Papers by Petr Pavlas
Word as definition. A key principle of the Comenian project for universal language: its sources and contexts
Language & History, 2024
The aim of this article is to re-examine the intellectual history of a principle central to seven... more The aim of this article is to re-examine the intellectual history of a principle central to seventeenth-century universal language projects. We call this principle ‘word as definition’. It is the requirement that every word in the dictionary of a new language should already be, by its shape, a definition of what it denotes: the root of the word would express the proximate genus and the affixes the specific difference. In Comenius, we find it first formulated in the Via lucis and later elaborated in the Panglottia manuscript. Besides the medieval and early modern mystical traditions, Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and Marin Mersenne are key figures in the process of its emergence. In this respect, Comenius plays a role in the link between the ‘continental’ and the British approach to the problem of language reform.
Comenius-Jahrbuch 31, 2023
Johann Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský) war ein Bischof und Theologe der Brüder-Unität, des tsch... more Johann Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský) war ein Bischof und Theologe der Brüder-Unität, des tschechischen Zweigs der christlichen Reformation, aus dem in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts die erste tschechische Bibelübersetzung aus den biblischen Originalsprachen hervorging: die Kralitzer Bibel. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Comenius’ Angelus pacis („Friedensengel “, 1667) mit biblischen Zitaten, Anspielungen und Interpretationen durchsetzt ist. Die Bibel ist die mit Abstand am häufigsten zitierte Autorität für die Thesen und Appelle des Autors. Als das geoffenbarte Wort Gottes, das von allen christlichen Konfessionen anerkannt wird, ist es der Bezugspunkt, an dem die meisten Argumente für die sofortige Beendigung des Zweiten Englisch-Niederländischen Krieges und ganz allgemein dafür, warum Frieden besser ist als Krieg, festgemacht werden können. In diesem Beitrag zeige ich sieben wichtige kognitive Metaphern des Angelus pacis auf, die auf biblischem Material basieren.
Studia Comeniana et historica 105-106 (LI), 2021
Pintnerová, Iveta - Pavlas, Petr. In the Footsteps of Patočka to the Cusan Echos in the Early Mo... more Pintnerová, Iveta - Pavlas, Petr. In the Footsteps of Patočka to the Cusan Echos in the Early Modern Vernacular Encyclopaedism: Comenius’ Theatrum universitatis rerum in Context. The article analyses in detail selected ideas from Theatrum universitatis rerum, a Czech-language universal encyclopaedia, probably written in Fulnek in 1616–1618, shortly after Comenius’ studies in Herborn and Heidelberg, and at the beginning of Comenius’ pastoral and pedagogical activity. The work was not completed and only a fragment of it is available to us today. The goal of the article is to identify and analyse those ideas from Theatrum whose possible and probable source of inspiration is Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), or the Cusan tradition. So far, Jan Patočka has dealt with the topic of the influence of Cusan ideas on Comenius’ Theatrum in the most detail. Therefore, his insights are an Ariadne’s thread for further elaboration also here.
“Le bon homme Comenius”: the personal and intellectual links between Comenius and Leibniz
Intellectual History Review, 2023
In this article, I first reconsider the personal links between Comenius and Leibniz, searching fo... more In this article, I first reconsider the personal links between Comenius and Leibniz, searching for how Comenian texts and ideas may have reached Leibniz. For that reason, I outline a constellation of thinkers within Central European Protestantism, since a vast majority of the important intellectuals with some noteworthy link both to Comenius and Leibniz were based there. Second, I investigate more closely one particular intellectual link between Comenius and Leibniz, namely their common combinatorial standpoint, because the striking parallels, connections and similarities between Comenius’s and Leibniz’s ideas on combinatorics, universal language and relational metaphysics have been largely overlooked thus far.
