Pub Date : 2020-12-24DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0008
H. Hotson
Since the function and form of Comenian pansophia derived from the previous post-Ramist tradition, its sources and basic working methods naturally betrayed the same family resemblance. Far from proceeding on strictly empirical principles, Comenius adopted from Alsted the idea that pansophia must derive from the ‘three books of God’: sense, reason, and revelation (section 8.i). Like Alsted, Comenius also collected and processed this huge variety of material within a system of commonplaces; while Hartlib and Dury, for their part, proposed using Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as the structure of a collaborative information processing centre known as the Office of Address for Communications. However bookish these methods may seem, they were not as far removed from Bacon’s actual practice as is commonly supposed (section 8.ii). The fatal disjuncture underlying the universal reform programme was not between empiricism and commonplacing but between philosophical and pedagogical goals. The fundamental objective was to expound a reformed system of universal knowledge in the systematic manner in which it could be propagated universally. But the reformation of knowledge in the patient, incremental manner advocated by Bacon required resistance to premature systematization. The Baconian pansophists were therefore forced to choose between pursuing the best means of transmitting received knowledge and the best means of transforming it. Since there was no point in communicating knowledge which remained fundamentally flawed, the universal reform agenda collapsed amongst Hartlib’s successors into the more coherent and manageable task of reforming natural philosophy alone (section 8.iii).
{"title":"Divergence","authors":"H. Hotson","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Since the function and form of Comenian pansophia derived from the previous post-Ramist tradition, its sources and basic working methods naturally betrayed the same family resemblance. Far from proceeding on strictly empirical principles, Comenius adopted from Alsted the idea that pansophia must derive from the ‘three books of God’: sense, reason, and revelation (section 8.i). Like Alsted, Comenius also collected and processed this huge variety of material within a system of commonplaces; while Hartlib and Dury, for their part, proposed using Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as the structure of a collaborative information processing centre known as the Office of Address for Communications. However bookish these methods may seem, they were not as far removed from Bacon’s actual practice as is commonly supposed (section 8.ii). The fatal disjuncture underlying the universal reform programme was not between empiricism and commonplacing but between philosophical and pedagogical goals. The fundamental objective was to expound a reformed system of universal knowledge in the systematic manner in which it could be propagated universally. But the reformation of knowledge in the patient, incremental manner advocated by Bacon required resistance to premature systematization. The Baconian pansophists were therefore forced to choose between pursuing the best means of transmitting received knowledge and the best means of transforming it. Since there was no point in communicating knowledge which remained fundamentally flawed, the universal reform agenda collapsed amongst Hartlib’s successors into the more coherent and manageable task of reforming natural philosophy alone (section 8.iii).","PeriodicalId":108404,"journal":{"name":"The Reformation of Common Learning","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114097783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-24DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0001
H. Hotson
Since this book is a sequel to Commonplace Learning, it begins with a synopsis of the previous volume. Ramism before 1620 was most deeply rooted in the fragmented political and confessional geography of the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Its function was to provide small polities with the means to transmit the maximum amount of useful learning with a minimum of time, effort, and expense. The appeal of this pedagogy to magistrates, rulers, parents, and students generated a motive force capable of spreading Ramism horizontally from one gymnasium to another and then vertically through gymnasia illustria to full universities, even in the face of opposition by humanists and theologians. Student demand then forced the universities to adapt begin expounding traditional Aristotelian philosophical substance in quasi-Ramist pedagogical form. Once Bartholomäus Keckermann (c. 1572–1608) had emancipated philosophical instruction from the text of Aristotle in this way, bolder men like the young Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) began using Keckermann’s systematic method to assemble increasingly eclectic doctrinal mixtures. The stage was set to deploy similar pedagogical methods to ease the assimilation of the bold new philosophies of the era of Descartes into university instruction as well. But before that happened, however, the outbreak of the Thirty Years War destroyed the network of German Reformed educational institutions which had sustained this tradition and scattered its students and teachers in all directions. The Reformation of Common Learning narrates some of the consequences of that diaspora for the intellectual history of the mid-seventeenth century.
