Burley, Walter

(b. England, ca. 1275; d. ca. 1345?)

logic, natural philosophy.

A colophon to the final version of Burley’s commentrary on the Logica vetus that is dated 1337 stipulates that the work was composed in its author’s sixty-second year, a factor which places Burley’s birth about 1275, possibly in one of the two towns named Burley in Yorkshire. Although almost nothing is known of his 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 doctorsacre theologie in a colophon dated 1324. We lack further information concerning Burley’s work as a theologian and have thus far not been able to discover his Commentary on the Sentences, but his first treatise dealing with the intension and remission of forms (theso-called Tractatus primus written between 1320–1327) indicates that Thomas Wilton, also a former fellow of Merton College, was at some point his socius and master of theology in Paris.

Burley most likely remained in Paris until 28 February 1327, at which time he 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 Porrée, apparently formulating an initial version of his comments during his earlier Oxford period. Many of the commentaries were late 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: Expositiones or Questiones (and again often in multiple versions) on the Physica, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologicda, De anima, Problemata, Parva naturalia, De motu De anima, 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 (MS Basel, Universitätsbibliothek F.V.12). 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 Tracdtus de formis (which contains his criticisms of Ockham’s identification of substance and quantity), the quodlibetal question De primo et ultimo instanti, and his two treatises on the intension and remission of forms (resp. the Tractatus primus and Tracttus 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 moribus philosophorum, also appears to derive from the early 1340’s.

If one excludes Burley’s importance within the history of formal logic, it is clear that the very small segment of his voluminous work within natural philosophy which has hitherto received careful study makes any estimate of his significance for the history of later medieval science radically incomplete and tentative. Yet in spite of this, there are two of Burley’s contentions which, to judge merely from the attention they received within the works of other medieval natural philosophers, are surely to prove of more than ephemeral importance: his view of the proper limits to be assigned temporal processes through the ascription of first or last instants, and his view of the nature of motion.

De primo et ultimo instanti. This brief treatise was a quodlibetal question disputed by Burley at Toulouse sometime before 1327. Its subject derived directly from Aristotle’s discussion in the Physics (Book VI, ch. 5, and Book VIII, ch. 8) of the problem of first and last moments within a given change which occurred over a given time interval. Without unraveling Aristotle’s treatment and proposed resolution of the puzzle, suffice it to say that Burley (and a multitude of other Scholastics as well) correctly focused upon the relevant variables within the problem as stated by Aristotle when they formulated what was to become a standard distinction concerning the first and last instants of a given temporal process or change. Briefly, the change may be limited intrinsically at both ends (incipit et desinit) by an instant which belongs to the temporal interval covering the change in question (primum vel ultimum instans esse), or limited extrinsically by a first or last instant which does not belong to the appropriate interval (primum vel ultimum instans non esse), in which case, of course, an ultimum instans non esse, immediately precedes the time denominated by the change, while a primuminstans non esse immediately follows it. Given this, in four regulae Burley explicitly stipulates the mutual exclusiveness of intrinsic and extrinsic instants as limits for both the beginning and the completion of a given change. The problem is then, however, to decide just which kinds of things can be said to begin or end by possessing just which kind(intrinsic or extrinsic) of limit. Although the many cases that Burley considers in making this decision involve complexities that cannot be expounded here, some notion of his procedure should be indicated. Thus, a res successiva, a given temporal motion or change or a time interval itself, can, following Aristotle, only have extrinsic limits at both ends. The same is true of a res permanens which depends in its being on a res successiva (the truth of the proposition “Socrates is running” is Burley’s example of such a res permanens, since it depends on the existence of a given run of Socrates, which is a res successiva). On the other hand, intrinsic limits are naturally appropriate when a given permanent thing itself has only instantaneous existence. And Burley goes on to ascribe what he feels to be proper limits to other cases of res permanentes undergoing change, specifically to changes explicable in terms of the intension and remission of forms as viewed under his own special theory concerning the nature of such intension and remission.

On the Nature of Motion. Indeed, to state Burley’s view with respect to this 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 (1) the forma fluens. Burley admitted that it could also be considered as (2) a flux (fluxus formae), or (3) 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 from, 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 (cf. Maier, Studien, II, 70–73). 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 wahich the forms were acquired, i.e., the transmutation or flux. The forma fluens conception, he admitted, was truer to the physical reality of motion (entitas rei), but the fluxus formae conception was truer to the significance of the term “motion”(Physics, BK.III, Text 4).

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, necessity, but also his view of forms as empirical, simple, and separate, and his refusal to assume hypothetical connections between them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Life and Writings. The three fundamental articles are A.B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford, 1957–1957), I, 312–314; Conor Martin, “Walter Burley,” in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus (Oxford, 1964), pp. 194–230; J.A. Weisheipl, “Ockham and Some Mertonians,” in Mediaeval Studies, 30 (1968) (174–188. Father Weisheipl will also shortly publish his “Repertorium Mertoniense” in a future vollume of Mediaeval Studies, which will include a complete list, together with editions and extant manuscripts, of Burley’s works. Cf. Zofia Wlodek, “Les traités de Walter Burleigh dans les manuscrits des bibliotheques en Pologne,” in Mediaevalia philosophica polonorum, 11 (1963), 152–156.

II. Texts of Burley’s Works.Early printed Editions and Manuscripts. (Note: Only selected early editions and a few MSS of works important within the history of science are listed; see Weisheipl’s forthcoming “Repertorium Mertoniense” for a complete listing.) Expositio super artem veterem (final version completed 1337; Venice eds., 1481, 1497, 1519). Exkpositio super libros duos posteriourm analyticorum (Venice, 1497). De sophismatibus, in St. Bonaventure, Opera omnia (Bassani, 1767), cols.467ff. Tractatus de universalibus realibus (Venice, 1492–1493). Exysicorum librorum physicorum, the defintive version(Venice, 1482, 1491, 1501; Bologna, 1589. Expositio librorumphysicorum (early, pre-1316version), MS Cambridge, Gonville & Caius 448/409, pp172–543. Questiones super libros physicorum (also early; incomplete, Books 1-IV only), MS Basel, Universitatbibliothek, F.V.12, ff.108r-171v. Expositiones super libros: (1) De anima; (2)Parva naturalis; (3)De generatione et corruptione; (4) De caelo; (5) De substantia orbis; (6) De motu animalium, Ms Vat. lat. 2151, lr-108v, 149r-256r. Tractatus de formis, MSS Vat. lat. 2151, ff. 131r-148r; Vat. lat. 2146.2146, ff. 252v-256v. Tractatus primus (sive Tractatus de activitate, unitate et augmento formarum activarum habentium contraria suscipientium magis et minus), Ms Vat. lat. 817, ff. 203r-223r. Tractatus secundus (sive Tractatus de intensione et remissione formarum) (Venice, 1496). Opuscula varia, MSS Vat. lat. 2146, ff. 235r-256v; Lambeth Palace 70, ff. 8r-306r. Expositio librorum ethicorum (Venice, 1481, 1500).

Modern Editions. See De puriate artis logicae, Tractatus longior, With a Revised Edition of the Tractatus Brevior, Philotheus Boehner, ed. (New York, 1955). Part 1 of Tractatus II of the Tractatus longior was republished, together with a brief introduction and an English transiation, by Ivan Boh, “Burleigh; On Conditional Hypothetical Propositions,” in Franciscan Studies, 23 (1963), 4–67. “De primo et ultimo instanti,” Herman and Charlotte Shapiro, eds., in Archiv für Gechichte der Philosophie, 47 (1965)157–173, Shapiro has also published—sometimes with the assistance of others—editions of the following brief opuscula of Burley; “De relativis,” in Franciscan Studies, 22 (1962), 155–171; “De qualitatibus,” in Franziskanische Studien, 45 (1963), 256–260; “De deo, natura et arte,” in Medievalia et humanistica, 15 (1963), 86–90; “De diffinitione,” in Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 337–340; “De potentia activa et passiva,” in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen age, 24 (1966), 299–303; and “De sensibus,” in Mitteilungen des Grabmann-Institutes der Universit?t München, Heft 13 (Munich, 1966). De vita et moribus philosophorum has been edited, together with an old Spanish translation, by H. Knüst (Tübingen, 1886); cf. J. O. Stigall, “The Manuscript Tradition of the De vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley,” in Medievalia et humanistica, 11 (1957), 44–57, and J. N. Hough, “Platus, Student of Cicero, and Walter Burley,” ibid., pp. 58–68.

