Athanasius Kircher, Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim and Natural Philosophy in the 17th Century Czech Lands
Abstract
The book "Athanasius Kircher, Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim and Natural Philosophy in the 17th Century Czech Lands" analyses the correspondence of the Jesuit baroque polymath, Athanasius Kircher, with his correspondents from the Czech Lands. From this correspondence emerges a strongly interconnected scholarly, noble and ecclesiastical community that played an outstanding role within Kircher's general correspondence and contiributed to the emergence of scholarly discourse of natural philosophy in the Czech Lands.
Kircher's work inspired a number of other scholarly works such as the analogy of sea movement and the movement of blood in the human body in "Oceanus macro-microcosmicus" (1664) by Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim - the first editor of the first medical journal "Miscellanea curiosa medico-physica sive Ephemerides". Sachs' and Kircher's books are futher compared as well as the type of analogy they are using.
Through the book's structure, in which every chapter is built on the previous one, it is possible to look at he development of natural philosophy in the Czech Lands in the middle of the seventeenth century from the different points of view.