Samuel de Sorbière

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Samuel de Sorbiére (* 1617 in Languedoc ; † 1670 ) was a French scholar, translator and doctor.

Life

Samuel de Sorbière

Sorbière came from a prominent Protestant family, studied medicine and was in Paris from 1641, where he came into contact with Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne and René Descartes and in 1645 Thomas Hobbes (in exile in Paris during the English Civil War and there tutor of exiled Charles II . ) met. He then settled in the Netherlands, where he published a French translation of Thomas More's Utopia in 1643 and took care of the publication of Hobbes' works. He also translated his De Cive (1649) and De Corpore Politico into French. The impetus for the publication of Hobbes' works (he also urged Hobbes to publish his natural philosophy) came from Mersenne. In 1654 he was back in Paris, where he converted to Catholicism (more for political and economic reasons than out of conviction, as the doctor Guy Patin wrote), which earned him a state pension. Sorbière won the favor of Cardinal Jules Mazarin and became a court historiographer. He was associated with the Academy of Henri Louis Habert de Montmor in Paris, of which he was a founding member and secretary (from 1658) and of which he wrote the statutes, and contributed to Montmort's publication of the writings of Gassendi (Lyon 1658), whose biography. During a visit to England in 1663/64 he became a member of the Royal Society . He played a role in founding the Académie des sciences in 1666.

He was of a contentious nature and his negative comments on his visit to England in 1664 challenged Royal Society spokesman Thomas Sprat in 1665 to respond. The controversy also grew into political dimensions: Sorbière was temporarily banned from Paris.

In his book on the trip to England he sided with Hobbes, who did not get on well with members of the Royal Society such as John Wallis , who had dismantled Hobbes' attempt at squareing the circle . Wallis had welcomed Sorbière kindly in Oxford and found himself ridiculed in return for it in Sorbière's book. Wallis would be a good mathematician, but his behavior towards Hobbes showed him not as a gentleman, but as a pedant, a stay in London could not only cure his bad breath, but also teach him courtly manners. Worse still was Sorbière's portrayal of the British Prime Minister Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon , to whom he thought he had legal knowledge, but otherwise found him poorly educated. Other peaks were directed against English customs and culture (and food culture ). The Danish ambassador in Paris also felt insulted in the book and reported the insult to Clarendon to the French Foreign Minister de Lionne, who temporarily banished Sorbière to Brittany (England was an ally of France against the Netherlands at the time). Advocates whom he sought, including through Hobbes in England, soon led to the lifting of this measure (apparently Charles II also wanted to end the affair), but his book proved to be detrimental to his further career.

In his response to the book, Sprat argued that it had completely misunderstood the Royal Society as a party divided into camps and subordinated to authorities (like Descartes'), indulging in ceremonial formality. The attack on Clarendon, whose patronage the Royal Society wanted, was rejected by Sprat.

The outrage was not equally strong among all members of the Royal Society, because they voted with a number of votes of 14 to 8 against the expulsion of Sorbière.

His advice to a young doctor (1672) is still quoted today - it would be honorable to admit medical errors, but averse to one's own practice.

Fonts

  • Lettres et discours de M. de Sorbière, sur diverses matières curieuses, Paris 1660
  • Relation d'un voyage en Angleterre, Paris 1664
    • English translation 1709: A Voyage to England: containing many things relating to the state

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Latin edition obtained by him in 1647 at Elsevier. Before that, there was only one anonymously printed edition with a small edition of 1642. Hobbes was not very enthusiastic that Sorbière mentioned in the edition that he was the teacher of the Crown Prince, given the controversy surrounding Hobbes' teaching both his own position as a teacher and could harm the Crown Prince. He pushed for the spots to be removed and therefore switched on Mersenne. The relationship between Hobbes and Sorbière cooled temporarily.
personal data
SURNAME Sorbière, Samuel de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sorbière, Samuel de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French scholar and doctor
DATE OF BIRTH 1617
PLACE OF BIRTH Languedoc
DATE OF DEATH 1670