Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen

From A BUDGET OF PARADOXES, 1872 by Augustus De Morgan

Longomontanus,^[1] a Danish astronomer of merit, squared the circle in 1644 :     ...     Pell^[2] answered him, and being a kind of circulating medium, managed to engage in the controversy names known and unknown, as Roberval, Hobbes, Carcavi, Lord Charles Cavendish, Pallieur, Mersenne, Tassius, Baron Wolzogen,^[3] Descartes, Cavalieri and Golius. Among them, of course, Longomontanus was made mincemeat : but he is said to have insisted on the discovery in his epitaph.

      ^[1] Christianus Longomontanus, (Christen Longberg or Lumborg) was born in 1569 at Longberg, Jutland, and died in 1647 at Copenhagen. He was an assistant of Tycho Brahe and accepted the diurnal while denying the orbital motion of the earth. His Cyclometria e lunulis reciproce demonstrata appeared in 1612 under the name of Christen Severin, the latter being his family name. He wrote several other works on the quadrature problem, and some treatises on astronomy.
      ^[2] ...     " John Pell (1610 or 1611-1685) studied at Cambridge and Oxford, and was professor of mathematics at Amsterdam (1643-46). He left many manuscripts but published little.   " (etc)
      ^[3] Johann Ludwig, Baron von Wolzogen, seems to have been one of the early unitarians, called Fratres Polonorum because they took refuge in Poland. Some of his works appear in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum (Amsterdam, 1656).   (Etc.)
[All notes by David Eugene Smith 1915, most of them here omitted (WPT)]

Chicago, London : Open Court 1915,
Vol. I, pp. 105-6.

From A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM, SOCINIANISM etc., 1945 by Earl Morse Wilbur

. . .   The comparative frequency with which, after well over three hundred years, books from the Raków press were still offered for sale by dealers in old books bears witness to their wide circulation ; and the long series of ambitious works by theologians, and the steady swarm of students' dissertations or essays at the Protestant universities, which during more than a century kept up an almost ceaseless attack against Socinian doctrines, are evidence of how seriously these Socinian books were regarded, and of how widely their influence was felt and feared. How effective they were in making proselytes, even in the face of the most bitter opposition, is to be seen in such names as those of Crellius, Smalcius, Ostorod, Völkel, Ruar, Schomann, Schlichting, Stegmann, Wolzogen and others, all of them German converts, who rose to leadership among the Socinians and contributed immensely to the strength of their cause.
(pp. 423-4)

* * *

In another quarter [than Socinian] an insidious danger to religious faith was discerned and opposed. It was in the new intellectual movement that was asserting itself in France. The works of Descartes, father of modern philosophy, were winning wide acceptance in France among both Catholics and Calvinists, to many of whom they offered a welcome relief from out-moded Scholasticism and the dogmatism of the Jesuits. Progressive spirits were reassured to discover that they might rest their religion on solid grounds of reason instead of on the questionable foundation of mere faith. The influence of the new philosophy was manifest both in liberal Catholic quarters, as among the Jansenists of Port Royal, and among Calvinists, especially at their theological college at Sumur on the Loire. It is interesting, however, to note that one of the first to scent danger in this movement was a leading Socinian, Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen.¹⁴   [..]   He . . wrote and published some trenchant criticisms on the Cartesian philosophy in its religious implications.¹⁵ (etc.)
(pp. 529-30)

      ¹⁴ Wolzogen was by birth an Austrian, born at the end of the sixteenth century. A man of large inherited wealth, and celebrated for his learning, he resisted strong worldly temptations to conform to the Catholic faith, and adhered to that of Calvin. Presumably for the sake of greater religious liberty, he removed to Poland, where he joined the Socinians and also engaged in public life and fulfilled various important political missions. He had long been much given to mathematical and physical studies, but the study of the Scriptures more and more absorbed him ; and his excellent commentaries on the New Testament make up two volumes of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. He was an intimate friend of Ruar. He died in Silesia in 1661.   cf. Bock, Antitrinitar., i, 1030-1039 ;   Fock, Socinianismus, p. 202 ; Ludwik Chmaj, 'Wolzogen przeciw Descartes'owi' (W. against D.), in Archiwum Komisyi do Badania Historyi Filozofii w Polsce, Tom i, Czesc i (Kraków, 1915), pp. 90-132.
      ¹⁵ Annotationes in Meditationes metaphysicas Renati Des Cartes (Amsterdam, 1657) ; also printed at the end of vol. ii of his works above mentioned.   cf. Fock, Socinianismus, p. 203, n.

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press 1945.

From WIEM, ca. 2000

Wolzogen Jan Ludwik, baron von Tarenfeldt, Freiherr von Neuhäusel (1599-1661), austriacki filozof, teolog, matematyk. Sporo podrózowal (1638 Paryz, 1646 Amsterdam, 1655 Bazylea).	. . an Austrian philosopher, theologian, mathematician ; lived and worked in Poland, was member of the Polish Brethren, much traveled (Paris, Amsterdam, Basel) . .
Autor pisanych w duchu socynianizmu komentarzy do Ewangelii. Najbardziej znane dzielo Wolzogena - Uwagi do medytacji metafizycznych René Descartes’a (1657, wydanie polsko-lacińskie 1959) - zawiera krytyke pogladów R. Descartes’a z punktu widzenia empiryzmu (m.in. postulat traktowania czlowieka jako calosci cielesno-duchowej, negacja istnienia idei wrodzonych).	Author of commentaries on the Gospels, Socinian in spirit. His best-known work is "Remarks on the metaphysical meditations by René des Cartes (1657 ; an edition in Polish and Latin 1959) — it contains a critique of Descartes on empirical grounds, (among others, the postulate of man as a psycho-somatic whole, . . etc).

( http://wiem.onet.pl/wiem/0026c9.html )