  Buridan is also different in that he remained for his entire life a secular cleric rather than joining a religious order such as the Dominicans or Franciscans. A papal letter of 1329 refers to him as simply, “clericus Atrebatensis diocoesis, magister in artibus [a cleric from the Diocese of Arras and Master of  Arts]” (Faral 1950, 11).  By contrast, the best-known names of the period all had religious and intellectual affiliations beyond the university: Thomas Aquinas (Dominican), Duns Scotus (Franciscan), William of Ockham (Franciscan), Gregory of Rimini (Augustinian), to name a few. The benefit for Buridan was that it freed him from the obligation to enter into the doctrinal disputes that had begun to arise, with alarming frequency and intensity, between religious orders, or between an order and the church hierarchy—e.g., the dispute between the papacy and the Franciscans over apostolic poverty. Thus, whereas Ockham spent his entire later career on political crusades, away from philosophy, and was finally excommunicated for his troubles, Buridan was bound only by the intellectual and pedagogical traditions of his university. His confessional independence also meant that he could help himself to philosophical insights from a variety of sources. This occasionally emerges in the eclectic character of his work, as we shall see below.