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

Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism

Márton SZENTPÉTERI
‘Cogito’ or ‘Cyclognomonica’: Combinatorial Encyclopaedia and Cartesian Meditation

My proposed Cracow lecture intends to interpret a manuscript copy of a hitherto unknown Transylvanian work written by Johann Heinrich Alsted. The Hortulus artis inventivae suis areolis distinctus is a brief commonplace student manuduction of the art of invention conceived in a combinatorial fashion typical of the late Alsted. What makes it truly fascinating is that its seventeenth-century copyist collated it with a commonplace abstract of the first three mediations from René Descartes’s seminal Meditationes de prima philosophia. Having analysed different aspects of this seemingly unusual combination, I will point to an eclectic attitude that could easily combine rather different philosophical discourses due to its post-Ramist text-producing technology.