Walter Burley

Background

Walter Burley was born around 1275 in England.

Education

Although almost nothing is known of Burley's youth, it seems most reasonable to presume that Burley began his studies at Oxford sometime during the last decade of the thirteenth century, for two works dated 1301 and 1302 already designate him as a Master in Arts. He may have at this time also been a fellow of Merton College, although the first definite connection we have with Merton derives from the bursorial roll of 1305. It seems very probable that, during his regency in arts at Oxford, Burley composed his earliest versions (later to be revised and expanded) of expositions on almost all of Aristotle’s works in logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy.

In 1310 (at the latest) we find him in Paris, where he began his theological studies, a stage in his career first definitely documented by his citation as Doctor Sacre Theologie in a colophon dated 1324.

Career

Burley most likely remained in Paris until 28 February 1327, at which time Burley was appointed as an envoy of Edward III to the papal court. Indeed, the official connections Burley then began with English public figures seems to have continued, intermittently, for the remainder of his years. Yet this is not to say that this new phase to his career marked the end, or even a substantial lessening, of his academic pursuits. For, just as during his years in Paris, he continued to set down numerous logical and philosophical works.

In Bologna in 1341 for a disputation and again at Avignon in November 1343, our last document mentioning Burley is a register revealing his acquisition of a rectory in Kent on 19 June 1344. It seems unlikely that he lived much beyond that date.

In terms of the literary activity, Burley remained, throughout his career, fundamentally an arts graduate. For, if one sets aside his lost work on the Sentences, all but one or two items among the formidable mass of his writings deal with logic and philosophy. He was, to begin with, an Aristotelian commentator with a vengeance, composing two - sometimes three - different versions of a commentary on a single work.

Thus, he wrote commentaries on all of the Aristotelian logical books, including Porphyry’s Isagoge and the Liber de sex principiis ascribed to Gilbert de la Porree, apparently formulating an initial version of his comments during his earlier Oxford period. Many of the commentaries were later revised, the final version of his complete Expositio super artem veterem being written only in 1337.

To this already very substantial body of logical literature one must add Burley’s numerous opuscula and treatises on the so-called parva logicalia (which constituted, in large part, medieval additions to the logic of Aristotle) and, in particular, the two redactions of his magnum opus in logic, the De puritate artis logicae.

The earlier, shorter version of this work appears to have been composed (in incomplete form) before the appearance (ca. 1324) of the Summa logicae of William of Ockham. Indeed, the second version (1325-1328) of Burley’s treatise can in many respects be viewed as a reply to some of Ockham’s contentions. Yet it is not merely as an anti-Ockhamist tract that Burley’s revised De puritate artis logicae is of importance; for, at least in the view of its modern editor, Philotheus Boehner, its implicit subsumption of syllogistic under the more general theory of consequences involving unanalyzed propositions strongly suggests Burley to have been a logician of appreciable competence.

As concerns natural philosophy once again one must begin by noting the extensive roster of Burley’s Aristotelian commentaries: Expositionesor Questiones (and again often in multiple versions) on the Physica, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica, De anima, Problemata, Parva naturalia, De motu animalium, Metaphysica (possibly), plus Averroes’ De substantia orbis. Of these commentaries, those on the Physics are undoubtedly the most important.

The earliest version appears to have been written at some point before 1316. Apparently also of an early date are the separate Questiones on the Physics, extant in a single (incomplete) manuscript. We are more fully informed, however, concerning Burley’s definitive version of his comments on the Physics: Book I was finished in Paris in 1324, Books II-VI, again in Paris, by 1327, while the final redaction of Books VII-VIII was written between 1334-1337.

Although this last effort which Burley devoted to the exposition and analysis of Aristotle’s Physics contains, it appears, the most significant of his contributions to natural philosophy, at least some of what he has to offer here also appears, in more elaborate form, within various independent treatises and opuscula, most notably the Tractatus de formis (which contains his criticisms of Ockham’s identification of substance and quantity), the quodlibetal question De primo et ultimo instand, and his two treatises on the intension and remission of forms (resp. the Tractatus primus and Tractatus secundus).

Burley turned to moral philosophy and varia rather late in his life, completing his exposition of Aristotle’s Ethics in 1333-1334 and of the Politics in 1340-1343. His immensely popular history of philosophers, the De vita et morihus philosophorum, also appears to derive from the early 1340’s.

