? ha ha.
