# Rudolph Goclenius

Rudolph Goclenius the Elder (Latin: Rudolphus Goclenius; born Rudolf Gockel or Göckel; 1 March 1547 – 8 June 1628) was a German scholastic philosopher. He is sometimes credited with coining the term psychology in 1590, though the term had been used by Pier Nicola Castellani and Gerhard Synellius 65 years earlier.

## Life

He was born in Korbach, Waldeck (now in Waldeck-Frankenberg, Hesse).
Goclenius studied at the University of Erfurt, the University of Marburg and the University of Wittenberg, earning his M.A. in 1571. Subsequently, he directed gymnasiums in his hometown Korbach (1573) and in Kassel (Michaelmas 1575). In 1581, Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel, a renowned astronomer, denied Goclenius's request to return to Korbach but allowed him to become a professor at the Philipps University of Marburg. There, he held chairs in physics, logic, mathematics, and ethics. Goclenius also served as a counselor to Wilhelm and his son Moritz, the latter of whom sent him to the Synod of Dort in 1618. In 1627, Moritz decided to allow Goclenius to retire peacefully due to his age.
While Goclenius is known for popularizing the term psychology, his most significant contribution lies in the field of ontology. Following Aristotle's work, he gave this philosophical discipline its name and continued in Aristotle's tradition. Ontology is thought to have been further developed in the 17th century by Goclenius.
Johann Balthasar Schupp satirically recounted that Goclenius claimed his work Analecta (published 1598 in Lich) was the best book he had ever written.
Jeremias Nicolai, a student at Korbach Stadtschule from Autumn 1574 onwards, brother of Philipp Nicolai, reported that Goclenius "promptly" composed a poem about "fiery air phenomena" (feurige Lufterscheinungen) observed in the city on November 14, 1574. It was published in Marburg the same year. City historian Wolfgang Medding has suggested that this poem was inspired by an aurora, a hypothesis supported by historical records of auroral observations. Later, he treated auroras ("chasmata") in a 1604 physics textbook.
On the morning of Trinity Sunday, on June 8, 1628, as Goclenius was preparing to go to church, he suffered a stroke and passed away. The previous day, he had dinner with Hermann Vultejus and his son-in-law Christoph Deichmann, Chancellor of Lippe. Vultejus recalled, that Goclenius was mentally sharp and articulate, just as he had been in his younger days. After his burial, which took place two days later, Wolfgang Riemenschneider (Loriseca) gave a speech in which he praised Goclenius as "leader of today's philosophers, Marburgian Plato, European light, Hessian immortal glory".

## Family

Goclenius married his first wife, Margarethe, in 1570. Abraham Saur, a jurist in Marburg, recorded the following in his chronicle for April 10:
   M. Rudolphus Goclerius [sic] holds wedding. On this day / in the year of Christ 1570 as the Sun entered the Sign of Taurus / of which Astrologers say / it is auspicious for marriage / M. Rudolphus Goclerius [sic] / a young learned Man and Poet / celebrated his wedding in Korbach.
From this marriage his oldest son, Rudolph Goclenius the Younger, or Rudolf Goclenius, Jr. was born. He went on to become a professor in Marburg and a celebrated mathematician. It is thanks to Rudolph Goclenius, Jr., that a lunar crater bears his name. Additionally, he also worked on cures for the plague and gained fame for his miraculous use with the "weapon salve" or Powder of Sympathy. Among other notable descendants were Theodor Christoph Goclenius (1602–1673, medicine), Eduard Franz Goclenius (1643–1721, law) and Reinhard Goclenius (1678–1726, law).

