“Buridan and the Origins of Secular Philosophical Culture”
Jack Zupko

John Buridan made many contributions to later medieval philosophy, but perhaps the most important was the way in which his work established the possibility of philosophy as a purely secular enterprise.  A career Arts Master at the University of Paris, the relationship between philosophy and theology was never far from his mind as he sought to bring the concerns of Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy into conversation with theology without violating either curricular mandate or ecclesiastical authority.  This had two noteworthy effects.  First, he transformed the genre of question commentaries on Aristotle, the mainstay of the Arts Masters, by providing theological concepts such as divine omnipotence and the distinction between natural truth and truths of the faith with a clearly ‘artistic’, or secular, rendering.  Second, he stabilized the philosophical grammar of the artists by composing the Summulae, the most sophisticated and widely used logical compendium of the later Middle Ages.  Buridan was convinced that metaphysics, or philosophical wisdom, cannot be ordained by theology because its methods, which emerge from its principles, are different.  Philosophy is accordingly not inferior to theology, just different—a view that permitted philosophy and theology to enjoy de facto equivalence in the speculative realm.