Philosophers 17th century
Étienne Chauvin was a French Protestant theologian and philosopher.
Chauvin's philosophy and worldview were entirely Cartesian. After his expulsion from Nîmes, Étienne Chauvin withdrew to Rotterdam, where he preached for several years in the Walloon Church. He was succeeded as professor of Baille at Rotterdam. In 1695 the Elector of Brandenburg appointed him pastor and professor of philosophy, and afterward inspector of the French college at Berlin.
Etienne Chauvin's major work is Lexicon Rationale, sive Thesaurus Philosophicus (1692). He also wrote Theses on the Knowledge of God (1662) and published the New Journal of Scholars (1694-1698).
Romeyn de Hooghe was a Dutch painter, sculptor, engraver and caricaturist of the late Baroque period, writer and philosopher.
Hooghe became famous for his political caricatures of King Louis XIV of France and propaganda pamphlets in support of William of Orange. He portrayed the war against the French monarch and his allies as a struggle between freedom and religious despotism.
Romeyn de Hooghe was a superb engraver and created over 3,500 engravings during his lifetime. His most important work is Hieroglyphica of Merkbeelden der oude volkeren (Hieroglyphics or Symbols of the Ancient Peoples), where he appeared not only as a consummate master of engraving, but also as a historian, talented writer and philosopher. This book has long been regarded in Europe as one of the most authoritative sources on classical mythology. It contains 64 engravings illustrating all stages of the narrative of myths, ancient cults and beliefs, and the interpretation of scripture, a guide to medieval Europe.
Romeyn de Hooghe also illustrated books and painted large panels. During his lifetime he was widely recognized as a painter and sculptor not only in his own country but also in other European countries.
Juana Inés de la Cruz or Juana of Asbaje, real name Juana Inés de Asbaje Ramírez de Santillananota, was a Mexican poet, scholar, and writer of the Latin American colonial period and the Spanish Baroque, and a Jerónimo nun.
Juana Ramírez was born into a poor family (Spanish father and Creole mother) and from an early age showed a burning thirst for knowledge and giftedness, but as a woman she was almost entirely self-taught. By her teens, she had already learned Greek logic and taught Latin to young children. She also learned Nahuatl, an Aztec language spoken in Central Mexico, and wrote several short poems in the language. At the age of 16, the girl was introduced to the court, and her intelligence impressed even Viceroy Antonio Sebastian de Toledo, Marquis de Mancera, and in 1664 he invited her to serve as maid of honor.
In 1669, at the age of 21, she took her tonsure at the Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite Order in Mexico City, where she remained a recluse for the rest of her life. In the convent, Sister Juana enjoyed exceptional freedom: she continued to socialize with scholars and senior members of the court, amassed one of the largest private libraries in the New World, as well as a collection of musical and scientific instruments. Her plays in verse, poetry, and compositions for state and religious festivals were frequently and successfully performed at the palace.
Sister Juana was an outstanding representative of Spain's Golden Age: she was the last significant writer of the Latin American Baroque and the first great exponent of colonial Mexican culture. Sister Juana wrote sonnets, romances, and ballads, drawing on a vast store of classical, biblical, philosophical, and mythological sources. She also composed moral, satirical, and religious texts, as well as many poems praising courtiers, but she also defended women's right to education.
At the end of her life, due to pressure from religious dogmatists, Sister Juana had to sell her extensive library of some 4,000 volumes and return to strict reclusiveness. In 1695, the plague struck the convent and, while caring for her sisters, Juana died of the disease at about the age of forty-four.
Today, Juana Inés de la Cruz is a national icon of Mexico and Mexican identity as a prominent writer of the Spanish-American colonial period. The former convent where she lived is a center of higher education, and her image adorns Mexican currency.
Benedictus Spinoza (Spanish: Baruj Espinosa) at birth Baruch Spinoza is a Dutch philosopher-rationalist of Jewish origin, a bright representative of the Age of Enlightenment.
Spinoza was born into a family of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, who converted to Christianity but returned to Judaism. As a young man, he was considered an outstanding Talmudic scholar and a promising religious scholar. But, inspired by the philosophical writings of René Descartes and Francis Bacon, the young philosopher soon fell outside the orthodox tradition because of his radical views. In 1656 he was severely excommunicated for heresy.
For the rest of his life, Spinoza spent his modest life grinding lenses and privately teaching philosophy, but he also wrote anonymously published philosophical treatises and secretly exchanged letters with many philosophically inclined luminaries of the wider European Enlightenment. Spinoza's only book, published in 1663 in Amsterdam under his own name, was Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I, & II, More Geometrico demonstrate (Principles of Cartesian Philosophy). These principles served as a preparatory work for many metaphysical views in his most important treatise, Ethics (1677).