## Philosophical attitude

An epigram from the literary games at Kassel in December 1576, contributed by Goclenius to the physics of Wilhelm Adolph Scribonius of Marburg, emphasized the importance of logic and reason in understanding the world - a guiding motif for his work:
   If you remove Logic, all knowledge is gone:
   And if anything remains, it's mere fable and shadow.
   Let the great lamp of Titania be extinguished:
   And you'll see everything in blind darkness.
   Take away the light of Logic and Prometheus' fire:
   And the world will be hidden in small shadows.
   Only an inert mass of undigested matter will remain,
   And chaos will reign as it did before.
   And without a standard, without law, without a certain order,
   everything that will be established by us will go.
Goclenius's philosophical views aligned closely with those of Aristotle. He belonged to a group called “Semiramists,” which consisted of Aristotelians advocating both dialectic interpretation of Aristotle's teachings and the exposition of Ramism. While serving as a rector at Korbach Stadtschule Goclenius even composed a scholarly poem on the death of Petrus Ramus. Friedrich Beurhusius, in a letter to Johann Thomas Freigius in September 1575, mentioned Goclenius as a devoted follower of Ramus, alongside other schoolmen such as Johann Lambach and Bernhard Copius.
In 1610, Johann Heinrich Alsted wrote a manual providing information and advice on academic studies. According to Alsted, Goclenius considered four philosophers—Aristotle, Julius Caesar Scaliger (whose Exercitationes he referred to as his 'Bible'), Jacopo Zabarella, and Jakob Schegk—to be essential reading (cumprimis legendos, meaning "should be read first"). He believed they should form the foundation of what he called the 'Philosophical Library.' Contemporary authors have slightly modified Goclenius's wording to imply that this selection would suffice to fill all the pulpits of philosophers. Another author felt compelled to clear up a contemporary semantic misunderstanding, according to which Goclenius' use of the word 'Bible' in relation to Scaliger's Exercitationes indicates an overestimation of reason among Calvinists.

## Works

In his Disquisitiones Philosophicae (Philosophical Inquiries), published in 1599, Goclenius presents a synoptic table that categorizes philosophical doctrines, or liberal arts, into distinct domains of knowledge. It encompasses two main categories: Real Doctrines and Arts Guiding Our Understanding. Real Doctrines delve into objects of our understanding, including Universal Philosophy (which deals with being in general) and Particular Philosophy (addressing specific beings). Within Particular Philosophy, we find Theoretical (or Real) Philosophy (studying essence and quantity) and Practical (or Moral) Philosophy (focusing on ethics and politics). The practice of Physics is the Art of Medicine. The conjunction of Astronomy and Geography is Cosmography. The second category, Arts Guiding Our Understanding, includes Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic. Given the diversity of his works, this classification system serves as a useful organizing principle, providing an overview of his writings. Additionally, it helps readers understand how Goclenius conceptually structured the world through his main category of Real Doctrines.
Goclenius authored over 70 books, with more than half of them published between 1589 and 1599. Furthermore, his extensive list of publications includes numerous academic disputations. This can be attributed to the statutes set by Landgrave Philip I on January 14, 1564, which mandated that professors at the University of Marburg conduct weekly examinations. Besides this institutional requirement, Goclenius’s conviction that truth is revealed through debate, whether with oneself or others, also played a significant role. Goclenius delivered three hours of lectures daily: one for the general public (pro lectione publica), one for master's students (pro magistrandis), and one for bachelor's students (pro baccalaureandis).
Notably, he used the term 'ontology' in his Lexicon philosophicum (1613), a term originally coined by Jacob Lorhard in his Ogdoas Scholastica (1606).

