Otto Heurnius

Otto Heurnius

Otto Heurnius (1577–1652)
Born 8 September 1577
Utrecht
Died 14 July 1652 (1652-07-15) (aged 74)
Leiden, Dutch Republic
Doctoral advisor J. Heurnius
Pierre Du Moulin
Doctoral students Henricus Regius
Johannes Walaeus
Other notable students Franciscus Sylvius

Otto Heurnius (Otto van Heurn) (8 September 1577 – 14 July 1652) was a Dutch physician, theologian and philosopher.

Life

He succeeded his father Johannes Heurnius as professor of medicine at the University of Leiden; and took over anatomy teaching from Pieter Pauw from 1617. Alongside his practical anatomy teaching, he had the care of a very various collection of zoological and botanical specimens.[1] The aims of the collection included reconstruction of the life of the Israelites in Egypt, as in the Book of Exodus.[2]

He was also a historian of philosophy, stressing the period before the philosophers of the Ancient Greeks (“barbarian philosophy”).[3] He based his ideas on the Corpus Hermeticum.[4]

References

  1. Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Sea-changes: studies in three centuries of Anglo-Dutch cultural transmission (1996), pp. 9–10.
  2. Klaas van Berkel and Arie Johan Vanderjagt, The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (2006), p. 51.
  3. Francesco Bottin, Models of the History of Philosophy: From its origins in the Renaissance to the "historia philosophica" (1993), pp. 106–7
  4. Wiep van Bunge et al. (editors), The Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Philosophers (2003), Thoemmes Press (two volumes), article Heurnius, Otto, p. 430–2.

External links

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