Jean Buridan and the Paris School of Natural Philosophy

Jean Buridan (c. 1300–1361) was a French secular arts master, never entering a religious order, who studied and then taught for his entire career in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris, serving twice as its rector, in 1328 and again in 1340. A student of Ockham's logic and broadly sympathetic to nominalist parsimony in metaphysics, Buridan nonetheless developed his own independent positions and, through his extensive series of "question commentaries" on Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and other natural-philosophical works, became the most influential Parisian natural philosopher of the fourteenth century, training a generation of students who carried his methods across Europe.