Continental Aristotelians in the British Isles
During the first half of the seventeenth century the syncretic and systematic works of the German logicians such as Bartholomäus Keckermann, Christoph Scheibler and Johann Stier were very successful in the British Isles. The first syncretic author to have
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Continental Aristotelians in the British Isles
7.1
German Aristotelianism
During the first half of the seventeenth century the syncretic and systematic works of the German logicians such as Bartholomäus Keckermann, Christoph Scheibler and Johann Stier were very successful in the British Isles. The first syncretic author to have some popularity in British universities was Keckermann, whose Gymnasium logicum is an abridgement of his Systema logicae. Keckermann’s work shows no particular innovation in the field of logic, but is rather a compromise between Ramism and Zabarellism in the matter of systematization of knowledge.1 It is a striking example of how logic was used at the time to solve theological controversies, to which the textbooks constantly refer.2 Nonetheless, as I have shown in the previous chapters, Keckermann’s works were very popular and well-studied in the university courses. In logic, his real success was not so much the Gymnasium logicum as the Praecognitorum logicorum tractatus tres (1599), and the Systema logicae (1600), later included in the Systema systematum.3 This is particularly striking because these textbooks lacked English editions and they seem to have exerted more influence than the Gymnasium logicum: as we shall see, these works were the source of inspiration for many Aristotelian seventeenth-century logical textbooks such as those of Airay and Coke.
1 Probably more correctly Mack argues that ‘in logic Keckermann is one of the northern European Protestants who has turned away from Ramus towards a full reinstatement of Aristotle’, cf. Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620, 192. 2 Cf. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method, 213–220; Ulrich G. Leinsle, Das Ding und die Methode. Methodische Konstitution und Gegenstand der frühen protestantischen Metaphysik (Augsburg, 1985), 275–276; Joseph S. Freedman, ‘The Career and Writings of Barholomew Keckermann’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 141 (1997), 305–364. For general overview on German Eclectic Aristotelianism cf. Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (Oxford, 2007). 3 Cf. Bartholomäus Keckermann, Praecognitorum logicorum tractatus tres (Hanau, 1599); Bartholomäus Keckermann, Systema logicae (Hanau, 1600); Bartholomäus Keckermann, Systema Systematum (Hanau, 1613).
M. Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4951-1_7, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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7 Continental Aristotelians in the British Isles
It is no wonder that Keckermann’s Praecognita and Systema were quite popular in the British Isles,4 for, they perfectly cover the topics of the ‘systema logicum’, which was the first part of teaching of the courses of logic, for instance in Cambridge. Nor is it surprising that these two works were not directly adopted by lecturers in their courses and that they were often summarized in other logical companions; in fact, Keckermann’s writ
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