This volume is the first annotated translation in any language of the entire text of the Summulae de dialectica, by the Parisian master of arts John Buridan (1300-1358). One of the most influential works in the history of late medieval philosophy, the Summulae is Buridan's systematic exposition of his nominalist philosophy of logic. Buridan's doctrine spread rapidly and for some two hundred years was dominant at many European universities. His work is of increasing interest today not (...) only to historians of medieval philosophy but also to modern philosophers, several of whom find in Buridan's ideas important clues to problems of contemporary philosophy. Gyula Klima provides a substantial introduction to Buridan's life and work and discusses his place in the history of logic. Through extensive notes Klima assists philosopher and medievalist alike to read Buridan with understanding and insight. Those with a philosophical interest in the relations among the structures of language, thought, and reality will find much to ponder in the Summulae. (shrink)

This publication offers the first critical edition of John Buridan’s second set of questions on Aristotle's “De generatione et corruptione”. The edition was made by Michiel Streijger, Paul Bakker and Hans Thijssen. First published as a printed book in 2010, the publication has been converted to open access with the CC BY-NC-ND license as of September 2023.

John Buridan (d. ca. 1360) was one of the most talented and influential philosophers of the later Middle Ages. His Questions Commentary on the eight books of Aristotle's Physics is the most important witness to Buridan's teachings in the field of natural philosophy. This volume presents the first critical edition of books III and IV of the final redaction of Buridan's Questions Commentary on the Physics. The critical edition of the Latin text is accompanied by a (...) detailed guide to the contents of Buridan's questions by Edith D. Sylla. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. (...) class='Hi'>Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers.

This critical edition is the first edition of John Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Topics. The work is preserved in one complete manuscript of good quality and in four abbreviated versions. Buridan composed the work at the University of Paris in the first half of the fourteenth century, and the work illustrates very well how the commentators of this period took a freer attitude to Aristotle than previously and were selective about the passages which they commented upon. In (...) book II Buridan discussed a number of sophisms which are not found in his collection of sophisms. The commentary was quite influential in the fifteenth century, particularly on the teaching in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe. (shrink)

'De syllogismis' is the fifth treatise of John Buridan's 'Summulae dialecticae', a textbook he wrote for his logic course in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris. 'De syllogismis' contains material related to Aristotle's Analytica Priora and Boethius's 'De hypotheticis syllogismis'. The textbook discusses inferences involving not only propositions de inesse, but also propositions featuring oblique, reduplicative and infinite terms. Buridan displays a keen interest in modal inferences and inferences involving propositional attitudes. Buridan's De (...) syllogismis continues along the lines of his nominalist conception of the relations between mind, language and reality. (shrink)

Aquinas, Ockham, and Burdan all claim that a person can be numerically identical over time, despite changes in size, shape, and color. How can we reconcile this with the Indiscernibility of Identicals, the principle that numerical identity implies indiscernibility across time? Almost all contemporary metaphysicians regard the Indiscernibility of Identicals as axiomatic. But I will argue that Aquinas, Ockham, and Burdan would reject it, perhaps in favor of a principle restricted to indiscernibility at a time.

Proclaiming Louis Pasteur as the “Founder of Stereochemistry”, the distinguished Scottish chemist, Crum Brown, addressing a late nineteenth-century audience of Edinburgh savants, drew attention—as Pasteur had incessantly done—to the intimate relationship between living organisms and the optical activity of compounds sustaining them. It seemed to Crum Brown “that we must go very much further down in the scale of animate existence than Buridan's ass, before we come to a being incapable of giving practical expression to a distinct preference for (...) one of two objects differing only in being one to the right and the other to the left”. Crum Brown's lecture must have been entertaining, but it was also motivated by a serious desire to do justice to a particular assertion of Pasteur—an assertion which had, moreover, been misunderstood and dismissed by no less a chemical genius than Wilhelm Ostwald. Writing at a time when the majority of his colleagues were stressing the resemblances between inorganic and organic compounds, Pasteur had insisted that he “could not point out the existence of any more profound distinction between the products formed under the influence of life and all others” than that “artificial products have … no molecular asymmetry”. Pasteur was obliged to concede that the chemist might produce enantiomorphic pairs of isomers, but without resorting to a manual separation of crystals he was powerless to imitate Nature's performance, powerless to fabricate by chemical means a separate optical isomer, divorced from its partner. Now it was not only Crum Brown who felt that chemists had brushed aside this proposition of Pasteur. In his 1898 Presidential Address to the chemical section of the British Association, Professor F. R. Japp also complained that the possible vitalistic implications of Pasteur's distinction between natural and artificial products had been misapprehended or tacitly ignored. (shrink)

