John Buridan

Buridan, John (c.1295/ 1300-after 1358), became a master of arts at the University of Paris in c.1320 and spent the rest of his life teaching there in the Faculty of Arts. He was rector of the university in 1328 and again in 1340. According to Villon, the queen of France ordered him to be tied in a sack and thrown into the Seine (no other source recounts this incident).

Among Buridan's works are logical treatises (Tractatus de consequentiis, Sophismata, Summulae de dialectica/Compendium logicae) which offered sophisticated treatment of the logica modernorum, the branches of logic newly devised by medieval logicians; and quaestio-commentaries on a very wide range of Aristotle's writing, including the Nicomachean Ethics, the Metaphysics, Politics, and many of the texts on natural science. Like his English near-contemporary, William of Ockham, Buridan was a nominalist: he denied that anything exists which is not individual. He did not, however, follow Ockham in his rejection of Aristotelian epistemology, nor does his moral thought show the strong emphasis—characteristic of Ockham and many 14th-c. nominalists—on the distinction between God's absolute power (what in theory God can do) and his ordained power. As an arts master, Buridan was content to develop Aristotle's ethics in Aristotle's own terms, as a practical science.

The sophism known as Buridan's Ass, which presents a donkey dying of hunger because unable to choose between two equal bundles of hay, appears to have been falsely attributed to him.

— John Marenbon

Buridan, John (c. 1300-after 1360) French scholastic philosopher. Buridan was educated under Ockham and taught at Paris, where he was also rector of the university. Little is known directly of Buridan's life, although it is known that he climbed Mont Ventoux considerably before Petrarch, and it was rumoured that he was tossed into the Seine in a sack for dallying with the Queen of France. He was a logician rather than a theologian, and pursued issues of formal logic for their own sake rather than for the sake of doctrinal argument. In addition to his writings in philosophy and logic, he contributed extensively to the science of his time, and his ethics shows a teleological bent related to Cicero and Seneca rather than to the more authoritarian and deontological ethics of Ockham. In logic his Consequentiae and Sophismata contain discussions of modal logic and of paradoxes of self-reference which still hold considerable interest.