Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Oxford Calculators

When Ockham died of the Black Death in Munich in 1349 it was a quarter of a century since he had left Oxford. During the period, the University had become the unquestioned intellectual centre of scholastic philosophy. It would be wrong to envisage it simply as a battleground for warring schools of thought, Thomists against Scotists, nominalists against realists and so on. During this period, Aquinas was not much followed in Oxford, even by Dominicans, and Scotism was not dominant even though in the first half of the fourteenth century the leading thinkers were Franciscans. Even Ockham left behind no characteristic nominalist school in Oxford. It was in France that nominalists like John of Mirecourt and Nicholas of Autrecourt took to lengths of extreme scepticism his teaching that God's unlimited power rendered suspect human claims to any certain knowledge of absolute truth.