Ramism was the most innovative and disruptive educational reform movement to sweep through the international Protestant world in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the 1620s, the Thirty Years' War destroyed the network of central European academies and universities which had generated most of this innovation. Students and teachers, fleeing the conflict in all directions, transplanted that tradition into many different geographical and cultural contexts in which it bore are wide variety of interrelated fruit. Within the Dutch Republic, post-Ramist method played a crucial role in the rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into a network of thriving young academies and universities. From England to east-central Europe, the tradition was no less important in accelerating the reception of Baconianism. In the easternmost outpost of the Reformed world in Transylvania, the displaced tradition generated a final flourishing of philosophical innovation which exercised a formative influence on the young Leibniz. The failure of all of these efforts to assemble the fruits of this tradition into an encyclopaedic synthesis marks a major watershed in Western intellectual history. The Reformation of Common Learning brings together all of these aspects of the tradition in a manner which roots them in deeper historical developments and relates a series of far-flung and poorly understood developments together in new ways.
Author(s): Howard Hotson
Series: Oxford-Warburg Studies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 500
Dedication
Preface
Contents
List of Figures and Table
Abbreviations
1. Status Quo Ante Bellum: Reformed Central Europe as Protestant Europe’s Pedagogical Laboratory, 1543–1630
THE THIRTY YEARS WAR AND THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE: POST-RAMIST METHOD AND EARLY CARTESIANISM, 1620–1670
2. Prologue: Philosophy during Leiden’s First Golden Age, 1575–1618
3. Germination: Ramism, Artisanal Learning, and the Mechanical Philosophy, 1618–1639
4. Transplantation: A Transfer of Pedagogical Leadership, 1618–1660
5. Renovation: German Reformed Roots of Dutch Cartesianism, 1640–1670
THE REFORMED DIASPORA AND THE HARTLIB CIRCLE: POST-RAMIST METHOD AND MID-CENTURY BACONIANISM, 1630–1670
6. Dissemination: The Reformed Diaspora and the Hartlib Circle
7. Expansion and Adaptation: The Post-Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia
8. Divergence: Post-Ramist Pedagogy and Baconian Natural Philosophy
POST-RAMIST ENCYCLOPAEDISM IN POST-WAR EUROPE: LEIBNIZ AND THE END OF AN ERA, 1630–1716
9. Reception: The Fortuna of the Encyclopaedia
10. Emendation: The Pursuit of a New Encyclopaedia, 1630–1716
11. Reconfiguration: The Encyclopaedia Turned Inside Out
12. Summary, Conclusions, and Prospects
Select Bibliography
Index
