John Buridan on the Formation of Scientific Authority

Abstract The aim of this essay is to examine John Buridans’s view on scientific authority and to point out the social dimension of such an authority. Drawing mainly on Buridan’s natural philosophy (and in particular on the commentary on the Meteors ), the essay identifies Buridan’s typology of scientific authority and points out how the community of masters is involved in the formation of such an authority. The important aspect of this shared formation is the openness of natural philosophy to the idea of probable knowledge, and the break with a strong theoretical conception of scientific knowledge.