Abstract

This competent work in a growing, scholarly series is regrettably the last publication of the zealously expert Father Philotheus Boehner, who died in May, 1955, before the first fruit appeared of his projected critical edition of the philosophical and theological works of his misunderstood fourteenth century confrère. This is an apt introduction for the research student to a set of Ockham’s representative philosophical texts, printed in Latin and English on opposite pages. Ockham’s concisely technical style is notoriously difficult for the tyro—demanding to be ‘ruminated’, in the editor’s transferred phrase—and Fr. Boehner has been careful to render it in expansive and easy-going English. In addition to a select bibliography of Ockham’s writings and of commentaries upon them, Fr. Boehner concisely expounds his life and the main principles of his philosophy according to the order of the following illustrative texts.