“The Buridan School Reassessed”
Hans Thijssen

There are few schools in the historiography of medieval science which have been praised more consistently than the Buridan school at the University of Paris. Especially since the studies by Pierre Duhem, it has won everybody’s admiration. Duhem claimed that the accomplishments of seventeenth-century science, as exemplified in Galilei and Descartes, had in essence already been achieved in the fourteenth century in Paris by John Buridan and his disciples. Even severe critics of Duhem, such as Anneliese Maier and Marshall Clagett emphasized that the school of Buridan was one of the two most prominent schools of medieval natural philosophy (the other being the school of Thomas Bradwardine (d. 1349) at Merton College in Oxford). The main representatives of John Buridan’s school were Nicole Oresme, Albert of Saxony, and Marsilius of Inghen. Although the precise teacher-student relations between these members were, according to Maier, unknown, the school was characterized by “its unitary teaching tradition and its intellectual physiognomy.”

In this lecture, I should like to raise some questions about the quite unusually coherent picture of the so-called Buridan school in medieval natural philosophy, which has emerged from the works of these pioneers in the historiography of medieval science, and which is continued in much that has been written since. The lecture is part of a study-in-progress of John Buridan and his intellectual circle in fourteenth-century Paris.