A collection of new essays on the influential medieval philosopher John Buridan, written by leading Buridan scholars. The volume places Buridan in his philosophical context and examines his writings on topics including logic, modal logic, paradoxes, metaphysics, epistemology, theory of knowledge, moral philosophy, and natural philosophy.

John Buridan (ca. 1300-1362) has worked out perhaps the most comprehensive account of nominalism in the history of Western thought, the philosophical doctrine according to which the only universals in reality are "names": the common terms of our language and the common concepts of our minds. But these items are universal only in their signification; they are singular entities like any other in reality. This book examines what is most intriguing to contemporary readers in Buridan's medieval philosophical system: his nominalist account of the relationship between language, thought and reality. The main focus of the discussion is Buridan's deployment of the Ockhamist conception of a "mental language" for mapping the complex structures of written and spoken human languages onto a parsimoniously construed reality. Concerning these linguistic structures, this book carefully analyzes Buridan's conception of the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages, in contrast to the natural semantic features of concepts. The discussion pays special attention to Buridan's token-based semantics of terms and propositions, his conception of existential import, ontological commitment, truth, and logical validity. Finally, the book presents a detailed discussion of how these logical devices allow Buridan to maintain his nominalist position without giving up Aristotelian essentialism or yielding to skepticism, and pays special attention to contemporary concerns with these issues.

John Buridan is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians.

Buridan was a brilliant logician in an age of brilliant logicians, sensitive to formal and philosophical considerations. There is a need for critical editions and accurate translations of his works, for his philosophical voice speaks directly across the ages to problems of concern to analytic philosophers today. But his idiom is unfamiliar, so editions and trans lations alone will not bridge the gap of centuries. I have tried to make Buridan accessible to philosophers and logicians today by the introduc tory essay, in which I survey Buridan's philosophy of logic. Several problems which Buridan touches on only marginally in the works trans lated herein are developed and discussed, citing other works of Buridan; some topics which he treats at length in the translated works, such as the semantic theory of oblique terms, I have touched on lightly or not at all. Such distortions are inevitable, and I hope that the idiosyncracies of my choice of philosophically relevant topics will not blind the reader to other topics of value Buridan considers. My goal in translating has been to produce an accurate renaering of the Latin. Often Buridan will couch a logical rule in terms of the grammatical form of a sentence, and I have endeavored to keep the translation consistent. Some strained phrases result, such as "A man I know" having a different logic from "I know a man. " This awkwardness cannot always be avoided, and I beg the reader's indulgence. All of the translations here are my own.

The studies in this volume present early science in its rich and divergent complexity. Many historians of the Scientific Revolution have used early modern scholasticism to represent pre-seventeenth century science as a whole, but a close look at ancient, medieval, and even early modern scientific writers shows that before the Scientific Revolution - and not only in Europe - there were many and diverse traditions of interpreting the natural world. This book provides a broad range of historical evidence concerning early science, which may be used as a basis for new and more complex historical interpretations. Originally published as Volume XIV, Nos. 1-3 (2009) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine.

’This sentence is false’ - is that true? The ’Liar paradox’ embodied in those words exerted a particular fascination on the logicians of the Western later Middle Ages, and, along with similar ’insoluble’ problems, forms the subject of the first group of articles in this volume. In the following parts Professor Spade turns to medieval semantic theory, views on the relationship between language and thought, and to a study of one particular genre of disputation, that known as ’obligationes’. The focus is on the Oxford scholastics of the first half of the 14th century, and it is the name of William of Ockham which dominates these pages - a thinker with whom Professor Spade finds himself in considerable philosophical sympathy, and whose work on logic and semantic theory has a depth and richness that have not always been sufficiently appreciated.

This volume features essays that explore the insights of the 14th-century Parisian nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. It serves as a companion to the Latin text edition and annotated English translation of his question-commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. The contributors survey Buridan’s work both in its own historical-theoretical context and in relation to contemporary issues. The essays come in three main sections, which correspond to the three books of Buridan’s Questions. Coverage first deals with the classification of the science of the soul within the system of Aristotelian sciences, and surveys the main issues within it. The next section examines the metaphysics of the soul. It considers Buridan’s peculiar version of Aristotelian hylomorphism in dealing with the problem of what kind of entity the soul (in particular, the human soul) is, and what powers and actions it has, on the basis of which we can approach the question of its essence. The volume concludes with a look at Buridan’s doctrine of the nature and functions of the human intellect. Coverage in this section includes the problem of self-knowledge in Buridan’s theory, Buridan’s answer to the traditional medieval problem concerning the primary object of the intellect, and his unique treatment of logical problems in psychological contexts.