A nominalist to the core, he held that definition and predication are either false or tautological.
Here he studied scholastic philosophy and theology under a pupil of Occam's, from whom he imbibed the nominalist conception of philosophy; in addition he studied canon law, medicine, astronomy and even magic, and apparently some Hebrew.
It is a notable feature of the new movement, that except verbally, in a certain licence of nominalist expression, due to the swing of the pendulum away from the realist doctrine of universals, there is little that we can characterize as Empiricism.
They had devised canons for the investigation of the concrete problems of this, but had either ignored altogether the need to give an account of the mirroring mind, or, in the alternative had been, with some naïveté, content to assume that their nominalist friends, consistently their allies in the long struggle with traditionalism, had adequately supplied or could adequately supply the need.
His Epitome et Collectorium ex Occamo super libros quatuor Sententiarum (1508, 1512, and various dates) is a clear and consistent account of the nominalist doctrine, and presents the complete system of scholastic thought from that point of view.