ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE, CARTESIANISM, AND PURITANISM IN APÁCZAI’S WRITINGS
ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE, CARTESIANISM, AND PURITANISM IN APÁCZAI’S WRITINGS

Summary/Abstract: János Apáczai Csere was the greatest Hungarian pedagogue, writer, translator, author of textbooks, theologian, and philosopher of seventeenth-century Transylvania, a distinguished representative of Cartesian thought, an eminent figure of the Transylvanian Puritan movement, the first Hungarian encyclopaedist, and the first Hungarian synthesiser of the sciences. Apáczai was the most significant representative of the peregrini who had attended Western universities; he had his principal work, the Magyar Encyclopaedia, printed in Utrecht (in 1655 with the date 1653), a Hungarian-language book intended for school use that summarised the entirety of the scholarship of his age. With him the period in which Hungarian philosophical texts were written exclusively in Latin came to an end, and the period of cultivating philosophy in the Hungarian language commenced. He is likewise associated with the first important Hungarian-language reception of one of the greatest philosophers of the age, René Descartes, who, according to the Transylvanian scholar, was “the reformer of all philosophy”, “the pride of the century”. The most significant Hungarian thinker of the period, the first truly modern Hungarian philosopher, was János Apáczai Csere.

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