Junge entered the Faculty of Arts of the University of Rostock in May 1606. At Rostock Jungius studied with Johann Sleker, from whom he learned metaphysics in the tradition of Francisco Suarez and his school.
Gallery of Joachim Junge
University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Junge received the Doctor of Medicine at Padua on January 1, 1619.
Gallery of Joachim Junge
University of Giessen, Giessen, Hesse, Germany
In May 1608 Junge went to the new University of Giessen to continue his studies. He took the Master of Arts degree at Giessen on December 22, 1608.
Junge entered the Faculty of Arts of the University of Rostock in May 1606. At Rostock Jungius studied with Johann Sleker, from whom he learned metaphysics in the tradition of Francisco Suarez and his school.
Joachim Junge, also known as Joachim Jungius, was a German logician, mathematician, and philosopher of sciences. He was an important figure of 17th-century atomism and was an advocate of a "corpuscular chemistry" that assumed the conservation of mass. He also demonstrated that a catenary was not a parabola.
Background
Joachim Junge was born on October 22, 1587, in Lubeck, Germany. He was the son of Nicolaus Junge, a professor at the Gymnasium St Katharinen in Lübeck who died in 1589, and Brigitte Holdmann, who later married Martin Nortmann, another professor at St Katharinen.
Education
Junge attended the Gymnasium St Katharinen in Lübeck, where he commented on the Dialectic of Petrus Ramus, as well as writing on logic and composing poetry, then entered the Faculty of Arts of the University of Rostock in May 1606.
At Rostock Junge studied with Johann Sleker, from whom he learned metaphysics in the tradition of Francisco Suarez and his school. In general, however, he preferred to concentrate on mathematics and logic. In May 1608 Junge went to the new University of Giessen to continue his studies. He took the Master of Arts degree at Giessen on December 22, 1608.
He began to study medicine at the University of Rostock in August 1616 and received the Doctor of Medicine degree at Padua on January 1, 1619.
Junge became a professor of mathematics and logic at Giessen in 1608 and remained there until 1614. His inaugural dissertation was the famous oration on the didactic significance, advantage, and usefulness of mathematics for all disciplines, which he later repeated at Rostock and Hamburg and which revealed the idea that guided his lifework. He ardently pursued mathematical studies. He copied a book by F. Viete, although which one is not known, and in 1612 and 1613, while on a journey to Frankfurt, observed sunspots, the existence of which had been confirmed by Johann Fabricius and Christoph Scheiner.
At this time Junge was attracted to pedagogy. In 1612, he traveled to Frankfurt with Christoph Helvich of the University of Giessen to attend the coronation of the emperor Matthias; there he met Wolfgang Ratke, who was trying to revive the “Lehrkunst.” Junge resigned his post at Giessen in 1614 and devoted himself to educational reform in Augsburg and Erfurt, but by the time of his return to Lübeck on July 27, 1615, he had changed his mind in favor of the natural sciences.
The years between 1619 and 1629 were a peak in Junge’s scientific life. He deepened his knowledge in the natural sciences while practicing medicine at Lübeck (1619-1623) and at Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel (1625) and during his tenure as a professor of medicine at the University of Helmstedt. He improved his abilities in mathematics as a professor of mathematics at Rostock in 1624-1625 and again from 1626 until 1628. Junge utilized this practical experience in the intensive private research that he conducted at the same time. This is particularly apparent in his “Protonoeticae philosophiae sciagraphia” and in his “Heuretica.” Finally, he was appointed a professor of natural science and rector of the Akademisches Gymnasium at Hamburg, a post he held until his death.
Two tragic features characterized this last period of Junge’s life. His wife died in 1638, and during the 1630s, too, he became subject to the envy of his colleagues and even to attacks by the clergy, despite him being a very religious man. He was thereafter reluctant to publish his writings and left some 75,000 pages in manuscript at the time of his death, of which two-thirds were destroyed in a fire in 1691, while the remainder have been little studied.
