in front of the University of Paris in 1347. In the same year Mirecourt’s theses
also were condemned. The conflictual situation generated further creativity,
provoking more moderate efforts to fill the disputed space of Aristotelean
physics. Jean Buridan, rector twice during this period, was among the univer-
sity officials who approved the condemnations. He argued against Autrecourt’s
skepticism of causality, preserving a space for the validity of scientific gener-
alizations. Explicitly using Ockham’s logic of terms, Buridan distinguished
between concepts of concepts and concepts of the first degree: the latter apply
to individuals and are the subject of science. Having licensed a moderated
empiricism, liberated from Aristotelean substance and teleology, Buridan and
his pupils went on to re-create the principles of physics, developing a theory
of the impetus of moving objects. Nicolas Oresme recognized the phenomenon
of uniformly accelerated movement, and appears to have anticipated Des-
cartes’s mathematical representation of motion by rectangular coordinates.
Albert of Saxony expounded the theory that gravity is an attraction from the
center of earth’s mass rather than a natural propensity of objects, and applied
the impetus theory to celestial motion. These theories overturned the Aris-
totelean physics and cosmology, eliminating the motors attached to celestial
spheres, and anticipated Copernican astronomy by holding the movement of
the earth to be possible.
These philosophers were respectable; Buridan was honored and became
rich accumulating benefices. Their theses were not condemned. But neither
were they followed. Buridan’s network stopped in the second generation and
dispersed. Some moved to the new universities at Vienna and Heidelberg, but
the creativity of these lineages went no further. The moment of conflict be-
tween the extremes of nominalist criticism and the now-canonical Aristotelean-
ism passed, and with it the creativity of the intermediate position was for-
gotten.
Paralleling these generations in France was the network of creative contro-
versy at Oxford from which Scotus and Ockham had emerged. It had cosmo-
politan contacts across the channel, primarily at Paris, later at Avignon and in
the south: Harclay, Chatton, Burley (191 in Figure 9.6), and Bradwardine
moved in the normal academic circles and also sometimes were emissaries or
courtiers of the English king, then involved in a series of French wars. Burley
defended the realism of universals against Ockham, and disputed the logical
status of time-instants in the physics of motion. Harclay and Chatton, on the
“nominalist” side, put forward atomism—the position which Autrecourt was
to take to such radical extremes in Paris. Bradwardine was goaded into action
by his English compatriots to defend Aristotle’s physical continuum, showing
that it cannot be composed of indivisibles; Bradwardine used a Euclid-like
axiomatic method to show the contradictions between non-extended points
492 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths