Walter Burley
Walter Burley (or Burleigh) (c. 1275–1344/5) was a medieval English Scholastic philosopher and logician. He was a Master of Arts at Oxford in 1301, and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford until about 1310. He spent sixteen years at Paris until 1326, becoming a fellow of the Sorbonne by 1324. After that, he spent seventeen years as a clerical courtier in England and Avignon. He died around 1344. Burley opposed William of Ockham on a number of points concerning logic and natural philosophy. There are at least 50 works attributed to him.
Contents |
[edit] Life
Burley was born in 1274 or 1275, possibly in Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire. Little is known of his early life. He was made rector of Welbury in Yorkshire in 1309, probably through the influence of Sir John de Lisle, a friend of William Greenfield.[1] As throughout his career, he did not act as rector, employing a substitute and using the income from the living to finance his study in Paris. In Paris, he completed his lectures on Peter Lombard's Sentences, and probably encountered the work of his contemporary William of Ockham. Burley's commentary on the Sentences has not survived, however.[2] Burley became a master of theology by 1324.
Burley became a courtier as part of the political events that followed the deposition of Edward II of England. It is generally thought that Edward was assassinated by an agent of Queen Isabella of France, Edward's wife, and Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, who may have been her lover, at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire on 11 October 1327. His first assignment was to try and obtain the canonisation of Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, who had been one of the leaders of the baronial opposition to Edward II. Thomas had become venerated as a martyr within a few months of his death. Edward III wrote three times to the Pope requesting his canonisation. Edward III was crowned on February 1, 1327, at the age of fourteen, and wrote the first letter to the Pope on February 28.
As part of this effort, Burley was sent to the papal court at Avignon to appeal directly to Pope John XXII. By coincidence, William of Ockham was also staying at Avignon, having been summoned there in 1324 to answer charges of possibly heretical statements (by 1326 there was a list of 51 charges against him).
Burley's associates were all closely involved in these attempts at canonisation (none of which was successful). One of these was Bishop Henry Burghersh, who was closely associated with Queen Isabella, another was Richard de Bury, a bibliophile and patron of the arts and sciences, who later became Burley's patron. Bury became involved in the intrigues preceding the deposition Edward II and supplied Isabella and Roger Mortimer with money in 1325 from the revenues of Brienne, of which province he was treasurer. On the accession of Edward III his services were rewarded by rapid promotion.[3] One of those accompanying Burley to Avignon was Sir William Trussell, who had been involved in the insurrection of 1322 against Edward II at Boroughbridge.
In May 1327, Burley became canon of Chichester by the provision of the Pope, but exchanged the position in 1332 to become canon at Wells, where de Bury was Dean. Bury had been involved in the coup d'etat of 1330 which resulted in the execution of Mortimer, and the de facto accession of Edward III to the throne. in 1333, de Bury was consecrated Bishop of Durham by the king, overruling the choice of the monks, who had elected and actually installed their sub-prior, Robert de Graynes.[4] In February 1334 de Bury was made Lord Treasurer, an appointment he exchanged later in the year for that of Lord Chancellor. He gathered together a group of intellectuals that included Thomas Fitzralph, Richard de Kilvington, Robert Holcott, Thomas Bradwardine and Burley himself.
[edit] Works
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. The Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum edited by H. Knust, Tübingen, 1886, once attributed to Burley, is of an anonymous author.
Other works include:
- Treatise on Suppositions
- In Aristotelis Perihermenias (Questions on Aristotle's Perihermenias, 1301)
- De Formis
[edit] References
- Broadie, Alexander. Introduction to Medieval Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
- Ottman, J. and Wood, R', "Walter of Burley, His Life and Works", Vivarium 37, 1999.
- Walter Burley. De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior, with a revised edition of the Tractatus Brevior, ed. P. Boehner (New York: 1955).
- Walter Burley. On the Purity of the Art of Logic. The Shorter and Longer Treatises, trans. & ed. P.V. Spade (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000).
- Walter Burley. De Formis, ed. Frederick J. Down Scott (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1970 ISBN 3769690044).
- Gracia, J.G. and Noone, T.B., A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, London 2003
[edit] External links
- Walter Burley entry by Alessandro Conti in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
