25 Facts About Thomas Bradwardine

Thomas Bradwardine stayed at Merton College until 1333, when he was appointed Canon of Lincoln, and in 1337 he was appointed the chaplain of St Paul's Cathedral.

Thomas Bradwardine was a precocious student, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a fellow by 1321; he took the degree of doctor of divinity, and acquired the reputation of a profound scholar, a skilful mathematician and an able theologian.

Thomas Bradwardine was a gifted logician with theories on the insolubles and in particular the liar paradox.

Thomas Bradwardine subsequently moved to Merton College, Oxford on a fellowship.

Thomas Bradwardine was afterwards raised to the high offices of chancellor of the university and professor of divinity.

Thomas Bradwardine was a culminating figure of the great intellectual movement at Oxford that had begun in the 1240s.

Thomas Bradwardine was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him intellectual freedom but deprived him of the security and wherewithal that the Preaching Orders would have afforded; instead he turned to royal patronage.

Thomas Bradwardine's great theological work, to modern eyes, is a treatise against the Pelagians, entitled De causa Dei contra Pelagium et de virtute causarum.

Thomas Bradwardine's major treatise argued that space was an infinite void in which God could have created other worlds, which he would rule as he ruled this one.

Thomas Bradwardine wrote De Geometria speculativa ; De Arithmetica practica ; De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus ; De Quadratura Circuli ; and an Ars Memorative, Sloane manuscripts.

Thomas Bradwardine wrote extensively on various subjects, including speculative arithmetic, geometry, and the workings of the human mind.

Thomas Bradwardine accepted the idea of predestination and suggested that all evil acts of Human will were due to God.

Thomas Bradwardine argued that providence is inseparable from predestination, and rejected the notion that humans could do good of their own volition.

Thomas Bradwardine would go on to write that free will and predestination through predeterminism are compatible, a theory known as compatibilism.

Thomas Bradwardine was one of these Oxford Calculators, studying mechanics with William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, and John Dumbleton.

In Tractatus de proportionibus, Thomas Bradwardine extended the theory of proportions of Eudoxus of Cnidus to anticipate the concept of exponential growth, later developed by the Bernoulli and Euler, with compound interest as a special case.

Arguments for the mean speed theorem require the modern mathematical concept of limit, so Thomas Bradwardine had to use arguments of his day.

Mathematician and mathematical historian Carl Benjamin Boyer writes, "Thomas Bradwardine developed the Boethian theory of double or triple or, more generally, what we would call 'n-tuple' proportion".

Thomas Bradwardine attempted to reconcile contradictions in physics, where he largely adopted Aristotle's description of the physical universe.

Thomas Bradwardine rejected four opinions concerning the link between power, resistance, and speed on the basis that were inconsistent with Aristotle's or because they did not align with what could be easily observed regarding motion.

The first opinion Thomas Bradwardine contemplates before rejecting is one he attributes to Avempace that states " that speeds follow the excesses of motive powers over resistances", following the formula.

Thomas Bradwardine did identify one measurement error in Aristotle's law of motion.

Boyer writes that "the works of Thomas Bradwardine had contained some fundamentals of trigonometry gleaned from Muslim sources".

Thomas Bradwardine was a practitioner and exponent of the art of memory, a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organise memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas.

Thomas Bradwardine's On Acquiring a Trained Memory, translated by Mary Carruthers, contains, as Carruthers describes it, was similar to Cicero's work on the art of memory.