Philosophie der frühen Neuzeit in den böhmischen Ländern (review)

Philosophy in the historical Kingdom of Bohemia has never received much attention in the Anglophone world. Yet in the early modern period, Bohemia and especially Prague were an extraordinarily fertile ground for philosophical thought. Stanislav Sousedík of Charles University in Prague is now the foremost expert on this region and period. His Philosophy in the Bohemian Lands between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment appeared in Czech in 1997 and is now available in a nearly identical German translation.

Within the Holy Roman Empire, the Bohemian Lands (i.e., Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia) formed a cultural unity that was also under independent rule until it came under the Habsburg crown in 1526. This study reveals the contribution of philosophy to the creation of this unity from the late Middle Ages until the end of Joseph II’s rule in 1790.

The book starts with the Thomism (Jean le Tourneur or Johannes Versor), the Scotism (Franciscus de Mayronis), and the Lullism (Hilarius of Leitmeritz) taught at the University of Prague after Jan Hus had imposed a strict ontological realism. Under independent Bohemian kings, political philosophy became relevant, and Renaissance Platonism was eventually received and flourished in coexistence with the inherited Aristotelianism. But none of the humanist philosophers in Prague, who were Protestants, achieved more than a regional importance, with the exception of Joannes Comenius in the philosophy of education, and possibly of Joannes Jessenius (Jesenský), a physician and politician who was influenced by contemporary Italian thought. His Zoroaster (1593) is a treatise on natural philosophy in the spirit of Neoplatonism with a strong hermetic tendency.

The seventeenth century was the heyday of philosophy in Bohemia. The Habsburgs imported the Jesuits to help re-Catholicize the country, and with them came Spanish neo-scholasticism. After the recovery of Catholic control in 1620, the Jesuits dominated the universities of Prague and Olmütz (Olomouc) and imposed the system of Suárez. The most prominent philosopher of this group was Rodrigo de Arriaga, whose Cursus philosophicus (1632) was studied throughout Europe. The book was innovative by emphasizing science and holding that philosophical propositions must be true both in the geocentric and the heliocentric systems of the universe. Arriaga embraced a nominalist ontology and rejected an immanent status of universals (universale in essendo). The strength of his work lies in his treatment of predication, multiplicity, similitude, possibility, necessity, and other categories of metaphysics, where he does show a high degree of individuality, and in his philosophy of nature, which he developed out of hylomorphism.

The flourishing of Bohemian Baroque philosophy is then explained largely as opposition to Arriaga’s system. There was a great variety of philosophical positions that vied for a place at the university, at the archiepiscopal seminary, or at the imperial court. Prague was a cosmopolitan city where the Hibernian Fathers, exiled Irish Franciscans teaching Scotism, coexisted with the Bohemian Lullist Kaspar Knittel and the Italian Capuchin Valerian Magni, who developed an anti-Aristotelian theory of consciousness that, according to Sousedík, resembles Descartes’s. The religious orders developed their own philosophies, more Thomistically inclined among the Benedictines and Dominicans, more Augustinian and skeptical among the Capuchins and Premonstratensians. But they all opposed the Jesuits.

Three philosophers receive particular attention because of their originality. Johannes Marcus Marci was a Bohemian physician who developed a philosophy of nature out of hylozoism combined with the doctrine of a world soul. Detailed morphological speculations about animals were meant to prove substantial forms. These teleological arguments evoke more Goethe than Aristotle. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, probably the best known philosopher discussed in the book, was a Cistercian who proved himself as a true polyhistor and published 262 works in a wide variety of fields. He became most influential with his own logic and theory of language, though in ethics he defended probabilism. Hieronymus Hirnhaim, a Premonstratensian abbot, is today nearly totally unknown. His book De typho generis humani (1676) presented one...