historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 3. Biography
Aristotle’s Politics, is that it offered its readers a direct confrontation with the
text and the political ideas of the great Greek philosopher himself. Following
these ideas, students could come to conclusions that deviated from the tradition
in the politica at Leiden University. In Harm Wansink’s study of ‘political
science’ at Leiden University we find an example of such a deviation. The
example concerns a disputation ‘on the best form of government’, published
in 1602. The disputation was held by a Polish student named Andreas Rey. On
the grounds of ideas that follow Aristotle’s, Rey concludes that in practice an
aristocracy is the best form of government. Rey’s opinion, according to Wansink,
constituted ‘a clear deviation from the tradition’ in the politica at Leiden
University, which was ‘monarchical’ in nature, i.e. it saw or tended to favour
monarchy as the best form of government. 98 As will be demonstrated in chapter
8 of this thesis, Boxhorn also deviated from the ‘monarchical’ aspect of the
Leiden tradition in the politica. Instead he followed Aristotle in the Stagirite’s
favourable analyses of aristocracy and that mixture of oligarchy and democracy
known as the ‘polity’ or ‘constitutional government’. 99
II. The politica of Franco Burgersdijk
Franco Burgersdijk has been described as ‘without doubt … the most influential
Dutch philosopher of the first half of the seventeenth century’. A former
Leiden student, Burgersdijk had returned from France, where he had held a
professorship of philosophy at the Protestant Academy of Saumur, to Leiden
University where he became extraordinary professor of logic in 1620. In 1626,
the year Boxhorn matriculated at Leiden, he was ordinary professor of logic
and ethics. Two years later Burgersdijk exchanged his professorship of ethics
for one of physics. He was three times rector magnificus before dying in 1635. 100
Burgersdijk was a versatile philosopher. His works cover all the four main
branches of philosophy: logic (Institutionum logicarum libri III, 1626); physics
(Collegium physicum disputationibus XXXII absolutum absolutum,
1632); metaphysics (Institutionum
metaphysicarum libri II, 1640); and ethics (Idea philosophiae moralis,
Leiden, 1621). For Boxhorn’s copy of Heinsius’s edition, see Catalogus Variorum & Insignium Librorum,
Celeberrimi ac Eruditissimi Viri Marci Zueri Boxhornii, xxxii.
98 Wansink, Politieke wetenschappen aan de Leidse universiteit, pp. 192, 194-95, 237, with quotes on p.
194, p. 195, and p. 237 respectively.
99 Aristotle, Politics, 1293b1-1294a1 [IV:7-8]. ‘For polity or constitutional government may be
described generally as a fusion of oligarchy and democracy …’ Quoted from Aristotle, The Politics and
The Constitution of Athens. Edited by Stephen Everson; translated by Benjamin Jowett (Cambridge University
Press; Cambridge, 1 st ed. 1997, 2007), p. 103. Unless stated otherwise, all references to, and quotations
from, Aristotle’s Politics refer to, and have been taken from, this edition.
100 For a recent biography of Burgersdijk and a short discussion of his works, see the entry “Burgersdijk,
Franck Pieterszoon (1590-1635)”, in Van Bunge et al. (eds.), The Dictionary of Seventeenth and
Eighteenth-Century Dutch Philosophers, Vol. 1, pp. 181-90, with quote on p. 182.
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