Benedict Spinoza defended the philosophical life from religious persecution and advocated a new, liberal, democratic regime to support that life. Although Spinoza was often persecuted as an atheist in his time, his writings played an important role in shaping philosophy, theology, and politics in the centuries to come. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, Spinoza is one of the most relevant today.
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and natural scientist who is considered the founder of modern philosophy.
Descartes was a very versatile scientist: besides numerous philosophical reflections, he wrote works on optics, meteorology and geometry. Contemporaries noted his extensive knowledge in many sciences. Descartes owns the famous saying "I think, therefore I exist" (best known in the Latin formulation "Cogito, ergo sum", although it was originally written in French: "Je pense, donc je suis").
He developed a metaphysical dualism that radically distinguished between mind, whose essence is thought, and matter, whose essence is extension in three dimensions. Descartes' metaphysics is rationalistic, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and physiology, based on sense experience, are mechanistic and empirical.
Unlike his scientific predecessors, who felt a holy awe at the incomprehensibility of the divine essence of the universe, Descartes admired the ability of the human mind to understand the cosmos and to generate happiness itself, and rejected the view that human beings were inherently unhappy and sinful. He believed that it was inappropriate to pray to God to change the state of things and the world; it was much more productive to change oneself.
Robert Fludd was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian.
Fludd is best known for his compilations in occult philosophy. He had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.
Girolamo Franzosi was an Italian physician and philosopher.
He was born in Polpenazza (now Polpenazze del Garda), near the Lombard lakeshore, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Franzosi was a student at Padua and became a convinced Aristotelian. He opposed the anatomists of the Neoteric Academy, which represented the new trends of medicine in Verona in contrast to the Galenic tendencies of traditional medicine.
Franzosi's other works, written under the influence of Girolamo Cardano and Agostino Nifo, deal with such wide-ranging topics as dreams, prophecies, imagination, and the medicinal properties of viper venom. He printed most of his works in Verona, calling himself "medicus and philosopher of Verona".
Galileo Galilei was an Italian naturalist, physicist, mechanic, astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician.
Using his own improved telescopes, Galileo Galilei observed the movements of the Moon, Earth's satellites, and the stars, making several breakthrough discoveries in astronomy. He was the first to see craters on the Moon, discovered sunspots and the rings of Saturn, and traced the phases of Venus. Galileo was a consistent and convinced supporter of the teachings of Copernicus and the heliocentric system of the world, for which he was subjected to the trial of the Inquisition.
Galileo is considered the founder of experimental and theoretical physics. He is also one of the founders of the principle of relativity in classical mechanics. Overall, the scientist had such a significant impact on the science of his time that he cannot be overemphasized.
Pierre Gassendi was a French Catholic priest, Epicurean philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and researcher of ancient texts.
He taught rhetoric at Diné and philosophy at Aix-en-Provence. Gassendi's Syntagma philosophicum, the result of his historical research and philosophical reflections, is a well-known work. Several of his works on astronomy, physics and mechanics were also published in the 17th century.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and a prominent polymath in many fields of science.
Leibniz was a universal genius; he showed his talents in logic, mathematics, mechanics, physics, law, history, diplomacy, and linguistics, and in each of the disciplines he has serious scientific achievements. As a philosopher, he was a leading exponent of 17th-century rationalism and idealism.
Leibniz was a tireless worker and the greatest scholar of his time. In the fate of Leibniz, among other things, there is one interesting page: in 1697, he accidentally met the Russian Tsar Peter I during his trip to Europe. Their further meetings led to the realization of several grandiose projects in Russia, one of which was the establishment of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was also the founder and first president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a member of the Royal Society of London.
Fortunio Liceti (Latin: Fortunius Licetus) was an Italian physician, natural philosopher, writer and educator.
Liceti studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Bologna and earned doctorates in these disciplines. He taught logic and philosophy at the University of Pisa, and became professor of philosophy at the University of Padua and the University of Bologna. At the University of Padua, Liceti became friends with Galileo Galilei.
Liceti's inquisitive mind was interested in a wide range of subjects: from genetics and reproduction to gems and animals. In general, Fortunio Liceti was a very industrious and prolific scientist: he published a book each year, writing more than seventy works on a wide range of subjects, including the human soul, reproduction, and birth defects.
