Abstract

Professor Erhard Weigel (1625-1699) made the University of Jena a place of new scientific inspiration by reception of Western thought in German Lutheranism (H. Schöffler). As the decisive academic preceptor of Baron Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and indirectly, Christian Wolff, he was one of the leading figures in early German enlightenment. He claimed a respectful and mathematically inquiring approach to nature (seen as divine creation representing God himself) which will give guidance on the way to real humanity. His devotion to that „Mathesis divina" was just as much a pedagogical, as social, moral and political concept. Engaged also in the defence against uprising atheism he showed in his Philosophia mathematica (1693), based perhaps on cabbalistic traditions, that God's wisdom is playing with all creatures as partners in the universe. In a somewhat antiaristotelic and vehement antischolastic attitude the author strived for a rationality, spread over all nations with respect to the divine transparency of this world. So everyone would be able to find happiness in which the patterns of wisdom are efficacious, and so becoming elevated to calculate and utilise this divine harmony in a divinely guided common existence of man and nature (see esp. note 14)