Sebastián Izquierdo

Sebastián Izquierdo (29 January 1601 – 20 February 1681) was a Spanish philosopher and Jesuit.
==Biography==
Sebastián Izquierdo was born in 1601 at Alcaraz, in the Castilian province of Albacete. He joined the Jesuits on November 17, 1623 and studied at the Jesuit college in Alcalá de Henares and the prestigious Colegio Imperial de Madrid. He taught Philosophy and Theology at Alcalá, Murcia and Madrid. He became Rector of the colleges of Murcia and Madrid and was present at the eleventh General Congregation of the Society of Jesus at Rome, at which time he was named Assistant of Spain and the West Indies. In Rome he befriended among others the well-known German polymath Athanasius Kircher. In 1659, he published in Lyon his monumental philosophical work Pharus scientiarum ﻿(The Lighthouse of Sciences). He died at Rome on 20 February 1681.
==Philosophy==
Although Izquierdo is virtually forgotten nowadays, he was an important figure 17th-century philosophy. Izquierdo was a follower of the Spanish medieval philosopher Ramon Llull. He was also strongly influenced by Bacon's empiricism. In his Pharus scientiarum he emphasized the need for a universal science that could be valid for all human knowledge (scientia de scientia or arte general del saber). It would be akin to the manner in which the Lullian Ars Magna was applicable to the entire ladder of creation. At the same time, Izquierdo advocated mathematizing the ars lulliana, and in the course of his exposition illustrates how Llull's letter combinations could be replaced by number combinations. The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, inflenced by the Pharus scientiarum, wrote his immense Ars magna sciendi an attempt to make the Lullian Ars a "science of science" suitable for the preparation of an encyclopedia of all human knowledge.
Historians of mathematics remember Izquierdo especially in connection with combinatorics, to which he devoted Disputation 29 (De Combinatione). He was the frst to discuss the number of k-combinations from a given set of n elements.Cf. Izquierdo influenced several contemporary philosophers, such as the Spanish Juan Caramuel and Tomás Vicente Tosca and the German Gaspar Knittel and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the latter, in particular, quoted the Disputatio de Combinatione, in his De Arte Combinatoria (1666). The Disputatio 29 «De Combinatione», was rescued from oblivion and studied in depth by the Jesuit historian of philosophy Ramón Ceñal, who not only translated it from Latin but also carried out an exhaustive study of it published by the Instituto de España.
==Works==
A prolific author, Izquierdo wrote philosophical, theological and ascetic works. 
* Theses de Immaculata Conceptione (1658).
* Pharus scientiarum, 2 vols., Lyon, 1659.
* Opus Theologicum, Rome 1664 Tom. I. 1670 Tom. II.
* Practica de los Exercicios Espirituales de Nuestro Padre San Ignacio. En Roma 1665 1675.
* Considerationes de los quatro Novissimos del Hombre, Muerte, Guizio, Inferno, y Gloria, Rome, 1672.
* Medios necessarios para la Salvación. Rome, 1674.
==Bibliography==
On the ideas of Izquierdo, see:
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For an extended study of Izquierdo's combinatory analysis and its influence, see:
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Category:1601 births
Category:Spanish people
Category:Philosophers
Category:Jesuits
Category:1681 deaths