Junge tried to apply his mathematical training in two ways. First, he used it to solve problems, as, for example, in proving that the catenary is not, as Galileo had assumed, a parabola. Many of his problems in arithmetic and geometry, including those set out in his Geometria numerosa and Mathesis specialis, have not been found. He was one of the first to use exponents to represent powers. His experiments and views on the laws of motion are also mathematical in nature, as was explicit in the Phoranomica. In this complete, but lost, Phoranomica Junge also wrote on such topics as “De impetu,” “De intensione motus” (on velocity), “De tempore,” and “De tendentia motuum.” Junge also made several astronomical observations and calculations.
Second, Junge used mathematics as a model on which to base a theory of science in general. He outlined this principle in the “Protonoeticae philosophiae sciagraphia.” In this paper and in his orations in praise of mathematics and his “Analysis heuretica,” Junge worked out a scientific method analogous to the mathematical mode of proof that he called “ecthesis.” These works were composed more than eight years before Descartes’s Discours appeared. In other writings Junge rejected such Scholastic devices as single syllogisms and consequences and advocated the “clear and distinct” methodological principle of Galen.
He further elaborated a theory of mathematical operations (“zetetica”) that continued in more detail the “general mathematics” of the school of Proclus, Conrad Dasypodius, and Johann Heinrich Alsted. Junge thought that this methodology was closely connected with the logical doctrine of proof that he presented in 1638 in the fourth book of his Logica Hamburgensis, in which he for the first time also treated such mathematical principles as “problems,” “regulas,” and “theorems”; abandoned distinctions in favor of exact nominal definitions; recommended a “geometric style” (“stylus protonoeticus”); and defined a systematic science (“scientia totalis”). His method of scientific inference was based upon “demonstrations” from principles (including definitions) and upon both complete and incomplete induction.
Junge’s taste for systematizing led him to morphological studies in botany and to a corpuscular theory of chemistry, among other things. All his arguments were based on observations that he put in writing as “protonoetical papers.” In botany, he built his system on what Andrea Cesalpino had defined as plant morphology.
Junge’s chemical system was elaborated before 1630 and was published in two Dispuiationes (1642) and in the Doxoscopiaephysicae minores (1662). It was based upon planned experiment and closely related to the medical tradition of the corpuscular hypothesis, as opposed to atomism. Junge explained the apparent homogeneity of a natural body, the mechanism of chemical reaction, and the conservation of matter and weight through the assumption of invisible particles of no fixed size or shape. This enabled him to elucidate the precipitation of copper by iron in solution as an exchange of individual particles at the metal and in the solution, as opposed to the “transubstanliation” suggested by Andreas Libavius, the mere extraction from solution proposed by Nicolas Guibert and Angelo Sala, and the simple disappearance of iron particles in the solution postulated by J. B. van Helmont.
Junge stressed that the parts of a body should be reducible to their original states with the same weights that they had originally had. In keeping with his analytical point of view, he defined an element a posteriori, that is as experimentally separable. He found that gold, silver, sulfur, mercury, saltpeter, common salt, soda, and some other substances had existed as discrete elements before separation. He distinguished the bodies arrived at after separation, that is, those “exactly simple bodies,” from the substantial parts, that is, “elements,” in the natural body. He chose to emphasize the former and stated that each consisted of like particles - although he did not specify how the particles of one such exactly simple body might be told from those of another.
Junge further recognized spontaneous reactions but referred them to attraction, and so he did not believe that any motion is inherent to the corpuscles. Like Galileo, he tried to objectify the properties of bodies and studied the transitions between their solid, liquid, and vapor phases. He was opposed to the Peripatetic notions of substantial forms and inseparable matter and fought strongly against the ideas of inherent qualities and a single principle of combustion.
Membership
Junge founded in about 1623 the Societas Ereunetica, a short-lived group dedicated to scientific research and perhaps modeled on the Accademia dei Lincei, with which Junge had become acquainted in Italy.
Societas Ereunetica
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Germany
Personality
Junge was primarily an explorer of nature, interested in the composition of matter, the reaction of bodies with each other and the techniques which would best allow insight into their working.
Quotes from others about the person
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: "While Jungius of Lübeck is a man little known even in Germany itself, he was clearly of such judiciousness and such capacity of mind that I know of no other mortal, including even Descartes himself, from whom we could better have expected a great restoration of the sciences, had Jungius been either known or assisted."
Connections
Junge married Catharina, the daughter of Valentin Havemann of Rostock, on February 10, 1624. She died on June 16, 1638.