How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participants in the change were Jean Buridan, humanists such as Lorenzo Valla (...) and Rudolph Agricola, Paduan Aristotelians such as Agostino Nifo, Jacopo Zabarella, and members of the medical faculty, writers on philosophy of mind such as the Englishman John Case, writers of reasoning handbooks, and Francis Bacon. (shrink)

What is an occurrent mental state? According to a common scholastic answer such a state is at least in part a quality of the mind. When I newly think about a machiatto, say, my mind acquires a new quality. However, according to a view discussed by John Buridan (who rejects it) and John of Mirecourt (who is condemned in 1347 for considering it “plausible”), an occurrent mental state is not even in part a quality. After sketching some (...) of the history of this position, I will present two common arguments against it—the argument from change and the argument from agency. I will then turn to Mirecourt’s own position on the matter. Mirecourt, I show, in fact offers us two different theories about occurrent mental states. The first, which I call the conservation theory, accepts that mental states are in part qualities. However, a mental state is a quality together with an action on the side of the mind, namely, its conservation of a quality within itself. The second position, which I will call the pure-action theory, holds that an occurrent mental state is not even in part a quality; instead, it is an action the mind performs which is neither the production nor the conservation of a quality within itself. Mirecourt characterizes such pure actions as “modes” of the mind, and it is this position which is condemned in 1347. In the final section, I turn to an objection that both Buridan and Mirecourt raise against the pure-action theory: if accidental states of the mind are mere modes of the mind, then why not suppose that all accidents are mere modes of the subjects which they qualify? (shrink)

Introduction -- Prologue -- Book one -- Book two -- Book three -- Book four.

The chronicle of John of Worcester is one of the most important sources of earlier English history. The chronicle, which was written at Worcester by 1140, is of considerable interest to historians of both the Anglo-Saxon period and of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its backbone is a translation of an Anglo-Saxon chronicle with varied connections, and this edition makes possible the detailed examination of these allegiances. Its annals for the second half of the ninth century provide one (...) of the earliest surviving witnesses to the text of Asser's Life of Alfred. The author had access to otherwise unrecorded sources of events in the eleventh century, and the chronicle's value as a contemporary source for the reign of Stephen has long been acknowledged. Dr McGurk has completed the edition of the work left unfinished by R. R. Darlington on his death in 1977. The chronicle will be published in three volumes. Volume II covers the annals for 450 to 1066, and volume III the annals from 1067 to 1140. Volume I will be published last, and will contain a general introduction and supplementary material. (shrink)

John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) was the foremost political theorist of his age. He was trained in scholastic theology and philosophy at Paris, and his writings are invaluable for summarizing many of the metaphysical speculations of his time. The Policraticus is his main work, and is regarded as the first complete work of political theory to be written in the Latin Middle Ages. Cary Nederman's new edition and translation, currently the only version available in English, is primarily aimed at (...) undergraduate students of the history of political thought and medieval history. His new translation shows how important this text is in understanding the mores, forms of conduct and beliefs of the most powerful and learned segments of twelfth century Western Europe. (shrink)

Vol. 1. Ars logica seu de forma et materia ratiocinandi -- v. 2. Naturalis philosophiae I. pars. De ente mobili in communi. III. pars. De ente mobili corruptibili -- v. 3. Naturalis philosophiae IV. pars. De ente mobili animato.