### Psychology

Goclenius made significant contributions that led to the knowledge field termed ‘psychology.’ Lecture notes from the University of Marburg indicate that he used the term ‘psychology’ as early as 1582 within the framework of a disciplinary classification, similar to J. T. Freigius (1574) and F. Beurhusius (1581). In 1586, he presided over two academic disputations, during which the word ‘psychology’ again appeared in adjectival form as a classificatory term. Although both disputations addressed the field of psychology, they revealed distinct conceptualizations of the soul or mind. The first thesis highlights the rational powers of the soul (vis cognoscendi & eligendi) as central to the human experience. The second thesis, in contrast, denies that the rational aspect alone constitutes the form of man, suggesting a more integrated view (personaliter) of the human being.
His anthology ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ: hoc est, de hominis perfectione, animo, et in primis ortu hujus, published in 1590, became the first book to feature the term 'psychology' in its title. In his dedicatory letter to Hartmann von Berlepsch, Goclenius introduced the theme of the book with an epistemological reflection. He explored the challenging and profound nature of understanding the mind (animus), the differing philosophical views on the sources of truth and knowledge, and the significance of this inquiry despite its difficulty. Regarding the question of the origin of the mind, Goclenius compiled two opposing viewpoints from treatises written between 1579 and 1589. Some suggest that souls are divinely created and placed into bodies (Creationism), while others argue that souls are inherited from parents (Traducianism). He encouraged readers to form their own opinions without condemning differing views. The full title of the book translates to English as 'Psychology: that is, on the perfection of man, his mind, and especially its origin—the comments and discussions of certain theologians and philosophers of our time who are shown on the following page.' In this context, the term 'psychology' refers both to the subject of inquiry ('the perfection of man, his mind, and especially its origin') and to the inquiry itself ('the comments and discussions of certain theologians and philosophers of our time').
Research over the past decades has gradually identified the sources of the treatises since the book lacks bibliographic references in the modern sense.
Rudolph Goclenius’s ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ (1590) and Its Sources :
| Number | Author | Title of Treatise | Source |
| 1 | Hermann Vultejus | De perfectione hominis Philosophica | Editor's note: From a public lecture at the University of Marburg. A preliminary discussion (προλεγομένων) before he began interpreting Plato’s Timaeus on January 30, 1581. |
| 2 | François Du Jon | Explicatio Quaestio: An Animus hominis propagetur a parentibus | Protoktisia (1589, pp. 73-95) |
| 3 | Johann Jakob Grynaeus | Quaestio est: Utrum anima hominis sit ex traduce an a Deo creetur? | Synopsis historiae hominis (1579, pp. 125-142) |
| 4 | Johann Jacob Coler | Quaestio Theologica et Philosophica, num anima sit ex traduce | Quaestio theologica et philosophica (1586, pp. 5-29) |
| 5 | Caspar Peucer | De essentia, natura et ortu animi hominis | Unknown. Revised by Goclenius. On the textual background see Roebel (2012, p. 258). |
| 6 | Aegidius Hunnius | An etiamnum per inspirationem hominibus infundantur illorum anima | Praelectiones in viginti et unum priora capita Geneseos (1589, pp. 30-31). Translated into German by Melchior Tilesius in 1590. |
| 7 | Laskói Csókás Péter | An animae rationales, sicut corpora, per seminalem traducem propagentur, an vero quotidie a Deo creatae, corporibus nascentium infundantur? | De homine (1585, pp. 176-253) |
| 8 | Rudolf Hospinian | Oratio qua affirmatur: Animam esse totam in toto, & in qualibet ejus parte totam | Oratio in genere didascalico (1586). Added to Coler's Quaestio theologica et philosophica, from page 30 onwards. See No. 4. |
| 9 | Timothie Bright | De traduce | In Physicam Gulielmi Adolphi Scribonii (1584, pp. 15-32) |
| 10 | Johann Ludwig Havenreuter | Sitne animus nobis ingeneratus a Deo, necne | Unknown. Almost identical with a portion of his commentary to the third book of Aristotle's de anima published later at Frankfurt (1605, pp. 333-339). |
| 11 | Rudolph Goclenius | De ortu animi | Original contribution. |
In the 17th century, Goclenius' ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ was widely read and quoted by scholars such as Robert Burton, Daniel Sennert, and Jakob Thomasius. Goclenius himself revisited his ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ in a 1604 textbook on natural science and in various philosophical disputations.
Nevertheless, historians of psychology have disagreed on whether Goclenius, with his ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ, aimed at an innovative approach for exploring the soul or to establish psychology as an independent field. Friedrich August Carus, in 1808, had referred to Goclenius' ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ as a Lehrbuch ('textbook'), placed in temporal succession to Casmann’s Psychologia anthropologica (1594). However, this was already disputed in the 19th century. Researchers since then have converged in their classification of this book, with some labeling it as a Sammelwerk ('collection', Schüling, 1967), Sammelband ('compilation', Stiening, 1999), or Anthology (Vidal, 2011). This, at least on a linguistic level, is more in line with the fact that Goclenius used the Latin verb 'congessi' (collect, bring together) in his dedicatory letter to Berlepsch to characterize his approach.

### Logic

Goclenius' crowning achievement is his original contribution made to term logic, called the Goclenian Sorites. In the words of the British logician Carveth Read:
   "It is the shining merit of Goclenius to have restored the Premises of the Sorites to the usual order of Fig. I.: whereby he has raised to himself a monument more durable than brass, and secured indeed the very cheapest immortality. How expensive, compared with this, was the method of the Ephesian incendiary!"
An example for the use of sorites in an argumentative context is presented by Goclenius in his "Dissertatio De Ortu Animi" which concludes the first edition of the Psychologia.
Contrary to Carveth Read's assessment, however, Dr. Rudolph Goclenius did not invent the Goclenian Sorites: St. Thomas Aquinas did:
   "[A] second demonstration takes as its starting point the conclusion of a first demonstration, whose terms are understood to contain the middle term which was the starting point of the first demonstration. Thus the second demonstration will proceed from four terms the first from three only, the third from five, and the fourth from six; so that each demonstration adds one term. Thus it is clear that first demonstrations are included in subsequent ones, as when this first demonstration—every B is A, every C is B, therefore every C is A—is included in this demonstration—every C is A, every D is C, therefore every D is A; and this again is included in the demonstration whose conclusion is that every E is A, so that for this final conclusion there seems to be one syllogism composed of several syllogisms having several middle terms. This may be expressed thus: every B is A, every C is B, every D is C, every E is D, therefore every E is A."

