Johann Heinrich Alsted
Johann Alsted was educated at Herborn Academy in 1602 in the state of Hesse, studying under Johannes Piscator.
Johann Heinrich Alsted
Johann Heinrich Alsted, Henrici Alstedii Scientiarum omnium encyclopaediae.
Johann Heinrich Alsted, Logicae systema harmonicum.
Johann Alsted was educated at Herborn Academy in 1602 in the state of Hesse, studying under Johannes Piscator.
Jan Amos Komensky, Moravian pedagogue, philosopher, theologian.
( )
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1313563463/?tag=2022091-20
( )
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3772809545/?tag=2022091-20
( )
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1165904748/?tag=2022091-20
minister philosopher divine scholars
Johann Heinrich Alsted was born in 1588 in Ballersbach, Germany. Alsted was the second son of Jacob Alsted (died 1622), a Reformed Church minister, and Rebecca Pincier, the daughter of a Reformed Church minister and sister of Johannes Pincier, humanist scholar and professor of medicine and philosophy at the Herbom Academy.
Johann Alsted was educated at Herborn Academy in 1602 in the state of Hesse, studying under Johannes Piscator. This academy, founded in 1584, had achieved considerable prominence as a center of Calvinist and Ramist influence. From 1606 he was at the University of Marburg, taught by Rudolf Goclenius, Gregorius Schönfeld and Raphaël Egli. The following year he went to Basel, where his teachers were Leonhardt Zubler for mathematics, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf for theology, and Johann Buxtorf.
In 1608 Alsted returned to Herborn and was appointed teacher and examiner at the high school of the academy. Two years later he became professor of philosophy, and in 1619 rector and professor of theology. He made brief visits to other parts of Europe, attending the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618.
The Thirty Years’ War upset the continuity of Alsted’s work, and he reluctantly decided to leave Herborn in 1629, to become the first rector of the new high school at Stuhlweissenburg, which had been established by the Protestant prince Gabriel Bethlen von Siebenbürgen.
Alsted’s major monographs—compendia or harmonia of logic, physics, the Scriptures, and education—display a strikingly uniform organization, at the cost of oversimplification. This was an inherent danger of the Ramist approach. The Systemaphysicae harmonicae (1612) is typical. It analyzes the principles of “physics” derived according to four conflicting systems: physicum Mosaicum; rahhinica et cahhalis lica peripateticam, and chemicam. These systems are based, respectively, on the Old Testament, Jewish mystical writings, Aristotle, and Paracelsus. The principles of each system are discussed in a clear logical sequence that draws upon a wide range of sources, from the humanist editors of the cabala to the late sixteenth-century neo-scholastic commentators Magirus and Scaliger, and the Paracelsian or mystical authors John Dee and Oswald Croll. Throughout, Alsted gives his own judgments on the physical principles, favoring a “Christianized” Peripatetic philosophy, the description of which occupies more than half the book.
The Methodus admirandorum contains information about improved techniques of surveying and physical astronomy, and discusses the merits of the Copernican hypothesis. Copernicus is admired, but his system is deemed unacceptable, for it is refuted by the Scriptures and common sense.
Alsted died in Alba Iulia in 1638.
Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of philosophy and theology at the Calvinist academy of Herborn, was a man of many parts. A deputy to the famous Synod of Dort and greatest encyclopaedist of his age, he was also a pioneer of Calvinist millenarianism and a devoted student of astrology, alchemy, Lullism, and the works of Giordano Bruno. From the mainstream Reformed tradition, Alsted and his circle inherited the zeal for further reformation of church, state, and society; but with this they blended hermetic dreams of a general reformation and the restoration of primordial perfection to the fallen human nature through Lullist and alchemical panaceas. However paradoxical from a strictly Calvinist standpoint, this loose synthesis helped prepare the programme of Alsted's greatest student, Johann Amos Comenius, and the following generation of central European universal reformers. Alsted's achievements brings up perspectives on the reforming movements of the 17th century.
In his religious affiliation Johann Alsted was a Calvinist. He was to found a Calvinist Academy: the context was that the Transylvanian royal family had just returned from Unitarianism to Calvinism.
The majority of Alsted’s writings were on theology, and in them he displayed the same logical and encyclopedic approach found in the philosophical writings. Throughout the areas of Calvinist influence, from Transylvania to New England, Alsted’s systematic treatises on educational theory, theology, and philosophy exerted great influence in the universities during most of the seventeenth century. His writings covered the whole spectrum of natural philosophy: commentaries on the cabala, the Ars magna of Lull, mnemonics, traditional and Ramist logic, physics, mathematics, and astronomy.
Alsted’s ultimate fame rests upon his conception of the encyclopedia as a universal system of knowledge. He believed in the fundamental unity of divine and secular knowledge, the nature of which unity could be displayed by the use of logica-mnemonica, the art of directing the mind and perfecting the memory. Also prominent was his logical analysis of the nature and divisions of the parts of knowledge, or technologia, which provided the basis for the organization of his encyclopedia.
These systematic writings had an immediate but ephemeral appeal in institutions of higher education, his Encyclopaedia being to such students as Cotton Mather the “North-West Passage to all the sciences.” More important, they influenced the educational theories of Comenius, as well as his pansophia, and the encyclopedic philosophies of Leibniz and Morhof.
Alsted married Anna Katherine Rab (1593-1648), daughter of the Herborn printer Christoph Rab (Corvinus), who was to print the majority of Alsted’s works. They had four children.
She was a daughter of the Reformed Church minister.
He was among the Alsted`d students.
Alsted attracted students from numerous German and Slavic states; the most famous was Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), who taught for a short time at Herborn before embarking upon his pansophic missions.
