The implications of divine omnipotence had been rumbling through the cloisters of Oxford for a generation before William arrived. His predecessor Duns Scotus (1266–1308) had discussed the problem of knowing the difference between right and wrong if God could, arbitrarily, change the rules. William went much further. In an approach that foreshadowed Descartes’s dismantling of Western philosophy until he reached the famous dictum of ‘cogito ergo sum’, Occam used his razor to strip away everything in medieval philosophy except God’s omnipotence.
