Nicolaus Taurellus

Nicolaus Taurellus (1547 to 1606), born Oechslein at Montbéliard, was a German philosopher and physician who helped re-establish metaphysics as a serious academic subject in the Lutheran tradition. Supported by the Duke of Württemberg, he studied philosophy at Tübingen under the Aristotelian logician Jacob Schegk, then took a medical doctorate at Basel in 1570. His first and largest book, The Triumph of Philosophy (1573), tried to join philosophical and theological truth and to defend the doctrine of creation, yet it was received as a provocation. He held a professorship of ethics at Basel and from 1580 a professorship of natural philosophy and medicine at Altdorf. He argued that the basic constituents of reality are immaterial form-like entities and that human beings are only accidental unities, a view that met fierce opposition from orthodox Lutheran theologians and prefigures ideas of Leibniz.