Johann Heinrich Alsted
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Johann Heinrich Alsted (March 1588 - November 9, 1638) was a German Protestant divine.
He was some time professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn, in Nassau, and afterwards at Weissenburg (present Alba Iulia) in Transylvania, where he remained till his death in 1638. He was a prolific writer, and his Encyclopaedia (1630), the most considerable of the earlier works of that class, was long held in high estimation.
In his The New England Mind, Perry Miller writes about the Encyclopaedia, "It was indeed nothing short of a aummary, in sequential and numbered paragraphs, of everything that the mind of European man had yet conceived or discovered. The works of over five hundred authors, from Aristotle to James I, were digested and methodized, including those of Aquinas, Scotus, and medieval theology, as also those of medieval science, such as De Natura Rerum." [1]
Alsted has been called 'one of the most important encyclopedists of all time'.[2]
[edit] Notes
- ^ The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard, 1982), pp. 102-103.
- ^ [1]. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p.632, in the context of Calvinist metaphysics, states In the works of authors like Clemens Timpler of Heidelberg and Steinfurt, Bartolomaeus Keckermannn of Heidelberg and Danzig, and Johann Heinrich Alsted of Herborn there appeared a new, unified vision of the encyclopaedia of the scientific disciplines in which ontology had the role of assigning to each of the particular sciences its proper domain.
[edit] Further reading
- Webster, Charles. (1970). "Alsted, Johann Heinrich". Dictionary of Scientific Biography 1: 125-127. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