{"title":"Status Quo Ante Bellum","authors":"H. Hotson","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Since this book is a sequel to Commonplace Learning, it begins with a synopsis of the previous volume. Ramism before 1620 was most deeply rooted in the fragmented political and confessional geography of the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Its function was to provide small polities with the means to transmit the maximum amount of useful learning with a minimum of time, effort, and expense. The appeal of this pedagogy to magistrates, rulers, parents, and students generated a motive force capable of spreading Ramism horizontally from one gymnasium to another and then vertically through gymnasia illustria to full universities, even in the face of opposition by humanists and theologians. Student demand then forced the universities to adapt begin expounding traditional Aristotelian philosophical substance in quasi-Ramist pedagogical form. Once Bartholomäus Keckermann (c. 1572–1608) had emancipated philosophical instruction from the text of Aristotle in this way, bolder men like the young Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) began using Keckermann’s systematic method to assemble increasingly eclectic doctrinal mixtures. The stage was set to deploy similar pedagogical methods to ease the assimilation of the bold new philosophies of the era of Descartes into university instruction as well. But before that happened, however, the outbreak of the Thirty Years War destroyed the network of German Reformed educational institutions which had sustained this tradition and scattered its students and teachers in all directions. The Reformation of Common Learning narrates some of the consequences of that diaspora for the intellectual history of the mid-seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":108404,"journal":{"name":"The Reformation of Common Learning","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131462949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-24DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0005
H. Hotson
The rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into the young Dutch universities is often regarded as evidence of the unique open-mindedness of Dutch society and culture during the Golden Age. Absent from such accounts is the fact that a disproportionate share of the earliest and most avid ‘Dutch Cartestians’ were in fact first- or second-generation refugees, displaced from the heartland of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed Germany during the course of the Thirty Years War (section 5.i). Particularly instructive is a group of early defenders of Cartesianism—Tobias Andreae, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich—educated in the Reformed academy in Bremen under the little-known figure of Gerhard de Neufville (section 5.ii). To this group can be added the Bremen-born Johannes Coccejus, whose variety of covenant theology was combined with Cartesianism to generate a tradition characteristic of the early Dutch moderate Enlightenment (section 5.iii). Placing the advent of academic Cartesianism within the intellectual diaspora of the Thirty Years War therefore opens fresh perspective on the Dutch Golden Age of the mid-seventeenth century and the intellectual fertility of Holy Roman Empire during the previous period (section 5.iv).
{"title":"Renovation","authors":"H. Hotson","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into the young Dutch universities is often regarded as evidence of the unique open-mindedness of Dutch society and culture during the Golden Age. Absent from such accounts is the fact that a disproportionate share of the earliest and most avid ‘Dutch Cartestians’ were in fact first- or second-generation refugees, displaced from the heartland of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed Germany during the course of the Thirty Years War (section 5.i). Particularly instructive is a group of early defenders of Cartesianism—Tobias Andreae, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich—educated in the Reformed academy in Bremen under the little-known figure of Gerhard de Neufville (section 5.ii). To this group can be added the Bremen-born Johannes Coccejus, whose variety of covenant theology was combined with Cartesianism to generate a tradition characteristic of the early Dutch moderate Enlightenment (section 5.iii). Placing the advent of academic Cartesianism within the intellectual diaspora of the Thirty Years War therefore opens fresh perspective on the Dutch Golden Age of the mid-seventeenth century and the intellectual fertility of Holy Roman Empire during the previous period (section 5.iv).","PeriodicalId":108404,"journal":{"name":"The Reformation of Common Learning","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127864572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-24DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0012
H. Hotson
The first part of this conclusion (section 12.i) surveys the development of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed central Europe before 1630 (narrated in Commonplace Learning), the scattering of that tradition during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and its further development in relation to figures such as Descartes, Bacon, Comenius, and Leibniz (recounted in The Reformation of Common Learning). The second part (section 12.ii) reviews the argument of this pair of studies from a thematic perspective. Ramism is approached, not as a philosophical school, but as a pedagogical tradition, the most dynamic, innovative, disruptive, and influential to arise in the Protestant world between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Its trajectory, in both the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, parallels the graphs of new educational foundations and the growth of their student bodies and catchment areas. Its motive power is student demand, fuelled by the social, political, and confessional circumstances of the era and channelled most effectively through relatively modest institutions responsive to student needs. This explains why this tradition of pedagogical innovation emerged in such fragmented landscapes, why Ramist methods and institutions served as channels thorough which mercantile and artisanal impulses percolated into the academic world, and how they could generate the power to overthrow seemingly superior cultural forces, such as the prestigious humanist educational ideals of the era and entrenched confessional commitments. The book closes with the prospect of complementing traditional top-down intellectual history with a bottom-up approach which can contextualize leading works and thinkers within whole landscapes of digitally analysable data.