In 1616, Liceti wrote and published the first edition of De monstruorum causis, natura et differentiis (On the Causes, Nature, and Differences of Monsters), a chronologically ordered catalog of monsters from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Among these monsters were infants with congenital malformations. Liceti was one of the first scholars to attempt to systematically categorize birth defects according to their causes, including numerous causes not related to the supernatural. This topic interested the scientist greatly and he returned to it several times during his life, supplementing it with illustrations, among other things. From 1640 to 1650. Liceti also wrote and published seven different volumes in which he answered questions from famous people on a wide variety of medical topics.
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian biologist, anatomist and physician, professor of logic, theoretical and practical medicine, and a member of the Royal Society of London.
After graduating from the University of Bologna with the degree of Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy, Malpighi soon took up a professorship there, then taught at the universities of Pisa and Messina. At the same time as teaching, he conducted biological research with his microscopes, which was an innovation in those days. In 1661, he identified and described the pulmonary and capillary network connecting small arteries to small veins, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. He also isolated taste buds and regarded them as nerve endings, described the minute structure of the brain, the optic nerve, and in 1666 was the first to see red blood cells and attribute to them the color of blood. His treatise De polypo cordis (1666) explained the composition of blood and how it coagulates.
During his medical practice, Malpighi studied microscopic sections of the liver, brain, spleen, kidneys, and the bone and deep layers of skin that now bear his name. In his landmark 1673 work on the embryology of the chicken, the scientist concluded that the embryo forms in the egg after fertilization. In 1675-79 he also made extensive comparative studies of the microscopic anatomy of several different plants and saw analogies between plant and animal organisms. The Royal Society of London published two volumes of his botanical and zoological works in 1675 and 1679. His Anatome Plantarum is richly decorated with engravings by Robert White.
After his house was burned and looted by his adversaries, in 1691 Pope Innocent XII invited him to Rome as papal personal physician, which was a great honor.
Malpighi can be considered the first histologist. For almost 40 years he used the microscope to describe the main types of plant and animal structures and thus marked for future generations of biologists the main directions of research in botany, embryology, human anatomy and pathology. The conflict between ancient ideas and modern discoveries continued throughout the seventeenth century. Malpighi was convinced that microscopic anatomy, by showing the minute structure of living things, questioned the value of the old medicine. He laid the anatomical foundation for the subsequent understanding of human physiological exchanges.
Marin Mersenne (also Marinus Mersennus or le Père Mersenne) was a French mathematician, physicist, philosopher and theologian, and music theorist.
Mersenne was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche and went on to study theology in Paris. He also became a member of the Order of the Minims and taught philosophy and theology at Nevers. He developed his ideas about the essence of the world and knowledge, insisting on the importance of experimentation and observation, and contrasted the rational natural world with human reason.
Beginning in 1635, Mersenne founded the Académie Parisienne, the forerunner of the French Academy of Sciences, where France's leading mathematicians and natural philosophers gathered. It provided a forum for the exchange of ideas among scientists and promoted the works of René Descartes and Galileo. The scientist's most famous achievement in mathematics was finding a formula for generating prime numbers, known today as Mersenne's Numbers. In 1644, Mersenne published his studies of Mersenne numbers and their relationship to prime numbers. His work in number theory and arithmetic proved pivotal to the development of mathematics in the seventeenth century.
He corresponded with many other scientists of the era, such as René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Fermat. However, his contributions extend much further, through his role in disseminating the work of the outstanding minds of his time. Mersenne traveled extensively throughout Europe, bringing new scientific ideas to France. He was an important mediator in the exchange of knowledge and contributed to the advancement of science in his era.
John Milton was a British poet and writer-publicist, intellectual and politician of the English Revolutionary period.
Milton first planned to become a priest, studied at Cambridge University, and then abandoned this activity. Several years he spent reading and self-education, learning many languages. In 1638 Milton traveled around the continent for about a year and a half, spending much time in Italy, primarily in Rome and Florence. He befriended young Italian literati, and his encounter with Galileo further influenced his writing.
Milton became best known for his poem Paradise Lost in Ten Books, which declares its purpose to justify the ways of God to man, but also touches on both universal and personal themes. Milton was the first author to use the word "cosmos" in our modern sense of "outer space," and his space epic takes place in a confidently Copernican universe.
In his prose works, Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the outbreak of the English Civil Wars in 1642 and long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he spoke out against tyranny and state-sanctioned religion in all his works. As a Protestant, Milton was often in conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 and then under Oliver Cromwell, conducting international correspondence and defending the government against polemical attacks from abroad.
