The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Buridan, Jean

Born circa 1300 in Bethune (Artois); died circa 1358. French philosopher; a representative of nominalism.

Buridan began teaching at the University of Paris in 1328. He contributed to the dissemination in France of Ockham’s philosophy and many concepts of natural science (explanation of the movement of falling bodies and the possibility of unlimited immovable space, for example). Buridan saw the problem of freedom of will as logically insoluble. He did not coin the proverbial expression “Buridan’s ass.”

WORKS

Quaestiones super libris quattuor de caelo et mundo. Cambridge, Mass., 1942.

REFERENCES

Istoriia filosofii, vol. 1. Moscow, 1941. Page 478.
Maier, A. Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert. Rome, 1949.
Faral, E. “Jean Buridan, maître ès arts de l’Université de Paris.” In his book Histoire littéraire de la France. Paris, 1950.

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References in periodicals archive

The philosophy section ranges through fourteenth-century nominalism and probabilism (with two papers on Jean Buridan), medieval understandings of Augustine on lying, and realist philosophies of truth from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.

La Verite. Verite et credibilite: construire la verite dans le systeme de communication de l'Occident (XIIIe-XVIIe siecle)

The Liar Paradox (which for him is "the so-called liar paradox") can be addressed without any metalinguistic maneuvering simply by saying, with Jean Buridan, that the utterer of a Liar Sentence is speaking falsely.

Campbell, Richard. The Concept of Truth

The names of Jordanus Nemorarius, Jean Buridan, John Philoponus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Oresme, and Leon Battista Alberti may not be known to many, even to many contemporary scientists.

The Christian roots of modern science

For example, the History's coverage of the reception of Aristotle's Ethics and especially the debate about the ultimate end can be profitably studied in connection with this volume's two extended treatments of book 10 of the Ethics (Albert the Great in translation 1 and Jean Buridan in translation 16); and the History's discussion of conscience is fleshed out in translation 2, which presents Bonaventure's analysis of conscience and synderesis.

Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall, eds. The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, vol. 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy

Jean Buridan, rector of the same university in the mid-1300s.

The mirror in the Moon

There was, as the documents he uncovered showed, intense intellectual activity during the Middle Ages, and a leading part was played by the masters of the Paris schools, in particular by Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme.

Pierre Duhem: historian of the Christian origin of science

(11) "Unde substantias non percipimus mediante sensu sub conceptibus substantialibus, sed bene sub conceptibus accidentalibus et connotativis, et non mere absolutis"; John Buridan, Le traite de l'ame de Jean Buridan (De Prima Lectura), ed.

The essentialist nominalism of John Burdian

See also the developments in fourteenth-century scholasticism (`William of Occam, Jean Buridan, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas of Autrecourt), whose relation to humanism has scarcely been studied.

The modality of moral communication in the Decameron's first day, in contrast to the mirror of the Exemplum (*)