Excerpt from Opera Omnia The Works of J ohn of Salisbury have never before been collected together, nor have they ever until now, either wholly or in part, been printed in this country. Yet the writer was without doubt superior to all his contempo raries, and his Works are by far the most valuable compositions which have come down to us, from the twelfth and thirteenth cen tuties. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic (...) books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas's Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity's continual coming to terms with the "Third Entry" of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture - specifically the Aristotelian notion of 'science' and sacra doctrina's satisfaction of those requirements - the Thomistic-commentary tradition, and (...) the larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula's flourishing "Second Scholasticism." In this latter context, John of St. Thomas applies the theological principles of Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic disputes preoccupying Thomist, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians, such as Cajetan, Bañez, Luis de Molina, Vazquez, Suárez - to name only a few - in a tour de force of theological thinking throughout the entire period of Scholasticism. In the process - and not insignificantly - the status quaestionis of theology's scientific character is clearly framed and answered according to John's satisfaction. Key to John of St. Thomas's resolution of the question is his understanding of the continuity of the power of human reason with the super-intelligibility of divine revelation spelled out in terms of what he calls "virtual revelation." This text presented in this volume is a quintessential example of the deep and abiding harmony that flourished between faith and reason as well as grace and nature within the golden era of Baroque Scholasticism. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. (...) class='Hi'>Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

A collection of letters portraying the life and times of this great medieval scholar, the devoted secretary of Archbishop Theobald, and the faithful friend and counsellor of Becket. Volume 1 of his correspondence, 'The Early Letters,' long out of print, is available on microfiche.

In this paper, we provide a historical exposition of John Buridan's theory of divided modal propositions. We then develop a semantic interpretation of Buridan's theory which pays particular attention to Buridan's ampliation of modal terms. We show that these semantics correctly capture his syllogistic reasoning.

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. (...) class='Hi'>Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

John Buridan was the most famous philosophy teacher of his time, and probably the most influential. In this important new book, Jack Zupko offers the first systematic exposition of Buridan's thought to appear in any language. Zupko uses Buridan's own conception of the order and practice of philosophy to depict the most salient features of his thought, beginning with his views on the nature of language and logic and then illustrating their application to a series of (...) topics in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. Part 1 of John Buridan considers the picture of language and logic developed in Buridan's Summulae de dialectica. Buridan systematically overhauled the logic he first learned and later taught at the University of Paris, redeeming the older tradition of Aristotelian logic in terms, propositions, and arguments. This made possible newer and more powerful forms of philosophical discourse. The second part of this volume provides a reading of Buridan's philosophy, showing how this discourse shaped his treatment of speculative questions such as the relation between soul and body, the nature of knowledge, the proper subject of psychology, the function of the. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the metaphysical assumptions behind Aquinas’s denials that a human rational soul unites with matter at conception and that a human rational soul is capable of developing and arranging the organic parts of an embryo. The paper argues that Buridan does not share these assumptions and holds that a soul is capable of developing and arranging organic parts. It argues that, given hylomorphism about the nature of organisms, including human beings, Buridan’s view is philosophically (...) superior to Aquinas’s in several respects. Finally, the paper poses an apparent inconsistency between several of Buridan’s texts on this topic and attempts to show that the inconsistency is merely apparent. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Obviously medicine should be evidence-based. The issues lie in the details: what exactly counts as evidence? Do certain kinds of evidence carry more weight than others? (And if so why?) And how exactly should medicine be based on evidence? When it comes to these details, the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement has got itself into a mess – or so it will be argued. In order to start to resolve this mess, we need to go 'back to basics'; and that means (...) turning to the philosophy of science. The theory of evidence, or rather the logic of the interrelations between theory and evidence, has always been central to the philosophy of science – sometimes under the alias of the 'theory of confirmation'. When taken together with a little philosophical commonsense, this logic can help us move towards a position on evidence in medicine that is more sophisticated and defensible than anything that EBM has been able so far to supply. (shrink)