Up to Five Books of God: The Metaphorical and Theological Background of Herborn Encyclopaedism
Reformation & Renaissance Review, 2022
Early modern encyclopaedism is generally known as a pedagogical
endeavour striving to achieve not... more Early modern encyclopaedism is generally known as a pedagogical
endeavour striving to achieve not only universal access to scientific
information and universal education, but also universal science and
knowledge. Its intellectual-historical genealogy and historicaltheological background, however, deserve much more scholarly
attention than they have received hitherto. This paper illuminates
the intellectual sources of Herborn encyclopaedism in terms of
some key cognitive metaphors from the field of Christian
theology. I not only show some traces of Bonaventuran and
Cusan philosophical theology in Herborn encyclopedism, but I
also argue that this encyclopaedism must be contextualised
according to theological loci, i.e. generation, incarnation of the
Word, and deification (generatio, incarnatio Verbi, theosis).
Journal of Early Modern Studies 9/1, 2020
The goal of this article is to detail the opposition to “Ramean tree” dichotomic divisions which ... more The goal of this article is to detail the opposition to “Ramean tree” dichotomic divisions which emerged in the age of swelling Antitrinitarianism, especially Socinianism. Scholars such as Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Jan Amos Komenský and Richard Baxter made a point of preferring the trichotomic to the dichotomic division of Petrus Ramus and the Ramist tradition. This paper tracks the origin of Komenský’s “universal triadism” as present in his book metaphorics and in his metaphysics. Komenský’s triadic book metaphorics (the notion of nature, human mind and Scripture as “the triple book of God”) has its source in late sixteenth-century Lutheran mysticism and theosophy, mediated perhaps by Heinrich Khunrath and, above all, by Johann Heinrich Alsted. Komenský’s metaphysics follows the same triadic pattern. What is more, Komenský illustrates both these domains by means of Ramist-like bracketed trees; regarding book metaphorics, clearly his sources are Khunrath and Alsted. Although inspirations from Lullus, Sabundus and Nicholas of Cusa are involved, the crucial role has to be ascribed to the influence of Lutheran mysticism and Alsted’s “Lullo-Ramism.”
The Search for a Final Language: Comenius’s Linguistic Eschatology
Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5/2, 2020
This paper seeks to analyse and clarify a linguistic-eschatological aspect of Comenius’s language... more This paper seeks to analyse and clarify a linguistic-eschatological aspect of Comenius’s language project. First, it investigates hypotheses concerning the origin of language in the works of key figures in the language planning movement: Bacon, Mersenne, Comenius, Dalgarno and Wilkins. Second, it inquiries into their theological justifications for language planning and into the problem of cessationism. Third, it examines the dignity and role of the existing languages according to Comenius and focuses on the notion and goal of the new, perfect, ultimate language as imagined by him. Fourth, it elucidates Comenius’s idea of the final language through the prism of his biblical exegesis and his understanding of sacred history.
Komeniáni v Karteziánském Zrcadle: Boj o definice některých metafyzických pojmů v polovině 17. století
Studia Neoaristotelica 16/4, 2019
The article picks up the threads of especially Martin Mulsow’s 1990s research and describes the d... more The article picks up the threads of especially Martin Mulsow’s 1990s research and describes the distinctiveness of the “relational metaphysics of resemblance” in the middle of the seventeenth century. The late Renaissance metaphysical outlines, carried out in the Comenius circle, are characteristic for their relationality, accent on universal resemblance, providentialism, pansensism, sensualism, triadism – and also for their effort to define metaphysical terms properly. While Comenians share the last – and only the last – feature with Cartesians, they differ in the other features. Therefore, Cartesians and Comenians cannot come to terms in the issue of the proper definitions either. Quite on the contrary, they oppose each other on this issue. By means of Johann Clauberg’s criticism of Georg Ritschel and René Descartes’s only supposedly “mysterious” and “solipsist” second meditation, the article turns a Cartesian mirror to the Comenian metaphysical project. In its light, the definitions of Georg Ritschel, Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and Jan Amos Comenius turn out to be unacceptable for Cartesians (and also for Thomists and, in part, for Baconians). Despite their superficially Aristotelian-scholastic appearance, their content is notably Paracelsian-Campanellian (with a Timplerian foundation). Even though Comenian definitions of metaphysical terms had been refused and defeated by Cartesians, they experienced a second lifespan in their robust influence on Leibniz and Newton.
