Buridan, John

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Second, he remained a secular cleric rather than joining an order such as the Dominicans or Franciscans. This freed him from the doctrinal disputes which often arose between religious orders, something which can be seen in the eclectic character of his work. Buridan's logical writings are in the form of handbooks and commentaries intended for use by students of logic. Most of his non-logical works appear as short commentaries ( expositiones ) or longer critical studies ( quaestiones ), usually in several versions, based on his lectures on the works of Aristotle .

In addition to the entire Organon, these included lectures on the Metaphysics , Physics , On the Heavens , On the Soul , Parva naturalia , Nicomachean Ethics and Politics .

Only a few of these works are available in modern editions, and none can be dated precisely. However, copies and early printed versions were distributed throughout European universities, where they often served as primary texts for courses in logic and Aristotelian philosophy.

As a result, Buridan's teachings continued to shape European thought well into the Renaissance. 2 Logic Buridan belongs to the 'terminist' tradition of medieval logic, so called because its practitioners regarded terms as the primary unit of logical analysis.

He wrote his most comprehensive logical work, the Summulae de dialectica (Summary of Dialectic) , as a commentary on the Tractatus or Summulae logicales (Summary of Logic) , a terminist textbook composed by Peter of Spain almost a century earlier.

However, because Buridan charged himself with 'analyzing and supplementing' Peter's rather elementary remarks 'sometimes differently' than Peter himself had expressed them, his comments served as a forum for his own innovative ideas in logic (Pinborg 1975 ). One section of Peter's text rewritten entirely by Buridan is the treatise on supposition, which deals with the referential function of significative terms in propositional contexts.

In this section, Buridan presents a revised account of the divisions of supposition that better expresses his nominalist ontology.

He rejects in particular the notion of 'simple supposition' , by which some logicians held that common terms such as 'man' could refer to 'universal natures… distinct from singulars outside the soul' (Summulae IV, 3 ).

In Buridan's view, terms refer only to particulars, although they can do so in different ways depending upon their semantic function.

Buridan also rejects as superfluous the idea of his Parisian contemporary Gregory of Rimini that what propositions signify, or 'make known' , is an abstract object that is 'complexly signifiable' .

Further expression of Buridan's nominalism can be found in the Tractatus de consequentiis (Treatise on Consequences) , an advanced study of the theory of inference, in which he argues that one need posit no additional cause for the falsity of a sentence beyond what makes its corresponding negation true. Buridan moved the Parisian tradition in new directions by developing and then systematically applying semantic theory to solve philosophical problems (Klima 1991 , 1992 ).

As well as characterizing his revision of the doctrine of supposition, this emerges in his analysis of the meaning of propositions containing intentional verbs (for. »