Sultan Omar Initiates the Reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, from the ‘Histoire de la conquete de Jerusalem’ by William of Tyre (c.1130-85) c.1470 (vellum), French School, (15th century).France, Rouen, XVe siècle Artiste : Maître de l’Échevinage.

Painting had made great progress in the naturalistic depiction of distance and volume during Medieval times. Moving from flat, decorative space to three dimensional illusions of space to better represent the world they saw around them. This propelled painting and sculpture into a new stratosphere and paved the way for the Italian Renaissance and Dutch realist paintings that had people literally fainting in front of them – dizzy and giddy with delight.

Modern concepts such as momentum, inertia and (expression of) rates of change came to be put in place in the 17th century, thanks mainly to the efforts of Galileo, Newton and Leibniz. Yet three centuries earlier John Buridan was thinking in terms of these concepts and attempting to apply them to moving things. In examining the motion of moving bodies, Buridan sought to correct the Aristotelian understanding of how movement is maintained in them. Buridan’s nine arguments on motion are presented and critiqued, and imagined counter-arguments, from an Aristotelian perspective, are offered.