 Although Holkot was a Dominican, well versed in the texts of Aquinas, his philosophy and theology owe much more to the scholastics of the fourteenth century than to the thirteenth. William Ockham exercised the most important influence. The hallmarks of Ockham’s philosophy are: his reduction of Aristotle’s ten categories of being to substance and quality; his analysis of the other eight categories and many other terms of philosophical art as connotative terms, best understood as exponible into more fundamental absolute terms denoting substances and qualities; his rejection of Aristotle’s final, formal and material causes as properly causal, keeping only efficient causality; his conception of mental language as a logical thought structure existing independently of spoken language; his reformulation of the prevailing views about reference (supposition theory) to accommodate his spare metaphysics; his rejection of species as necessary for knowledge in favor of intuitive cognition or the direct intellectual cognition of objects; and his view that the ethical precepts of the Ten Commandments are not absolute but subject to divine will, such that God could, without contradiction, have created a system in which moral good involves obeying the opposite of each of the traditional commands. Holkot assumed most of Ockham’s philosophical positions as foundational, taking them for granted in the development of his theology.