Rudolph Goclenius

Rudolph Goclenius (1547 to 1628), born Rudolf Gockel at Korbach in Waldeck, was a German scholastic philosopher. He studied at Erfurt, Marburg and Wittenberg, took his master's degree in 1571, directed the gymnasium at Korbach and then at Kassel, and from 1581 held a professorship at the University of Marburg, granted by Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel. Over his career he held chairs in physics, logic, mathematics and ethics. He is sometimes credited with coining the term psychology in 1590, though others had used it earlier. He wrote more than seventy books, many of them between 1589 and 1599, among them the Disquisitiones Philosophicae of 1599, which sorted the philosophical disciplines into real doctrines and arts guiding the understanding, and in 1618 he was among the Hesse-Kassel delegates at the Synod of Dort.