How was Buridan’s thought shaped by its institutional setting and by pedagogical practice in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris? This essay argues that local circumstances are crucial not only for interpreting Buridan’s arguments, but also for understanding his larger contribution to the history of philosophy. Thus, we find that even working within the constraints of the arts curriculum, Buridan was always able to segue from established modes of instruction and prescribed topics to discuss philosophical problems of interest to him; in this he was no different from other arts masters of the period, and indeed, from university lecturers even today. But he also used his independence to embody, in ways he himself may not have fully understood, a new way of being a philosopher. Whereas a century earlier, Thomas Aquinas saw himself as a theologian and regarded philosophy as an activity proper to pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, Buridan sought to define what he was doing in contradistinction to theology, and on grounds we would now recognize as secular.

By the latter half of the fourteenth century, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (N.E.) had assumed its rightful place in the arts curriculum of most medieval European universities, though it seems only M.A. students were required to attend lectures on it. But there had in fact been much interest in the work since Albert the Great first commented on the entire text in the previous century, so that by the time it appeared in the university statute books, there was already a tradition of commentary on it going back several generations.

In commenting on the works of Aristotle, most arts masters saw their task as twofold, viz., that of explaining the littera or literal meaning of Aristotle's text, and then (usually in a separate work) of identifying and trying to resolve the philosophical questions raised by it. In the case of N.E., the latter task provided ample opportunity for the master to address conflicts between Aristotle and other authors whose works were regarded as authoritative in ethics. This would have included not just philosophers from Greek and Roman antiquity available in Latin translation, but also the Bible, Church Fathers, and earlier medieval commentators on N.E. such as Albert and Thomas Aquinas. In the Latin West there had always been a tension, or perhaps uneasy alliance, between Christian ethics and its pagan forbears, but most commentators regarded Aristotle as having important things to say in moral philosophy, and the belief that Aristotle's views, and especially his arguments for them, should be seen as complementing Christian doctrine was widespread.

Stoicism remains one of the most significant minority reports in the history of Western philosophy. Unfortunately, however, the precise nature of its impact on later thinkers is far from clear. The essays in this volume are intended to bring this picture into sharper focus by exploring how Stoicism actually influenced philosophers from antiquity through the modern period in fields ranging from logic and ethics to politics and theology. The contributing authors have expertise in different periods in the history of philosophy, but all have sought to demonstrate the continuity of Stoic themes over time, looking at the ways in which Stoic ideas were appropriated (often unconsciously) and transformed by later philosophers for their own purposes and under widely varying circumstances. The story they tell shows that Stoicism had many faces beyond antiquity, and that its doctrines have continued to appeal to philosophers of many different backgrounds and temperaments.

In tracing the influence of Stoicism on Western thought, one can take either the high road or the low road. The high road would insist on determining the ancient provenance of Stoic and apparently Stoic ideas in the work of medieval and modern thinkers, using the writings of the ancient Stoics to grade their proximity to the genuine article; this would require paying close attention to the particular questions that exercised thinkers such as Zeno and Chrysippus, in order to determine the extent to which later figures contributed to their solutions.