William of Ockham. In 1350 the dominant intellectual system in Europe was still scholasticism. The scholastic theologians at the major universities remained the most influential thinkers of the time. Popes and kings frequently called on them to render judgments on issues that were often far from being theological matters. The last of the great scholastics, William of Ockham, died in 1347. The history of scholasticism over the next century involved working out the impact of Ockham's ideas. Before Ockham, the dominant scholastic view in philosophy was Thomism, named after the great scholastic thinker St. Thomas Aquinas. The debate between two systems involved the issue of how the mind knows things. Thomism accepted realism, which proposed that the mind understands what the five senses present to it because it recognizes them from their universals. The universals were concepts that existed on a higher metaphysical plane...