The Hermeneutical Rehabilitation of Supposition Theory in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Logic

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 464-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Meier-Oeser

Abstract The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’ (hermeneutica generalis), accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about.


1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Cohen
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edgington

By an analysis of extensive and detailed annotations in copies of Thomas Johnson's Mercurius botanicus (1634) and Mercurii botanici, pars altera (1641) held in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the probable author is identified as William Bincks, an apprentice apothecary of Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. Through Elias Ashmole, a friend of Bincks' master Thomas Agar, a link is established with the probable original owner, John Watlington of Reading, botanist and apothecary, and colleague of Thomas Johnson. The route by which the book ended up in the hands of Thomas Wilson, a journeyman copyist of Leeds, is suggested. Plants growing near Kingston-upon-Thames in the late seventeenth century, recorded in manuscript, are noted, many being first records for the county of Surrey.


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