Samuel Christian Hollmann

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Samuel Christian Hollmann

Samuel Christian Hollmann (born December 3, 1696 in Stettin , † September 4, 1787 in Göttingen ) was a German philosopher and naturalist .

Life

Born the son of a royal Swedish court preacher , he lost his father at an early age. He attended high schools in Stettin and Danzig , studied in Königsberg (Prussia) from 1718 and switched to the University of Wittenberg on October 10 of the same year , where he obtained the degree of master's degree on October 17, 1720 . After he had acquired the teaching qualifications for universities as Magister Legens on October 2, 1723, he briefly visited the University of Jena and the University of Greifswald, where he gave private lectures. Hollmann, who had returned to Wittenberg, was accepted as an adjunct of the philosophical faculty on March 9, 1724 , had approached the philosophy of Christian Wolff , and thereby began his rise to a well-known philosopher of his time.

However, this path was often rocky. After he had published his "Observationes elencticae in Controversia Wolffiana" in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1724 against the will of the censors Ernst Christian Schröder and Martin Gotthelf Löscher , a case was pending against him because he had triggered a foreign confrontation with Prussia. Hollmann received a reprimand and had to cover the costs that had arisen from the misconduct. Nevertheless, he tried to crown the career he had begun at the Wittenberg Faculty of Philosophy by obtaining an extraordinary professorship with a full professorship, which was also followed in 1725 and he was given an extraordinary professorship in philosophy.

However, when he applied for the vacant full professorship in Oriental Studies in 1727, he was rejected by the philosophical faculty because he was supposed to concentrate on philosophy, especially since his lectures were well attended. After he had taken over the deanery of the philosophical faculty in 1730 and still not attained a full professorship due to the change of the throne of the Elector of Saxony in 1733 and thus insufficient security of supply, he turned to August III. who made him assessor in the philosophical faculty in 1733 . This gave him a seat and a voice in the Corpus academicum and in the philosophical faculty, with the prospect of a paid philosophical professorship.

In the meantime the University of Göttingen had tried to get him, his sovereign allowed him to move there to become a full professor of logic and metaphysics. On September 30th, 1734 he arrived in Göttingen and gave his first lecture there on October 14th, in a temporary grain shed. For almost 53 years he belonged to the Georgia - Augusta and shared all their fates in their founding phase. As a lecturer, he was very well received, first through his philosophical lectures on various branches of philosophy, later particularly through his physical lectures, to which he devoted himself more and more exclusively and in which he was gladly heard by officers and nobles, so that he was compelled for a time was to repeat the same lecture daily for a second hour.

As prorector, he made a special contribution to the university during the Seven Years' War by trying to protect the city from the threats posed by the French and by making the uninterrupted continuation of academic work possible. After he had become a member of the Royal Society in 1747 , he earned significant services in connection with Albrecht von Haller in founding the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen , of which he was one of the first members and directors in the years 1751-61. In 1761 he resigned from the latter position; but he continued his lectures until he was 88 years old. On April 30, 1778, the Wittenberg Faculty of Philosophy again awarded its former adjunct as "inter verissimos Philosophiae eclecticae statores eminens" its highest dignity and renewed his doctoral degree. He celebrated his 50th anniversary as a doctorate and in 1784 as a professor in Göttingen, and after he continued to work on scholarly work, he died, almost 91 years old, as the first and oldest Göttingen university teacher, shortly before the first jubilee celebration at the Göttingen University.

Act

His literary work initially dealt with philosophical topics. His first writings were some philosophical treatises in which he denied Leibniz's monadology and pre-established harmony. Hollmann's main philosophical work is the three-volume Institutiones philosophicae . The definition of philosophy used therein is similar to that of the young Christian Thomasius . It is striking that philosophy is still largely understood as an auxiliary science for the upper faculties. Hollmann himself stated that his basic intention was to separate the disciplines of logic and metaphysics, physics, pneumatology and natural theology, morality and natural law dealt with in the work, but which have so far often been mixed up, exactly from one another and to give each one its proper limits put. The philosophical system developed in the process follows the ideas that are written down in his dissertations De reformatione philosophica and De vera philosophiae notione . He kept within the framework of a given, basically Cartesian paradigm of philosophical theorizing.

With increasing age, his interest in philosophy waned, especially since a major change in literature began in 1769, when Immanuel Kant's star rose. Although he himself recapitulated his achievements in the field of philosophy in 1781, his main activity had been turning more and more to the natural sciences since the early 1940s. He published works on physics, on natural philosophy, then dealt with anatomical, botanical, paleontological, but especially with meteorological investigations and observations, wrote about barometric height measurement, about electricity, earthquakes, artificial cold generation, about thermometers and barometers. In 1752 he described a find of rhinoceros bones in Germany.

In addition, he delivered treatises in the Göttingen Societätsschriften , in the Göttingische advertisements of learned things , and even published weekly publications himself for a time under the titles of Weekly Göttingische Nachrichten and The Scatterer . He himself organized a collection of his scattered treatises under the title Sylloge Commentationum . Most recently he worked on the detailed history of the beginning and progress of the University of Göttingen . On May 17, 1787, he announced the appearance of the same; but only 7 sheets of it are actually printed, one had to refrain from further publication, since after the death of the author only unprocessed notes were found instead of a print-ready manuscript. Beckmann continued this work and in 1787 the work "The Georg Augustus University" was published.

Selection of works

  • De stupendo naturae mysterio, anima humana sibi ipsi ignota , Greifswald 1722
  • Comm. philos. de harmonia praestabilita , 1724
  • Letter to Bilfinger , 1725
  • Institutiones philosophiae , Wittenberg 1727–1734 3 parts
  • De reformatione philosophica , Wittenberg 1730
  • De vera philosophiae notione , Wittenberg 1731, 1733
  • Paulo Uberior in universam philosophiam introductio , Wittenberg 1734
  • De definiendis justis scientiarum philosophicarum limitibus , Göttingen 1736
  • Institutiones pneumatologiae et theologia naturalis , 1747
  • Philosophia prima seu metaphysica , Göttingen 1747
  • Philosophia moralis seu ethicae , Göttingen 1768
  • Jurisprudentiae naturalis primae lineae , Göttingen 1751 and 1768
  • Illorum, que per universa philosophiam ab ipsomet reperta sunt, anacephalaiosis , Göttingen 1781
  • Baseline of the Physica experimentalis , 1742
  • Natural philosophy , Göttingen 1749, 1753, 1766
  • Sylloge Commentationum , Göttingen 1762, 1775, ed.nova 1784
  • Accidental Thoughts on Various Matters , 6th Collection, 1776

literature

Web links

Commons : Samuel Christian Hollmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Georg Schmeling: City and University in the mirror of the first Göttingen weekly papers. In: Göttingen in the 18th century. Göttingen 1987, DNB 870948601 , pp. 31-71.
personal data
SURNAME Hollmann, Samuel Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 3, 1696
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH September 4, 1787
Place of death Goettingen