Abstract
Marcus Marci was a Czech physician (the personal physician of the emperor Ferdinand III) and polymath who significantly contributed to medicine, mechanics, optics, and chiefly to philosophy. As a physician he supported Paracelsian views; he contributed to medicine through his studies on the nature of epilepsy and its treatment. In mathematics, he was attempting (without remarkable success) to deal with the quadrature of a circle. More important are his two writings on natural philosophy Idearum operatricium idea (Prague 1635) and Philosophia vetus restituta Pán en pantón sive Philosophia vetus restituta (Prague 1662, 2. ed. Leipzig 1676) in which he defended hylozoism against the Jesuit scholastics of his time. Although hylozoism was not an exceptional conception in Renaissance philosophy, due to his Prague scholastic opponent Arriaga, Marcus formulated and justified this teaching with greater conceptual accuracy than was usual among other hylozoists of this time.
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References
Primary Literature
Idearum operatricium idea (Prague 1635); Pán en pantón sive Philosophia vetus restituta (Prague 1662, 2. ed. Leipzig 1676); Thaumantiae liber de arcu coelesti (Prague 1648); De longitudie seu differentia inter duos meridianos (Prague 1650); Liturgia mentis seu de natura epilepsiae (Regensburg 1678); Othosophia seu philosophia impulsus universalis (ed. Jakub Dobřensky, Prague 1683). Pokorný, Z., Dopis Jana Marka Marci Galileimu, in: Sborník pro dějiny přírodních věd a techniky 9, Praha 1964, pp 7–19.
Secondary Literature
(P. Svobodný ed.), Joannes Marcus Marci. A Seventeeth Century Bohemian Polymath, Charles University Press, Prague 1998 (collection containing contributions to all branches of Marcus’ scholarly activities and a complete bibliography); P. R. Blum, Die zwei Philosophien des Bernardus a s.Theresia, in: Studia Comeniana et Historica 16, 1986, Nr 32, pp. 101–123; S. Sousedík, Philosophie der frühen Neuzeit in den böhmischen Ländern, Stuttgart-Bad Constatt 2009, pp. 139–160.
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Solcova, K., Sousedik, S. (2016). Marci, Johannes Marcus. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_563-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_563-1
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