The solution John Buridan offers for the Paradox of the Liar has not been correctly placed within the framework of his philosophy of language. More precisely, there are two important points of the Buridanian philosophy of language that are crucial to the correct understanding of his solution to the Liar paradox that are either misrepresented or ignored in some important accounts of his theory. The first point is that the Aristotelian formula, ` propositio est vera quia qualitercumque significat (...) in rebus significatis ita est ', once amended, is a correct way to talk about the truth of a sentence. The second one is that he has a double indexing theory of truth: a sentence is true in a time about a time, and such times should be distinguished in the account of the truth-conditions of sentences. These two claims are connected in an important way: the Aristotelian formula indicates the time about which a sentence is true. Some interpreters of the Buridanian solution to the paradox, following the lead of Herzberger, have missed these points and have been led to postulate truth-values gaps, or surrogates of truth-value gaps, when there is nothing of this sort in his theory. I argue against this tradition of interpretation of Buridan and propose an interpretation of his solution to the Liar. (shrink)

Are theories ‘underdetermined by the evidence’ in any way that should worry the scientific realist? I argue that no convincing reason has been given for thinking so. A crucial distinction is drawn between data equivalence and empirical equivalence. Duhem showed that it is always possible to produce a data equivalent rival to any accepted scientific theory. But there is no reason to regard such a rival as equally well empirically supported and hence no threat to realism. Two theories are empirically (...) equivalent if they share all consequences expressed in purely observational vocabulary. This is a much stronger requirement than has hitherto been recognised— two such ‘rival’ theories must in fact agree on many claims that are clearly theoretical in nature. Given this, it is unclear how much of an impact on realism a demonstration that there is always an empirically equivalent ‘rival’ to any accepted theory would have—even if such a demonstration could be produced. Certainly in the case of the version of realism that I defend—structural realism—such a demonstration would have precisely no impact: two empirically equivalent theories are, according to structural realism, cognitively indistinguishable. (shrink)

This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower (...) forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

One of the manuscripts of Buridan’s Summulae contains three figures, each in the form of an octagon. At each node of each octagon there are nine propositions. Buridan uses the figures to illustrate his doctrine of the syllogism, revising Aristotle's theory of the modal syllogism and adding theories of syllogisms with propositions containing oblique terms (such as ‘man’s donkey’) and with ‘propositions of non-normal construction’ (where the predicate precedes the copula). O-propositions of non-normal construction (i.e., ‘Some S (some) (...) P is not’) allow Buridan to extend and systematize the theory of the assertoric (i.e., non-modal) syllogism. Buridan points to a revealing analogy between the three octagons. To understand their importance we need to rehearse the medieval theories of signification, supposition, truth and consequence. (shrink)

It may come as a surprise to readers familiar with the life and work of the Arts Master that he discusses the Eucharist at all. As he likes to remind us, theological topics are generally out of his wheelhouse. Even so, in his Questions on the “Metaphysics” of Aristotle (QM) 4.6, Buridan takes the sacrament of the Eucharist as a key data point in his discussion of Aristotle’s Categories. In the Eucharist, the accidents of the bread and wine—their color, (...) texture, and so on—remain intact, but the underlying substance is transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Accordingly, God can preserve accidents independent of their underlying substance. Therefore, for our part we can use accidental terms, like whiteness, without connoting any substances, like communion bread. Moreover, it follows that, contrary to Aristotle, substance and the accidental categories are not the most general genera. Instead, being (ens) is, as Buridan concludes. Here, I trace Buridan’s thought on the metaphysical and semantic matters of substance in light of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is for him not only a theological truth, but a metaphysical and semantic datum as well. I conclude by asking why Buridan did not take any and all questions about the Eucharist to be out of his ken. What does this tell us about his attitude toward theology? This paper also includes, as an appendix, the first ever English translation of the question under discussion (QM 4.6): “Does the term being (ens) signify substances and accidents by one single concept or notion?”. (shrink)