Life, Influence, and Works

Buridan was born around 1300 somewhere in the diocese of Arras, in Picardy. He was probably of humble birth, which is indicated by the fact that we have no reliable record of his family, and by the circumstance that at the College of Cardinal Lemoine, where he completed his early education, he may have been a recipient of a stipend for needy students. If this is in fact the case, then his career is a testimony to the possibility of upward social mobility in medieval academia through talent and hard work alone. He obtained his license to teach after 1320 at the Arts Faculty of the University of Paris, where he remained teaching for the rest of his life. The fact that he did not follow the usual career path of professors of his time, moving on to one of the ‘‘higher’’ Faculties of Medicine, Law, or Theology, may indicate a prudent choice on his part: staying at the Arts Faculty, he could work relatively undisturbed on his ‘‘quiet nominalist revolution,’’ without getting embroiled in the ‘‘ideologically charged’’ controversies of the Faculty of Theology. In any case, staying at the Faculty of Arts certainly did not hurt his professional stature. He served twice as rector of the university, and lived unusually well off for a university professor of his time, drawing income from at least three benefices till his death, sometime before 1362, when one of his benefices went to another person.

Buridan’s students and professional associates at Paris spread his ideas far and wide in Europe. (All this, however, need not mean that talk about a doctrinally homogenous ‘‘School of Buridan’’ at Paris is justified: see Thijssen 2004.) But besides his enormous indirect influence, we should note that his works themselves, both in manuscripts and later in early printed editions, became required reading at many ‘‘new’’ universities, such as Vienna, Prague, Krakow, Rostock, and Saint Andrews.

Buridan’s works are mostly the by-products of his teaching. As such, they mainly consist of commentaries on Aristotle, covering the entire Aristotelian corpus, ranging from logic to natural philosophy (including physics, biology, and the philosophy of the soul), to metaphysics, and to practical philosophy, including ethics and politics. Among the commentaries, there are running commentaries expounding Aristotle’s texts, but the more significant ones, where his originality shines, are the question commentaries (fitting in the established medieval genre), which, instead of merely expounding the author’s text, provide the opportunity of thorough discussion of the problems raised by the text. In fact, the commentary format suited his style so well that he wrote even his most original, systematic work, Summulae de dialectica (see Buridan 2001) in the form of a running commentary on an authoritative text, in this case, the enormously influential Summulae logicales (or simply Tractatus) of Peter of Spain (see Peter of Spain 1972). Besides his major works, he produced a number of short treatises, the most important and original of which is the Treatise on Consequences, expounding his original, nominalist conception of logical validity. (For a detailed discussion of his genuinely original conception, see Klima 2009, c. 10; for more on his life and an excellent, historically ‘‘contextualized’’ discussion of his work, see Zupko 2003.)