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)

Revisions of three lectures given at Catholic University of America in March 1978. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Introduction.--The first lecture, Eternity of the world.--The second lectures, Monopsychism.--The third lecture, Rationalism.

The book documents thirty cases in which university-trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing.

The tow, the fire, the Heavens and God, Article 156 of Tempier’s Syllabus and John of Naples. Through the examination of the direct textual tradition of the March 1277 condemnation, the indirect tradition and the possible interpretations linked to each of the main variants, the article attempts to reconstruct the original meaning of article 156 of Tempier’s Syllabus. The issue at the heart of the question is whether the impossibility of fire burning the tow after the cessation of the celestial (...) movement is due to the fact that God would then also cease to exist (quia nec Deus esset or quia Deus non esset, prevailing variants in the manuscript and indirect tradition), or to the fact that nature would cease to exist (quia natura deesset, minority variant chosen by Roland Hissette in his own edition of the text of the condemnation published in 1977, and since then commonly accepted). On the basis of the evidence provided especially by two quodlibetal questions by John of Naples, it is suggested that the correction proposed by Hissette is unnecessary, and that article 156 concerns the inseparability of God’s cosmological function as mover of the Heavens from His own Divine nature. The appendix contains the first critical edition of John of Naples’ Quodl. III, q. 10. (shrink)

Careful examination of the arguments used in the De aeternitate mundi attributed to Boethius of Dacia shows that this is not a work of radical Aristotelianism, but a teaching text aimed at showing students how to approach the question of the eternity of the world in their disputations. A comparison of the text with some of the articles condemned in 1277 demonstrates that the articles do not originate from the text and that the work was not targeted by Tempier. What (...) is learned from the text about disputations on the eternity of the world is then used to show another way of reading these articles which is consistent with Tempier’s assertion that they were put forward by students during disputations and to some extent enables one to reconstruct the debates as they happened. This also shows how the students distorted the arguments of their masters for their own ends, which in turn suggests how the so-called ‘double truth’ may have been inspired by the De aeternitate mundi or a text like it. Finally, this helps explain the apparent reaction against the arguments used in the De aeternitate on the part of a number of philosophy teachers during the 1270s. (shrink)