## Publications

Bibliographies of Goclenius's writings were compiled by Friedrich Wilhelm Strieder (Grundlage zu einer hessischen Gelehrten und Schriftsteller Geschichte, Bd. 4, Göttingen 1784, pp. 428–487; Bd. 9, Cassel 1794, p. 381; Bd. 13, Cassel 1802, pp. 341–343; Bd. 15, Cassel 1806, p. 338) and Franz Joseph Schmidt (Materialien zur Bibliographie von Rudolph Goclenius sen. (1547-1628) und Rudolph Goclenius jun. (1572-1621), Hamm 1979). Schmidt was a historian of medicine based in Hamm (Westphalia). His bibliography is organized into five groups: scientific works, academic writings, occasional writings, writings with Goclenius as editor or author of a foreword, and writings listed in the catalogue of the British Library but not in Strieder's Dictionary. Strieder’s bibliography is arranged chronologically.
* Oratio de natura sagarum in purgatione & examinatione per Frigidam aquis innatantium, Marburg 1584. [A speech delivered at a graduation ceremony on November 19, 1583; republished in Panegyrici Academiae Marpurgensis, Marburg 1590, pp. 190–203; and again, slightly shortened and with typographical errors, in Otto Melander’s Resolutio praecipuarum quaestionum criminalis adversus sagas processus, Lich 1597. The reprint in Melander’s book is preceded by a letter from Goclenius to Melander. In the letter, Goclenius expresses his approval of Melander’s work refuting the practice of witch purgation by cold water. He mentions that he was once tasked by William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, through his Chancellor, to investigate the physical causes of witches floating, which led him to compose a speech on the subject.]
* Oratio de Nativa et Haereditaria in nobis labe & corruptione, Marburg 1588.
* Problemata logica, pars I 1589, pars II 1590; Pars I-V 1594 (reprint: Frankfurt: Minerva, 1967, in 5 voll.).
* ΨΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΑ: hoc est, de hominis perfectione, animo, et in primis ortu hujus, commentationes ac disputationes quorundam theologorum & philosophorum nostrae aetatis, Marburg 1590; Marburg 1594 (enlarged); Marburg 1597 (enlarged).
* Scholae seu disputationes physicae, Marburg 1591 (new editions: Marburg 1595 & Marburg 1602; Physicae Disputationes, Marburg 1598).
* Partitio dialectica, Frankfurt 1595.
* Isagoge in peripateticorum et scholasticorum primam philosopiam, quae dici consuevit metaphysica, 1598 (reprint: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1976).
* Institutionum logicarum de inventione liber unus, Marburg 1598.
* Cosmographiae seu sphaerae mundi descriptionis, Marburg 1599.
* Disquisitiones philosophicae, Marburg, 1599.
* P. Rami Dialectica cum praeceptorum explicationibus, Oberursel 1600.
* Appendix IIII. Dialogistica, Marburg 1602.
* Physicae completae speculum, Frankfurt 1604.
* Dilucidationes canonum philosophicorum, Lich 1604.
* Controversia logicae et philosophiae, ad praxin logicam directae, quibus praemissa sunt theoremata seu praecepta logica, Marburg 1604.
* Miscellaneorum Theologicorum Et Philosophicorum, Marburg 1607; Marburg 1608.
* Conciliator philosophicus, 1609 (reprint: Hildesheim, Georg Olms, 1980).
* Lexicon philosophicum quo tanquam clave philosophiae fores aperiuntur, 1613 (reprint: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1980).
* Lexicon philosophicum Graecum, Marburg 1615 (reprint: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1980).
The book titled 'Rhapsodus,' from Uffenbach's library, contains a collection of unpublished manuscripts by Goclenius. These manuscripts include letters, observations, dissertations, various critiques, and poems (Bibliothecae Uffenbachianae Universalis, Tomus III, Frankfurt 1730, pp. 488-490).