Abstract
Andreas Osiander was a Lutheran theologian of the first generation of reformers. He was a preacher and worked as a teacher of Hebrew in Nuremberg. He is renowned in theology due to his polemics with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon concerning the doctrine of justification, which seems to be influenced by Paracelsus and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In his exegetical works, Osiander followed the cabalistic techniques of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin. His editorial works are the most famous. Osiander prepared the first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) which he anonymously introduced with a preface suggesting that the work was more of a mathematical model than a description of reality. Due to this he has been called either the enemy of science or the founder of an instrumentalism in the philosophy of science. Osiander’s edition of Girolamo Cardano’s mathematical work Ars Magna (1545) also attracted particular attention.
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References
Primary Literature
Osiander, Andreas d. Ä. 1975–1997. Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebass. Vols. 1–10. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn.
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Nejeschleba, T. (2022). Osiander, Andreas. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_564
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