BURIDAN, JEAN (JOANNES BURIDANUS) (C. 1297—C. 1358), French philosopher, was born at Bethune in Artois. He studied under William of Occam in Paris where he became pro fessor of philosophy, and, in 1327, rector. The tradition that he was forced to flee from France along with other Nominalists, and founded the University of Vienna in 1356, is unsupported and in contradiction to the fact that the university was founded by Frederick II. in 1237. An ordinance of Louis XI., in 1473, di rected against the Nominalists, prohibited the reading of his works. In philosophy Buridan followed Occam in denying all objective reality to universals. The aim of his logic is represented as having been the devising of rules for the discovery of syllogistic middle terms; this system for aiding slow-witted persons became known as the pons asinoruin. The parts of logic which he treated with most minuteness are modal propositions and modal syllogisms. In commenting on Aristotle's Ethics, Buridan asserts that liberty is only a certain power of suspending the deliberative process and determining the direction of the intellect. Otherwise the will is entirely dependent on the intellect. The comparison of the will unable to act between two equally balanced motives to an ass dying of hunger between two equal and equidistant bundles of hay is not found in his works, and may have been invented by his opponents to ridicule his determinism. Buridan is also con spicuous for his departure from Aristotelian physics in his impetus theory of movement.