such as Ockham and Marsilius of Padua. Marsilius and Jean of Jandun had
been Paris masters from the 1310s through their exile in the mid-1320s, and
in the same decade Nicolas of Autrecourt and Gregory of Rimini were students.
Ockham’s Oxford opponent Walter of Burley was also present as theology
master. Undoubtedly there was overlap among these circles, keeping up a
continuity of controversies that burst out into the extreme radicalism of Au-
trecourt and Mirecourt.
Jean of Mirecourt, a Cistercian monk (and thus outside the main factions
of Franciscans and Dominicans) specialized in drawing out shocking conse-
quences of the critical movement. God could make it that the world had never
existed. God could cause a man to hate Him, and could even have misled Christ.
There is no certainty except that which is based on the principle of resisting
self-contradiction. All other evidence is from experience, and only experience
of one’s own existence is certain; to doubt it is to recognize the existence of
the doubter, thereby passing the contradiction test. Mirecourt’s argument ech-
oes Augustine and foreshadows Descartes’s cogito, but he has none of Des-
cartes’s system-founding purpose. Mirecourt instead reduces knowledge to a
minimum. He would go on to conclude that between the self and external
things, there is no ground for intermediaries; substance and accident are alike
fictions.
Autrecourt used a similar criterion of evidence, foreshadowing Hume,
arguing that there is no line which unites cause and effect. Since substance,
whether material or intellectual, involves a specific kind of causal inference
used to explain the properties of events, substances do not exist. Autrecourt
expressly overthrew Aristotelean physics as well as metaphysics. Here we see
the anti-Aristotelean front at its most militant. Ockham in his 1317–18 Oxford
lectures had already criticized Aristotle’s physics, using his razor to dispose of
motion as an existent over and above the moving body (CHLMP, 1982: 530).
Ockham had debated with Burley’s refined realist theory that motion is a
succession of distinct forms. Autrecourt pressed this very point. Since move-
ment and change are not the succession of different forms in the same sub-
stance, they must be a rearrangement of atoms. Nor was this atomism en-
tirely original, as it had been proposed in the previous generation by Henry
of Harclay (141 in Figure 9.4), Ockham’s close predecessor; by Gerard of
Odo, the Franciscan General (148), and by Walter Chatton (147)—that is, in
the heart of the Paris-Oxford-Avignon network (EP, 1967: 5:497–502; DSB,
2:394). Autrecourt took the argument to shocking extremes, going on to
speculate that since the human soul is liberated when the atoms of the body
disintegrate, the soul leaves and becomes reunited with another body. Autre-
court thus managed to be both a radical skeptic and a believer in reincarnation.
Not surprisingly, Autrecourt was condemned and forced to burn his books
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^491