John Dumbleton

John of Dumbleton (Latin Ioannes De Dumbleton; c. 1310 – c. 1349) was a member of the Dumbleton village community in Gloucestershire, a southwestern county in England. Although obscure, he is considered a significant English fourteenth-century philosopher for his contributions to logic, natural philosophy, and physics. Dumbleton’s masterwork is his Summa Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis (Summary of Logic and Natural Philosophy), likely to have been composed just before the time of his death.

John of Dumbleton is recorded to have become a fellow at Merton College, Oxford (ca. 1338–9) and to have studied with the likes of William Heytesbury, Thomas Bradwardine, and Richard Swineshead. These four medieval scholastics held a common bond in that their study interests were in a similar field, but the method of study which brought these fellows into the same sphere of learning was of a more esoteric bent than modern university methods. They were interested in mathematics and logical analysis for the purposes of natural philosophy, theology, and an a priori type of mathematical physics (not to be confused with modern, empirical, experimental physics). Thus, the physics postulations and conjectures made by Dumbleton and his Oxford contemporaries were primarily done without any application of physical experimentation. Dumbleton, along with the other three Merton philosophers, received the moniker 'Calculators' for their adherence to mathematics and logical disputation when solving philosophical and theological problems. After being named a fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford (1340) and making a return to Merton College (1344–45) Dumbleton is recorded to have studied theology in Paris (ca. 1345–47) for a brief period before returning to finish his studies at Merton College (1347–1348). The fact that no extant copy of Dumbleton's Summa Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis is complete (nor edited) leads one to wonder if his death (ca. 1349) abruptly terminated the possibility of its completion.

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