The Liar Paradox from John Buridan back to Thomas Bradwardine

Abstract

Thomas Bradwardine was born shortly before the start of the fourteenth century. While at Merton College in Oxford in the 1320s, he made two seminal contributions to our understanding of the world. One is generally recognised and well known: his reinterpretation of Aristotle on the ratio of velocity to force and resistance, that the second two vary with the square of the first. The other insight is much less well known and usually credited elsewhere. Ralph Strode, friend and neighbour in London of Geoffrey Chaucer later in the century wrote: Then appeared that prince of modern natural philosophers, Thomas Bradwardine, who first came upon something of value concerning the insolubles.1 The insolubles are paradoxes or antinomies of language, perhaps most famously expressed in the Liar Paradox: 'What I am saying is false'. Bradwardine's solution was later taken up by Albert of Saxony and John Buridan at the University of Paris, and is most well known in Buridan's version, following discussions by Ernest Moody and Arthur Prior2 and translations by Scott and Hughes.3 Bradwardine's treatise has not been translated into English, and appeared in print for the first time in 1970, edited from two of the twelve manuscripts known to have survived.4