Acta Comeniana 31, 2017
Apart from cabbalist and Lullist “philosophical combinatorics”, there is a tradition of mathemati... more Apart from cabbalist and Lullist “philosophical combinatorics”, there is a tradition of mathematical combinatorics connected with transposing letters (phones) from Cardano on. While Girolamo Cardano (1539) uses the combinations of letters as a more or less random illustration of the method of combinatorial calculations, Christopher Clavius (1570) more appropriately applies permutation and Daniel Schwenter (1636) thinks about putting all the gained “words” down. Paul Guldin (1641), moreover, enumerates the media and space needed for such an enterprise. The problem is, step by step, taken more and more seriously. Marin Mersenne and Jan Amos Comenius take this problem as a serious issue too. This study shows the influence of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636) on Jan Amos Comenius’s combinatorial approach to language planning. The influence could be either direct or indirect (perhaps via a hypothetical translation or abstract by Theodore Haak). However, there is no doubt that Comenius was acquainted with Mersenne’s project in detail. Comenius is the first thinker whose combinatorial calculations are a part of a treatise focused purely on general linguistic (Novissima linguarum methodus, 1648). Kircher’s Polygraphia nova et universalis appears in 1663, Leibniz’s Dissertatio de arte combinatoria in 1666, van Helmont’s Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio in 1667.
Acta Comeniana 30, 2016
The study deals with Jan Patočka’s unfinished text “Transcendentalia and Categories” which is app... more The study deals with Jan Patočka’s unfinished text “Transcendentalia and Categories” which is appended in English translation as a supplement. First, the study confirms Patočka’s thesis on the origin of Comenius’s triadism in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa and, at the same time, on the original features of Comenius’s conception, namely his systematic, deductive order of triads. Secondly, it investigates who mediated Cusan ideas to Comenius. The most important of these mediators was Pinder; among the others can be counted Weigel, Arndt, Alsted and possibly Paracelsus too. Patočka even assumes that Comenius actually read some works of Cusa (e. g. De ludo globi) himself. Last but not least, the study extends the validity of Patočka’s thesis to the new finding regarding Comenius’s metaphor of “God’s three books”.
Studia Comeniana et Historica, 2017
Jitse van der Meer and Richard Oosterhoff suggest that the unsuccessful Protestant attempt to mar... more Jitse van der Meer and Richard Oosterhoff suggest that the unsuccessful Protestant attempt to mark out the boundaries of allegorical biblical exegesis and to fix the meaning of scriptural passages caused the awareness of the imperfection of the verbal language. Therefore, early modern philosophers “turned to nature” and strived to find the perfect language in mathematics and logic.
This hypothesis needs to be revised: already the entire Middle Ages had been aware of the corruptedness of the verbal language. The decisive impulse for the rise of the perfect language movement seems to be rather the doctrinal plurality and the confessional diversity following the Reformation, because of which there arose the need of argumentation by means of natural theology for the sake of persuasion of the heterodox party or finding of a doctrinal consent. To avoid logomachy, some early modern philosophers tried to develop the perfect and universal language. One of them was Jan Amos Comenius.
The aim of the paper is to outline Comenius’s design of the real language (lingua realis) that represents one chapter from the early modern language planning. It tries to show how Comenius’s project – with its “logical purism”, “word as definition” program, combinatorial ambitions and the effort not to restore, but to create the perfect language – belongs to the early modern mathematizing thought. The possible mutual influence among the projects of Jan Amos Comenius, John Pell, Cheney Culpeper and Francis Lodwick is discussed. The paper is intended as a complement of Rhodri Lewis’s discoveries from the perspective of Comenius studies.
According to Peter Harrison's book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1998... more According to Peter Harrison's book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1998) modern science came into existence as a result of the emphasis of Protestants on the literal sense of the Scripture, their refusal of the earlier symbolic or allegorical interpretation, and their efforts at fixing the meaning of the biblical text in which each passage was to be ascribed a single and unique meaning. This article tries to summarize the most significant critiques of Harrison's hypothesis (by Kenneth Howell, Jiste van der Meer and Richard Oosterhoff) and to acknowledge their legitimacy. However, the alternative explanation of the emergence of modern science as a result of disputes over the biblical interpretation and the subsequent discovery of the ambiguous character of the ordinary verbal language is not fully satisfactory either.
