Paracelsus The Man And His Reputation His Ideas And Their Transformation

Despite his fame Paracelsus remains an illusive character. As this volume points out it is somewhat of a paradox that the fascination with Paracelsus and his ideas has remained so widespread when it is born in mind that it is far from clear what exactly he contributed to medicine and natural philosophy. But perhaps it is exactly this enigma which through the ages has made Paracelsus so attractive to such a variety of people who all want to claim him as an advocate for their particular ideas. The first section of this book deals with the historiography surrounding Paracelsus and Paracelsianism and points to the need of reclaiming the man and his ideas in their proper historical context. A further two sections are concerned with the different religious, social and political implications of Paracelsianism and its medical and natural philosophical significance respectively.

Nietzsche was famously an atheist, despite coming from a strongly Protestant family. This heritage influenced much of his thought, but was it in fact the very thing that led him to his atheism? This work provides a radical re-assessment of Protestantism by documenting and extrapolating Nietzsche’s view that Christianity dies from the head down. That is, through Protestantism’s inherent anarchy. In this book, Nietzsche is put into conversation with the initiatives of several powerful thinking writers; Luther, Boehme, Leibniz, and Lessing. Using Nietzsche as a critical guide to the evolution of Protestant thinking, each is shown to violate, warp, or ignore gospel injunctions, and otherwise pose hazards to the primacy of Christian ethics. Demonstrating that a responsible understanding of Protestantism as a historical movement needs to engage with its inherent flaws, this is a text that will engage scholars of philosophy, theology, and religious studies alike.

Paracelsus has been called the father of modern chemistry and is legendary for his treatment of syphilis. This work argues that Paracelsus developed an understanding of the body as composed of two distinct sexes, revolutionizing early modern conceptions of the female body as an inversion of or flawed approximation of the male body.

The great Paracelsian scholar Walter Pagel and the pioneer medical historian Kurt Polycarp Sprengel identified Petrus Severinus' Idea Medicinæ (1571) as an influential vehicle for the elaboration and diffusion of Paracelsian ideas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a process that has recently come under renewed scrutiny. Severinus' conception that diseases grow from living, seed-like entities proved to be an especially important idea, which was recognized by prominent scientific and medical authors from Oswald Croll and Daniel Sennert to Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle. But they also formed a useful theoretical model for reconciling ideas about physical causation with certain Christian Platonist concerns in Protestant theology. A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine is the first book-length monograph to treat Severinus, a Danish royal physician and contemporary of the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, and to present his ideas in their historical context as well as considering their ramifications for medical and religious theory in the decades prior to the Thirty Years' War. This book will prove to be a useful tool in the reexamination of the process by which Paracelsian ideas were spread and assimilated and will appeal to all those interested the intellectual background for the work of Tycho Brahe and his students and the role of Paracelsian and Hermetic metaphysical ideas in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

History of science credits the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) for his contributions to the development of chemistry and medicine. Yet, as this book makes clear, focussing on Van Helmont's impact on modern science does not do justice to the complexity of his thought or to his influence on successive generations of intellectuals like Robert Boyle or Gottfried Leibniz. Revealing Van Helmont as an original thinker who sought to produce a post-Scholastic synthesis of religion and natural philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan reconstructs his ambitious quest for universal knowledge as it emerges from the text of the Ortus medicinae (1648). Published after Van Helmont's death by his son, the work can best be understood as a compilation of finished and unfinished treatises, the historical product of a life unsettled by religious persecution and personal misfortune. The present book provides a coherent account of Van Helmont's philosophy by analysing its main tenets. Divided into two parts, the study opens with a background to Van Helmont's concept of an alchemical Christian philosophy, demonstrating that his outlook was deeply grounded in the tradition of medical alchemy as reformed by Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493-1541). It then reconstitutes Van Helmont's biography, while giving a historical dimension to his intellectual output. The second part reconstructs Van Helmont's Christian philosophy, investigating his views on God, nature and man, as well as his applied philosophy. Hedesan also provides an account of the development of Van Helmont's thought throughout his life. The conclusion sums up Van Helmont's intellectual achievement and highlights avenues of future research.

With its innovative studies and its extensive catalogue of texts erroneously attributed to Paracelsus (1493/4-1541), this volume explores largely overlooked aspects of the Paracelsian movement in Renaissance and early modern medicine, science, natural philosophy, theology and religion.

In the sixteenth century a new type of practitioner emerges in Europe: the aristocrat who not only supports creative activities, but is personally involved in the projects he finances. The courts of noblemen and other wealthy individuals are transformed into new sites of knowledge production where medicinal waters are distilled, exotic plants cultivated, and alchemical experiments pursued. This new fascination with nature, and the wish to explore and exploit its explicit and hidden mechanisms, was an intellectual trend that spread all over Europe, reaching even the easternmost parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Hungarian Count Boldizsár Batthyány (c.1542–1590), a powerful aristocrat and formidable warrior, was also a passionate devotee of natural philosophy. His Western Hungarian court was the focal point of an intellectual network which comprised scholars—such as the renowned botanist Carolus Clusius—physicians, book dealers, and fellow aristocrats from Central Europe and used his connections to exchange objects and information. Batthyány’s biography, his extensive correspondence and up-to-date book collection on natural philosophy—especially alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and botany—reveals that wealth, mobility and intellectual curiosity allowed him to share the enthusiasms of his Western European counterparts, and make the Muses speak even among arms.

One of the most significant events in the history of Western civilization was the cosmological revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Among the most salient factors in this change, described by Alexandre Koyré as the ‘destruction of the cosmos’ inherited from ancient Greece, were Copernican heliocentrism and the substitution of a homogeneous universe for the hierarchical cosmos of the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Starting with a new approach to the issue of the presence of Islamic astronomical devices in Copernicus’ work and a thorough reappraisal of the cosmological views of Paracelsus, the book deals mainly with the abolition of cosmological dualism and the ways in which it affected the decline of astrology over the 17th century. Other related topics include planetary order and theories of world harmony, the cause of planetary motion in the Tychonic world system or the discussion on comets in Germany through the first presentation of a manuscript treatise by Michael Maestlin on the great comet of 1618.