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Occamists (14th-Century idea of force impetus): *
Jean Buridan (1301-1359) was educated in Paris, receiving his MA degree & license to teach by the mid-1320s, from the University of Paris. From 1328 on he was a teacher at the University. His focus was on logic and the works of Aristotle; he played a key role in the demise of the Aristotelian view of the cosmos. His major contribution was the theory of impetus, or impressed force, to explain projectile motion (in his Questions on Aristotle's De Anima On the Soul). Rejecting the discredited Aristotelian idea in which the tendency of a thrown projectile to continue moving is due to a proximate but external moving cause (such as the air surrounding it), he argues that only an internal motive force, transmitted from the mover to the projectile, could explain its continued motion.
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Like Ockham, he is a nominalist, although nominalism was a practice, or way of doing philosophy, rather than as a piece of doctrine. And like Ockham he was part of the movement against Aristotelian thought. Much of the groundwork had already been done by Ockam who subjected Aristotle’s Physics to withering critiques. He would probably have read Ockam as the latter wrote most of his philosophical works between 1320 and 1325, just as Buridan was studying for his MA. We can see Occam’s Razor at work in Buridan. who effectively used reduction by elimination to destroy the impetus idea of Aristotelian Physics.