 Why did Buridan remain in the faculty of arts? It is unlikely that someone of his obvious philosophical ability would have gone unnoticed. Nor does the reason appear to have been a lack of means, for despite his impoverished background he did receive a number of bursaries and stipends, and is even listed in a document of 1349 as being among those masters capable of supporting themselves without financial assistance from the University. One possible answer—though in the absence of concrete evidence that he never studied theology, it must remain speculative—is that he deliberately chose to remain among the ‘artists [artistae]’. What little he does say about philosophy very clearly ties the philosophical enterprise to his office as an arts master, not to whatever it was theologians took themselves to be doing.  Rejecting the traditional picture of theological learning as the perfection or completion of philosophical wisdom, Buridan seems to articulate, sometimes in spite of himself, a new vision of philosophy as a secular enterprise based on what is evident to the senses and intellect, in contrast to theology, which begins from non-evident truths revealed in scripture and doctrine.[4] Perhaps most tellingly, Buridan never refers to theology as constituting a ‘scientia’, or body of knowledge—an assumption almost all theologians took great pains to defend in their commentaries on the  Sentences.[5]