Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism

Michał CHOPTIANY
Anti-Ramist Polemics: Jan Brozek

The aim of this paper is to analyse a treatise, Apologia pro Aristotele et Euclide contra Petrum Ramum (Dantisci, 1638), written by Johannes Broscius. Broscius, born in 1585, was an eminent Polish mathematician, astronomer and theologian, one of the first promoters of the Copernican theory. He studied at the Academy of Kraków and at the University of Padua; until his death in 1652 he was a lecturer in Kraków. He was author of several mathematical treatises (Arithmetica integrorum [Cracoviae, 1620]; Apologia . . ., and two small treatises on perfect numbers), and a few literary dialogues written against the Jesuits (Gratis, 1652). In a vast majority of the resources in the history of mathematics, the treatise of 1638 is mentioned as a text in which Broscius formulated his original theory of stellated polygons. What is surprising, however, is that hardly anyone mentions this text is not only an attempt to defend Euclidean mathematics, but also a dissertation written against Peter Ramus.

In my paper, I would like to emphasise the last part of the title of Broscius’s work and thus focus on the anti-Ramist aspect of his writing. I would like to present here specific examples of Ramus’s theses which Broscius criticised, and analyse the structure of Broscius’s arguments and study their relation to Ramus’s claims. My aim, therefore, is to present a dialogue of these two early modern intellectuals and mathematicians which stretched out more than one hundred years. Such an endeavour is possible thanks to the fact that in the Jagiellonian Library collection of early printings a copy of Ramus’s Arithmeticae libri tres of 1555 was preserved. This volume includes marginal notes made by Broscius. Thanks to these marginalia we can reconstruct Broscius’s workshop and relate them to his own book.

Broscius, therefore, is not only an eminent mathematician or one of the first Copernicans, but he and his work can serve also as a sort of pretext to study the sixteenth-century reception of Ramus at the Academy of Krakow, and to try to find initial answers for the questions about the shape of Polish Ramism, Anti-Ramism and Crypto-Ramism in the intellectual milieu of the Academy of Kraków.