In his rhetoric, Augustine’s metaphor of the “book of nature” works towards a full appreciation o... more In his rhetoric, Augustine’s metaphor of the “book of nature” works towards a full appreciation of the created world and the fight against gnosis. In Patrizi’s and Comenius’ use of this imagery, a similar tendency appears with respect to the human heart and intellect: Patrizi prefers the “book of the soul” to other human books, while Comenius even wishes to make its importance equal to both the Bible and Nature. This shift seems to be significant in the context of the Renaissance and the Early Modern Age, and culminates in Kant’s “Copernican turn”. The goal of this paper is to outline the history of the trope and to compare Patrizi’s and Comenius’ understanding of it.
Přírodní filosofie Tommasa Campanelly
Studia Comeniana et Historica, vol. 43 (2013), no. 89-90
The article compares two conceptions of perfect language originated in the 17th century. Whereas
... more The article compares two conceptions of perfect language originated in the 17th century. Whereas
for Johannes Amos Comenius the perfect language has to be desideratum of philosophical
research, for Francis Mercury van Helmont, on the contrary, the perfect language is a really existing
language, namely Hebrew. It is shown that both conceptions differ in their interpretation of
the concept „perfection“. Comenius connects perfection with universality, while van Helmont with
originality.
Book Reviews by Petr Pavlas
Acta Comeniana 35 (LIX), 2021
Like a tripod, this review article is “three-legged”, having three partial objectives. First, it ... more Like a tripod, this review article is “three-legged”, having three partial objectives. First, it provides a concise companion to the book under review. Second, it presents a critical reflection upon those elements of Hotson’s story which the reviewer finds particularly thought-provoking or controversial. Third, at the very end (Conclusion: Towards a History of Hope), the reviewer dares to add somewhat more personal ruminations and speculative contemplations regarding a historiography of and for the future.
Filosofický časopis 68/2, 2020
A book review of Johannis Amos Comenii Opera Omnia 26/1. Epistulae. Pars I: 1628-1638.
Studia Comeniana et historica, 2018
A book review of the new, Latin-Czech edition of Comenius's metaphysical writings.
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Papers by Petr Pavlas
endeavour striving to achieve not only universal access to scientific
information and universal education, but also universal science and
knowledge. Its intellectual-historical genealogy and historicaltheological background, however, deserve much more scholarly
attention than they have received hitherto. This paper illuminates
the intellectual sources of Herborn encyclopaedism in terms of
some key cognitive metaphors from the field of Christian
theology. I not only show some traces of Bonaventuran and
Cusan philosophical theology in Herborn encyclopedism, but I
also argue that this encyclopaedism must be contextualised
according to theological loci, i.e. generation, incarnation of the
Word, and deification (generatio, incarnatio Verbi, theosis).
This hypothesis needs to be revised: already the entire Middle Ages had been aware of the corruptedness of the verbal language. The decisive impulse for the rise of the perfect language movement seems to be rather the doctrinal plurality and the confessional diversity following the Reformation, because of which there arose the need of argumentation by means of natural theology for the sake of persuasion of the heterodox party or finding of a doctrinal consent. To avoid logomachy, some early modern philosophers tried to develop the perfect and universal language. One of them was Jan Amos Comenius.
The aim of the paper is to outline Comenius’s design of the real language (lingua realis) that represents one chapter from the early modern language planning. It tries to show how Comenius’s project – with its “logical purism”, “word as definition” program, combinatorial ambitions and the effort not to restore, but to create the perfect language – belongs to the early modern mathematizing thought. The possible mutual influence among the projects of Jan Amos Comenius, John Pell, Cheney Culpeper and Francis Lodwick is discussed. The paper is intended as a complement of Rhodri Lewis’s discoveries from the perspective of Comenius studies.
for Johannes Amos Comenius the perfect language has to be desideratum of philosophical
research, for Francis Mercury van Helmont, on the contrary, the perfect language is a really existing
language, namely Hebrew. It is shown that both conceptions differ in their interpretation of
the concept „perfection“. Comenius connects perfection with universality, while van Helmont with
originality.
Book Reviews by Petr Pavlas