His brief treatise De primo et ultimo instanti was a quodlibetal question disputed by Burley at Toulouse sometime before 1327. Its subject derived directly from Aristotle’s discussion in the Physics of the problem of first and last moments within a given change which occurred over a given time interval.

Achievements

• Walter Burley's major achievement was in becoming one of the most eminent logicians and natural philosophers of the first half of the fourteenth century and the chief polemist of William of Ockham. Of his almost 80 works composed over a period of some 40 years from his studies in Oxford to the final days of his intellectual activity (about 60 of them have survived), most are devoted to logic and natural philosophy, the remaining ones, to theology and practical philosophy.
  
  His main work was the De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior, in which he covers such topics as the truth conditions for complex sentences, both truth-functional and modal, as well as providing rules of inferences for different types of inferences. He was one of the first logicians to recognize the priority of the propositional calculus over the predicate calculus, despite the fact that the latter had been the main focus of logicians up until this period.
  
  In logic, he was the champion of via antiqua, defending realist views against the criticism of Ockham. He was also known for his commentaries on Aristotle's Physics, which include the quodlibet De Primo et ultimo instanti (around 1320) and the longer work Expositio in libros octo de physico auditu.

Works

More photos

• book

  • On the Purity of the Art of Logic: The Shorter and the Longer Treatises

    (This is the first complete English translation of On the ...)

  • De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior 1327
  • Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum 1307

Views

To state Burley’s view with respect to the much-discussed problem of motion is, in effect, to set forth the basis of his theory of intension and remission of forms, a theory most elaborately developed and expressed in his Tractatus primus. Some theorists, of whom Ockham is a prominent but not the earliest example, had argued that motion consists of nothing else besides the mobile and the place, quality, or quantity that it successively acquires. The form successively acquired was called 'the forma fluens". Burley admitted that motion could be viewed in this way, but said that it could also be considered as a flux (fluxus formae), or a successive quantity.

As a flux, motion was the acquisition of the terminus of motion or the transmutation by means of which the terminus was acquired. As a successive quantity, motion was the measure of the motion taken in the second (fluxus) sense. Motion as a forma fluens belonged to the same category as its terminus (place, quality, or quantity); as a fluxus formae it either belonged to or constituted the whole of the Aristotelian category of passions or affectations; as a successive quantity, it belonged to the category of quantity.

Why was it necessary, according to Burley, that motion be not only a forma fluens but also a flux? For Burley, places, qualities, and quantities were individual and simple.

A body at a given time had only one place, one quality of a given type, and one quantity of a given type. In the case of quality, for example, the not uncommon assumption that a compound simultaneously contained both hot and cold combining to produce a single sensible result was to Burley not only false, it was self-contradictory. Qualities like hot and cold were for him sensible by definition. They were not hypothetical underlying realities without separate effect. It followed further, on this view, that one quality could not be part of another. Similar conclusions could be applied to place and quantity.

Since this was Burley’s view of the forms to be acquired, his conception of the forma fluens theory could not be the same as Ockham’s. Ockham spoke of the form acquired or the terminus of motion, and assumed that this final form somehow contained the forms acquired along the way. A single form was acquired part by part, and this was the forma fluens. For Burley, every instant of motion corresponded to a different form, and these forms were neither part of, nor contained in, the terminus of motion. The forma fluens was any one of these instantaneous forms, but no one of these forms could represent the whole motion since the terminus (with successive acquisition assumed) represented the whole motion for Ockham. To represent more than an instant within a motion, Burley needed another existential referent.

He might have chosen the entire collection of instantaneous formae fluentes. Durand of St. Pourcain did just this, saying that the continuity of these forms unified them. For Burley, the forms, analogous to points, could not be continuous, and hence could not be treated as a unity.

As a unified referent he chose instead the means by which the forms were acquired, i.e., the transmutation or flux. The forma fluens conception, he admitted, was truer to the physical reality of motion (eniitas rei), but the fluxus formae conception was truer to the significance of the term “motion”.

If Burley’s views of motion are typical of other parts of his physics as yet less well-known, the motivation for his conclusions was not simply a willingness to multiply entities beyond necessity, but also his view of forms as empirical, simple, and separate, and his refusal to assume hypothetical connections between them.

Apart from local motion, he was interested in the issues related to substantial, qualitative, and quantitative change, called generation, alteration, and growth, respectively.

Connections

associate:

William of Ockham

References

• Questions on the de Anima of Aristotle
  1996
• Dictionary of scientific biography
  1981