Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Logic in the 14 th Century after Ockham 445
topics of the Ars curriculum (logic, natural philosophy (physics), psychology and
moral philosophy, metaphysics — he commented on all major Aristotelian texts),
but, as often noted, he never moved on to ‘higher’ levels of intellectual activity
(such as law, medicine or theology) (cf. [Zupko, 2002a]). While it was not the
most usual path for a master to remain in the Arts faculty throughout his career,
Buridan was not the only one to have had such a trajectory (cf. [Courtenay, 2004]).
In any case, this meant that Buridan spent his entire career focusing on the subjects
of the Arts curriculum, producing a large corpus of extremely sophisticated
philosophical texts.
For Buridan, logic was the basic methodology permeating not only all intellectual
investigation, but also a key component for the political life of a good citizen
(cf. the preface to his Summulae [Buridan, 2001, 3]); in other words, the importance
of logic for Buridan can hardly be overestimated. Of course, it must be
understood that what Buridan conceived logic to be goes beyond the narrower conception
that the discipline currently has (this, in fact, holds of the whole medieval
tradition): for him, logic encompassed investigations that we would now consider
to belong to the fields of semantics, formal epistemology, philosophy of language,
metaphysics, among others. Still, Buridan produced a sophisticated and coherent
system of doctrines, which has been the object of growing interest over the last
couple of decades. Like Ockham, Buridan was a nominalist, that is, a defender of
ontological and theoretical parsimony, but while sharing a certain common base,
his doctrines differed in content and in general approach from those of Ockham’s
in many significant aspects. Buridan, not Ockham, is usually thought to be the
pioneer of a whole new approach to logic that was to be influential for at least
another century, the so-called ‘via moderna’ of‘viaBuridanii’.
For our purposes, his most important texts are his long Summulae de Dialectica
(a heavily modified commentary of Peter of Spain’s Summulae — available in
English in [Buridan, 2001], and in Latin in several volumes, as part of an ongoing
project of critically editing the whole text of the Summulae) and his Treatise on
Consequences [Buridan, 1976]. In fact, since his semantics will be treated elsewhere
in this volume, and since he did not write on obligations, he will be discussed in the
section dedicated to consequences and, more briefly, in the analysis of the concept
of supposition; however, in the section on consequence, he will indeed feature as
a most prominent figure, as his treatise on consequences and his remarks on the
topic in the Summulae are in many respects the most interesting of such medieval
texts.
Albert of Saxony was once thought to have been a pupil of Buridan’s, but this
is now considered as highly unlikely, since they belonged to two different nations
(Buridan to the Picardy nation and Albert to the English-German nation); as
noted above, the most customary was for a pupil to be trained under a master of
his own nation (often of his own home region). However, the influence of Buridan’s
doctrines over Albert is evident; in fact, Albert’s work is often seen as a synthesis
of Ockham’s and Buridan’s ideas (cf. [Biard, 2004, section 1]). This is to some
extent true, but the importance of Albert as an original thinker should not be