nicholas latkovic

“His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It was in itself splendid enough that we could live our lives in harmony so long.”

- Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher and feminist theorist, on her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre

Above: It is possible to describe the other planets in the solar system as revolving around the Earth, but that explanation is unnecessarily complex compared to the contemporary consensus that all planets in the solar system revolve around the Sun.

Occam’s razor, also known as Ockham’s razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness), is a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.

The principle is often summarized as “simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.” In practice, the principle is usually focused on shifting the burden of proof in discussions. That is, the razor is a principle that suggests we should tend towards simpler theories until we can trade some simplicity for increased explanatory power.

Bertrand Russell offered what he called “a form of Occam’s Razor”: “Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.”

Occam’s razor is attributed to the 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar Father William of Ockham (d’Okham) although the principle was familiar long before. The words attributed to Occam are “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem), although these actual words are not to be found in his extant works.

The saying is also phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate (“plurality should not be posited without necessity”). To quote Isaac Newton, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes.”

- Wikipedia

“Lo no mori, e non rimasi vivo.”
“I did not die, yet nothing of life remained.”

- Dante Alighieri, poet, writer and philosopher

Annie Hall. Dir. Wood Allen. Pro. Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, Colleen Dewhurst. United Artists, 1977.

My mother’s best advice to me was: ‘Whatever you decide to do in life, be sure that the joy of doing it does not depend upon the applause of others, because in the long run we are, all of us, alone.’

- Ali MacGraw, actress

Parenthood. Dir. Ron Howard. Pro. Brian Grazer. Perf. Steve Martin, Dianne Wiest, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis. Universal Pictures, 1989.