Burley, Walter

« not lost, as in the succession theory, but becomes part of the new degree.

However, as long as the issue of how to explain the intension and remission of forms continued to be discussed, the succession theory was nearly always taken seriously. Burley's treatise on first and last instants represents a standard view.

For Burley, as for most other fourteenth-century authors, 'permanent' entities - that is, those that are wholly existent at once, unlike motion - have a first instant of being but no last instant.

When water is heated and becomes air, there is a first instant at which the air exists but no last instant of the water.

On the other hand, for 'successive' entities such as motions, there is neither a first instant at which the motion exists, nor a last instant of motion before the body comes to rest. Combining his ideas of first and last instants and his ideas of intension and remission, Burley argued in the Tractatus primus that all degrees of heat must be of the same species, rejecting such separate, contrary species as hotness, temperateness and coldness. William of Ockham and other fourteenth-century nominalists such as John Buridan developed physical theories that minimized the types of entities in the world, maintaining that there are only substances and qualities unless there are special reasons for relaxing this rule.

Burley, on the other hand, seems not to have been motivated by any preference for ontological parsimony.

Thus, for Ockham, motion cannot exist separately from the moving body. Alteration as a kind of motion is simply the body altered and the degrees of quality ( forma fluens ) that it successively takes on.

Buridan adhered to Ockham's view for alteration, but relaxed it for local motion.

If local motion were not something more than the body and the places it successively takes on, Buridan argued, then if God rotated the cosmos as a whole and there was nothing at rest to act as a reference point, it would be impossible to distinguish the cosmos in rotation from the cosmos at rest.

Finding this conclusion unacceptable, Buridan concluded that in local motion there must be a flux ( fluxus formae ) as well as the places occupied.

Burley, when confronted with similar questions, did not even try to develop a theory of motion that did not involve a fluxus formae as well as a forma fluens , but instead easily accepted the assumption that there is a fluxus formae . Likewise, while the nominalists emphasized that distances can exist and be measured only on bodies, so that when bodies move, the distances measured on them must likewise change, Burley took it as unproblematic that when two bodies are at rest, the distance between them remains the same, whether or not there is an unchanging body on which to measure the distance. Because Burley belonged to no religious order, he has had no modern confrères interested in perpetuating a knowledge of his views.

In the current state of scholarship, Burley appears more often as someone holding views contrasting with those of the nominalists than as someone whose theories are of interest for their own sake.

Yet Burley's works were widely used, even after the advent of printing, probably more because of their thoroughness and clarity than because of the unique positions that Burley upheld.

Burley's work would repay further study as a. »