| Jean Buridan |
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| 1300 births | |
| buridan, jean | |
| 1358 deaths | |
| french philosophers | |
| medieval philosophers | |
| renaissance latin authors | |
| scholastic philosophers | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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LIFE AND WORK Born, most probably, in Béthune , France , Buridan studied at the University Of Paris under the Scholastic Philosopher William Of Ockham . Apocryphal stories abound about his reputed amorous affairs and adventures which are enough to show that he enjoyed a reputation as a glamorous and mysterious figure in Paris life; in particular, a rumour held that he was sentenced to be thrown in a sack into the river Seine for dallying with queen Jeanne De Navarre , but was ultimately saved through the ingenuity of his student ( Francois Villon alludes to this in his famous poem Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis ). That he also seems to have had an unusual facility for attracting academic funding suggests that he was indeed a charismatic figure. Unusually, he spent his academic life in the faculty of arts, rather than obtaining the doctorate in Theology that typically prepared the way for a career in Philosophy . He further maintained his intellectual independence by remaining a secular Cleric , rather than joining a Religious Order . By 1340 , his confidence had grown sufficiently for him to launch an attack on his mentor, William of Ockham. This act has been interpreted as the beginning of religious skepticism and the dawn of the Scientific Revolution , Buridan himself going on to prepare the way for Galileo Galilei through the theory of Impetus . Buridan also wrote on solutions to Paradox es such as the Liar Paradox . A posthumous campaign by ''Okhamists'' succeeded in having Buridan's writings placed on the '' Index Librorum Prohibitorum '' from 1474 - 1481 . Albert Of Saxony was among the most notable of students, himself renowned as a Logician . Impetus Theory The concept of ''inertia'' was alien to the physics of Aristotle . Aristotle, and his Peripatetic followers, held that a body was only maintained in motion by the action of a continuous external Force . Thus, in the Aristotelian view, a projectile moving through the air would owe its continuing motion to ''eddies'' or ''vibrations'' in the surrounding medium, a phenomenon known as '' Antiperistasis ''. In the absence of a proximate force, the body would come to rest almost immediately. Jean Buridan proposed that motion was maintained by some property of the body, imparted when it was set in motion. Buridan named the motion-maintaining property ''impetus''. Moreover, he rejected the view that the impetus dissipated spontaneously, asserting that a body would be arrested by the forces of air resistance and Gravity which might be opposing its impetus. Buridan further held that the impetus of a body increased with the speed with which it was set in motion, and with its quantity of matter. Clearly, Buridan's impetus is closely related to the modern concept of Momentum . There is an important difference between our modern concept of momentum and Buridan's concept of impetus. Buridan saw impetus as ''causing'' the motion of the object, whereas momentum is a property ''caused by'' motion. Buridan anticipated Isaac Newton when he wrote: ...after leaving the arm of the thrower, the projectile would be moved by an impetus given to it by the thrower and would continue to be moved as long as the impetus remained stronger than the resistance, and would be of infinite duration were it not diminished and corrupted by a contrary force resisting it or by something inclining it to a contrary motion Buridan used the theory of impetus to give an accurate qualitative account of the motion of projectiles but he ultimately saw his theory as a correction to Aristotle, maintaining core Peripatetic beliefs including a fundamental qualitative difference between motion and rest. The theory of impetus was also adapted to explain Celestial phenomena in terms of ''circular impetus''. SEE ALSO BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Buridan
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