Jean Buridan c. 1300 – c. 1361

Jean Buridan was a French priest and one of the most important philosophers of the late Middle Ages, who spent his entire career in the secular arts faculty at Paris rather than in the higher faculty of theology. He produced extensive commentaries on Aristotle in logic, natural philosophy, ethics, and politics, and developed the theory of impetus that anticipated early modern accounts of inertia. His treatment of the freedom of the will gave rise to the celebrated thought experiment of the ass between two equal bales of hay. He was instrumental in the rise of nominalism in fourteenth-century Paris.