John Milton is considered the most important English writer after William Shakespeare. Author of political pamphlets and religious treatises, he is one of the most famous writers of the 1650s, the vibrant era of the English Revolution (Civil War).
Giovanni Nardi was an Italian physician and natural philosopher.
After studying at the University of Pisa, Nardi worked as a physician in Florence. He corresponded with many of the leading natural philosophers and antiquarians of his time, including members of the Accademia dei Lincei. In 1620 Nardi became court physician to Duke Ferdinando II Medici of Tuscany and accompanied him on his travels. In his Florentine home, Nardi amassed a collection of antiques and curiosities.
Nardi wrote several volumes on natural philosophy, as well as a commentary on Lucretius entitled Titi Lucretii Cari De rerum naturae libri sex (1647). Nardi's commentaries on Lucretius's natural history, medicine, physics, and theory of atomism far exceed the poem itself.
Giuseppe Rosaccio was an Italian physician, astronomer, cosmographer and cartographer.
Rosaccio graduated from the University of Padua, studied philosophy, medicine and law, and worked as a physician and judge. He became famous for a series of works that popularized a number of scientific disciplines. Some of his books deal with astrological medicine, specific diseases and their remedies, and the distillation of medicines from plants.
Giuseppe Rosaccio wrote about forty works on various topics of interest to him, but the main one was geography. He wrote an essay on the Muslim religion and treatises on geography, cosmography, astronomy, and astrology, which became very popular and were repeatedly reprinted.
Rosaccio created many atlases and small-format geographical works. Among his works is Ptolemy's Geography, which contains many indexes and is written in Italian (1599). He also authored a large map of the world (1597), and a large map of Italy and Tuscany (1609). His book Journey from Venice to Constantinople includes maps of the route with brief texts, that is, it is essentially an illustrated version of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Israël Spach (also Israelis Spachius) was a German and French physician, medical writer and teacher of medicine.
Spach studied at the University of Tübingen, receiving the degree of doctor of medicine, and from 1589 taught medicine and Hebrew at the University of Strasbourg, with the rank of professor of medicine. He was characterized by a high bibliographical education.
Spach was the author of a gynecological encyclopedia, Gynaeciorum sive de mulierum tum communibus, tum gravidarum, parientium, et puerperarum affectibus et morbis, published in Strasbourg in 1597. It was a very significant book for its time.
Israël Spach also wrote Nomenclator scriptorum medicorum..., published in Frankfurt in 1591, which was the first attempt at a bibliography on medical subjects. It was organized under very broad subject headings, with indexes of authors and subjects.
Jonathan Swift was a British-Irish writer, essayist, philosopher, and author of the world-famous satirical novel Gulliver's Travels.
Swift also wrote numerous works, including The Tale of the Barrel (1704), An Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity (1712), and A Modest Proposal (1729). Almost all of Swift's satirical works were published anonymously, giving the author wide latitude in expressing his talent as a satirist.
Swift was a clergyman, made a career in London, became the chief pamphleteer and political writer of the Tories and headed the Tory journal "The Inspector", and then returned to Ireland, where he created his major life's work.
The four-part novel Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's greatest satire, was first published in 1726 and has since been reprinted hundreds of times in many languages around the world. The author describes in an engaging style the different races and societies that Gulliver encounters on his travels to ridicule the many errors, follies, weaknesses and vices to which people and society at large are subject. The author's boundless imagination, bitter irony, keen intellect and brilliant language give this work a world-class scope.
Johann Zahn (German: Johann or Johannes Zahn) was a German scientist and philosopher, optician and astronomer, mathematician and inventor.
Zahn studied mathematics and physics at the University of Würzburg, was professor of mathematics at the University of Würzburg, and served as a canon of the Order of Regular Canon Premonstratensians. His other activities were optics as well as astronomical observations.
In 1686 Johann Zahn invented and designed a portable camera obscura with fixed lenses and an adjustable mirror, which is the prototype of the camera. In his treatise on optics, Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus (1702), Zahn gives a complete picture of the state of optical science of his time. He begins with basic information about the eye and then moves on to optical instruments. The book is aimed at eighteenth-century microscope and telescope enthusiasts and includes all the necessary details of construction, from lens grinding to drawings.
Martin Zeiler (also Zeiller) was a Baroque era German author.
Zeiler was schooled in Ulm, moving to Wittenberg in 1608 to study jurisprudence and history. He worked several jobs as private teacher and notary. He lived in Ulm from 1629, working as teacher and inspector at local schools.