Walter Burley

Walter Burley (or Burleigh), c.1275-1344/5, was a medieval English logician. He was a Master of Arts at Oxford in 1301, and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford until 1305. He studied theology in Paris from before 1310, and by c.1320 he was a doctor of theology at Paris. He was a fellow of the Sorbonne by 1324. After studying William of Ockham's commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Burley opposed Ockham on a number of points concerning logic and natural philosophy.

Work

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.

Notability

This philosopher has Bcmp Pages:=1 page in the Blackwell Companion. {{#set: Birth Date=1275| Flourished=1310| Birth_Country_Name=England| Death Date=1344| Death_City=Paris?| Death_Country_Name=France? }}