Ockham Explained

I’ll pause here for another brief philosophy-related post.

Amidst all the regional turmoil of the week and my wish to follow it closely, there’s still been time to read on the bus. And I’ve had a crackling good read with Rondo Keele’s Ockham Explained.

It’s in the same Open Court series as my own Heidegger Explained. Keele taught here in Cairo from 2002-05 and is now teaching in the honors college at Northwestern State in Louisiana.

Strengths of the book:

*clear prose

*a gift for making the intellectual life of the Middle Ages as vivid as one can make it in a brief introductory format

*the best handful-of-pages summary of Plato and Aristotle that I can imagine

*a lucid exposition of Ockham, his famous Razor, and Walter Chatton’s contemporary objections to the Razor

A very nice read. My worry was that it would only be read by people who happen to be looking for an introductory text on Ockham, which can’t be such a large number. But it’s currently #99 among Medieval books on Amazon, and considering that the book is already a year old that’s not bad. (I was told by the editor at Open Court that the vast majority of books have half their sales in their first year of existence. If you can beat that dynamic, I suppose it means your book has some legs.)