Name
4/9/2016
BIO 1
Nicholas of Cusa
The person that I was assigned for our first biography was Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas of Cusa was “born in 1401 and passed away on the day of August 11, 1464” (Hudson). Nicholas of Cusa was a German philosopher, theologian, and astronomer. He was one of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, and he made spiritual and political contributions in European history. When Nicholas of Cusa was at a young age, “he entered the Faculty of Arts of the Heidelberg University in 1416 as ‘a cleric of the Diocese of Trier,’ studying the liberal arts”(Hudson). He seemed to have left Heidelberg soon afterwards, “as he received his doctorate in canon law from the University of Padua in 1423” (Joost-Gaugier). After he attended the University of Padua in 1423, “he entered the University of Cologne in 1425 as ‘a doctor of canon law,’ which he appears to have both taught and practiced there”(Joost-Gaugier). In the field of philosophy, “Nicholas of Cusa was noted for his deeply mystical writings about Christianity” (Hudson), particularly on the possibility of knowing God with the divine human mind. Nicholas of Cusa wrote of the unfolding of creation in God. “He was suspected by some of holding pantheistic beliefs, but his writings were never accused of being heretical” (Joost-Gaugier). In the field of mathematics, Nicholas of Cusa can be read about in the different essays that he wrote. “Most of Nicholas of Cusa's mathematical ideas can be found in his essays, De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance), De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God) and On Conjectures. He also wrote on squaring the circle in his mathematical treatises” (Hudson). Nicholas of Cusa also had an impact in the field of science that he studied. In medicine, he introduced an improvement which, in an altered form, has continued in use to this day. This improvement was, “the counting of the pulse, which up to his time had been felt and discussed in many ways but never counted. ...Nicholas of Cusa proposed to compare the rate of pulses by weighing the quantity of water run out of a water clock while the pulse beat one hundred times. ...The manufacture of watches with second-hands has since given us a simpler method of counting, but the merit of introducing this useful kind of observation into clinical medicine belongs to Nicholas of Cusa” (Joost-Gaugier). Lastly, Nicholas of Cusa had a pretty big impact on politics and the church. Nicholas of Cusa noted that government was founded on the consent of the governed, which is referred to as “government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised” (Wikipedia). The reason of his meaning behind why he noted that was because “for if by nature men are equally strong and equally free, the true and settled power of one over the others, the ruler having equal natural power, could be set up only by the choice and consent of the others, just as a law also is set up by consent (Joost-Gaugier). Even though these accomplishments seem like a lot of ways Nicholas of Cusa impacted certain fields of study, they are only a small amount of what he did in his lifetime.