Sometimes though one has to doubt Lafferty's depth of philosophical understanding, when he writes stuff like this:
"We'll do it," said Gregory. "Our world has become
something of a fat slob; it cloys; it has bothered me all
evening. We will find whether purely intellectual at-
titudes are of actual effect. We'll leave the details to
Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year
1323 when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon
where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with
him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham's Commen-
tary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemn-
nation. They were not condemned outright, but Ock-
ham was whipped soundly in that first assault, and he
never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham's nihil-
ism was a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did
die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts
where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no
longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his view-
point could have sunk the world, if indeed, intellectual
attitudes are of actual effect."
"We wouldn't have liked Lutterell," said Aloysius. "He
was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was
always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was
charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will de-
stroy the world yet. There's a chance that we will get
our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was
frozen for thousands of years by an intellectual attitude,
one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham's. India is hypno-
tized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary
and which does not move -- hypnotized by an intellectual
attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ock-
ham's."
So they decided that the former chancellor of Ox-
ford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should
suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in
France, and that he should not arrive there to lance
the Ockham thing before it infected the world.
One may hold in his favor, that this is a world that has been already altered by one experiment, so the Ockham described here need not be the "real" Ockham. As Aloysius Shiplap says a few paragraphs earlier:
There is something amiss
here, though. It is as though I remembered when things
were not so stark with Ockham, as though, in some
variant, Ockham's Terminalism did not mean what we know
that it did mean.
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