Jean Buridan
c. 1301-1358 · Scholasticism · Prominent
Buridan taught arts at Paris in the fourteenth century and never moved on to theology, which left him a career in logic. He held that nothing general exists outside your mind. There are individual things, and there are the words we sort them with. He untangled the liar, the sentence that calls itself false, as a problem in language, and defended the senses against skeptics who doubted them.
Signature
The position Buridan is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- leans Nominalism
- Language
- Conventional
Positions on the 2 axes the sources answer
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
18 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Buridan refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Language
- Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language?