  Buridan's academic career was unusual in two respects, both of which help to explain his philosophical outlook. First, he appears to have spent his entire career in the faculty of arts, without moving on to study for a doctoral degree in one of the more prestigious faculties of law, medicine, or theology, which was the more typical career path of a medieval academic. Most of the figures we think of today as medieval philosophers were in fact trained as theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and even William of Ockham (though he did not finish his degree). Since university statutes forbade arts masters from teaching or writing about theology, Buridan produced no theological works and no commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the principal genre of philosophical writing in the fourteenth century.