BURIDANO (Buridanus), GIOVANNI. — Philosopher and scientist, born in Béthune at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. Rector of the Sorbonne for the second time in 1340 (the date of his first rectorship is unknown), he was still teaching there in 1358 and almost certainly died shortly thereafter. A disciple of Occam, he advocated and developed his doctrines despite the disapprovals and prohibitions of 1326, 1339, and 1340. He in fact accentuated the nominalist theory of universals and upheld a singular form of voluntarism: the greater good invariably determines our choice, and the only freedom within our power is that of suspending the choice for further reflection. The legend of B.’s ass, incapable of making a determination, is not found in his writings. B.’s greatest merit lies in having divined the foundations of modern dynamics (E. Gilson). It is indeed in the nominalist school of Paris that we find the precursors of Leonardo, Copernicus, and Galileo (P. Duhem). B.’s special merit is having breached the Aristotelian doctrine of motion. He replaces it with the theory of the impetus imparted by the mover to the moved object and perceived that, without the resistance of the medium, motion would continue indefinitely. This is what occurs in celestial rotational motion, in which the impetus initially imparted by God encounters no resistance tending to cancel II. The moving intelligences thus become superfluous, and the entire astronomical structure of the ancients is shaken. His observations on gravitation and the laws governing it are also noteworthy.
Principal works: Summulae o Compendium logicae (Paris 1487); Quaestiones in libros politicorum Aristotelis (there 1500); Quaestiones super octo physicorum libros (there 1500); Quaestiones in libros de anima (there 1516); In metaphysicon Aristotelis quaestiones (there 1518).