{"title":"Summary, Conclusions, and Prospects","authors":"H. Hotson","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"The first part of this conclusion (section 12.i) surveys the development of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed central Europe before 1630 (narrated in Commonplace Learning), the scattering of that tradition during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and its further development in relation to figures such as Descartes, Bacon, Comenius, and Leibniz (recounted in The Reformation of Common Learning). The second part (section 12.ii) reviews the argument of this pair of studies from a thematic perspective. Ramism is approached, not as a philosophical school, but as a pedagogical tradition, the most dynamic, innovative, disruptive, and influential to arise in the Protestant world between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Its trajectory, in both the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, parallels the graphs of new educational foundations and the growth of their student bodies and catchment areas. Its motive power is student demand, fuelled by the social, political, and confessional circumstances of the era and channelled most effectively through relatively modest institutions responsive to student needs. This explains why this tradition of pedagogical innovation emerged in such fragmented landscapes, why Ramist methods and institutions served as channels thorough which mercantile and artisanal impulses percolated into the academic world, and how they could generate the power to overthrow seemingly superior cultural forces, such as the prestigious humanist educational ideals of the era and entrenched confessional commitments. The book closes with the prospect of complementing traditional top-down intellectual history with a bottom-up approach which can contextualize leading works and thinkers within whole landscapes of digitally analysable data.","PeriodicalId":108404,"journal":{"name":"The Reformation of Common Learning","volume":"222 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114469902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-24DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0003
H. Hotson
Decades ago, Walter Ong intuited a powerful link between the advent of printing with moveable type, the subsequent spatialization of discourse most strikingly evident in Ramism, and the corpuscular, mechanistic physics of Descartes (section 3.i). More recently, Klaas van Berkel has identified the precise location of this link in Snellius’ student, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), who, working at the interface of artisanal knowledge and Ramist pedagogy, developed the basic principles of a physico-mathematical philosophy of nature which he passed on to Descartes in 1618–19 and to Gassendi and Mersenne a decade later (section 3.ii). Another figure of the same generation, Henricus Reneri (1593–1639), was inspired by a very similar set of interests and aspirations to become Descartes’ first devoted follower and perhaps closest friend (section 3.iii).
几十年前，沃尔特·翁(Walter Ong)直觉地发现，活字印刷术的出现、随后在拉米主义中最为明显的话语空间化，以及笛卡尔的微粒力学物理学之间存在着强有力的联系(第3.i节)。最近，Klaas van Berkel在Snellius的学生Isaac Beeckman(1588-1637)身上发现了这种联系的确切位置，Isaac Beeckman在手工知识和Ramist教学法的界面上工作，发展了自然的物理数学哲学的基本原则，并在1618-19年传递给了笛卡尔，并在十年后传递给了Gassendi和Mersenne(第3.ii节)。同一代的另一位人物Henricus Reneri(1593-1639)，受到非常相似的兴趣和愿望的启发，成为笛卡儿的第一个忠实追随者，也许也是最亲密的朋友(第3节iii)。
{"title":"Germination","authors":"H. Hotson","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199553389.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Decades ago, Walter Ong intuited a powerful link between the advent of printing with moveable type, the subsequent spatialization of discourse most strikingly evident in Ramism, and the corpuscular, mechanistic physics of Descartes (section 3.i). More recently, Klaas van Berkel has identified the precise location of this link in Snellius’ student, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), who, working at the interface of artisanal knowledge and Ramist pedagogy, developed the basic principles of a physico-mathematical philosophy of nature which he passed on to Descartes in 1618–19 and to Gassendi and Mersenne a decade later (section 3.ii). Another figure of the same generation, Henricus Reneri (1593–1639), was inspired by a very similar set of interests and aspirations to become Descartes’ first devoted follower and perhaps closest friend (section 3.iii).","PeriodicalId":108404,"journal":{"name":"The Reformation of Common Learning","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114304178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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