III. Secondary Literature. A. Logic. Philotheus Boehner’s high opinion of Burley as a logician is succinctly stated in his Medieval Logic. An Outline of Its Development from 1250 to c. 1400 (Chicago, 1952), pp. 44–51, 84–89. This opinion, seemingly shared by Boh (vide supra et infra), has been criticized by L. Minio-Palluello in Oxford Magazine, 71 (1953), 200–201. A. N. Prior, “On Some Conse-quentiae in Walter Burleigh,” in New Scholasticism, 27 (1953), 433–446. Ivan Boh, “A Study in Burleigh: Tractatus de regulis generalibus con sequentiarum,” in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 3 (1962), 83–101; “Walter Burleigh’s Hypothetical Syllogistic,” ibid., 4 (1963), 241–269; “An Examination of Some Proofs in Burleigh’s Propositional Logic,” in New Scholasticism, 38 (1964), 44–60. Ernest A. Moody, Truth and Consequence in Mediaeval Logic (Amsterdam, 1953) passim.

B. Natural Philosophy and General. Absolutely fundamental are the five volumes of Anneliese Maier’s Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, which contain numerable expositions and analyses of aspects of Burley’s work within the context of similar material as treated by other late medieval Scholastics: I. Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1966); II. Zwei Grund-probleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie, 3rd ed. (Rome, 1968); III. An der Grenze von Scholastik and Natur-wissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1952); IV. Metaphvsische Hintergru tide der spätscholastischen Naturphilosophie (Rome, 1955); V, Zwischen Philosphie and Mechanik (Rome, 1958).

Other articles by Maier also directly concerned with Burley are “Zu Walter Burleys Politik-Kommentar,” in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 14 (1947), 332–336: “Zu einigen Problemen der Ockhamforschung,” in Archivum Franciscanum historicum, 46 (1953), 181–194; “Handschriftliches zu Wilhelm Ockham und Walter Burley,” ibid., 48 (1955), 234–251; “Ein unbeachteter ’Averroist’ des XIV Jahrhunderts: Walter Burley,” in Medioevo e rinascimento: Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi (Florence, 1955), 477–499; “Zu Walter Burleys Traktat De intensione et remissione formarum,” in Franciscan Studies, 25 (1965), 293–321. Maier has included these articles (save the last), together with addenda, in her Ausgehendes Mittelalter: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Rome, 1964–1967).

See also L. Baudry, “Les rapports des Guillaume d’Occam et de Walter Burleigh,” in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, 9 (1934), 155–173: A. Koyré, “Le vide et 1’espace infini au XIV^e siecle,” ibid., 17 (1949), 75–80; three articles of S. H. Thomson, “Walter Burley’s Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle,” in Melanges Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, 1947), pp. 557–579; “An Unnoticed Questio theologica of Walter Burley,” in Medievalia et humanistica, 6 (1950), 84–88: “Unnoticed questiones of Walter Burley on the Physics, “in Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 62 (1954), 390–405: four articles by H. Shapiro, “Walter Burley and Text F 1,” (i.e., of Book IV of the Physics), in Traditio, 16 (1960), 395–404; “Walter Burley and the Intension and Remission of Forms,” in Speculum, 34 (1959), 413–427 in conjunction with Anneliese Maier on the same topic); “A Note on Walter Burley’s Exaggerated Realism.” in Franciscan Studies, 20 (1960), 205–214; “More on the ‘Exaggeration’ of Burley’s Realism,” in Manuscripta, 6 (1962), 94–98.

A brief treatment of Burley’s view on first and last instants, together with other late Scholastic discussion of the same problem, may be found in Curtis Wilson, William Hevtesburv: Medieval Logic and the Rise of Mathematical: Physics (Madison, Wis., 1956), pp. 29–56.

John Murdoch

Edith Sylla