Casmann, Otto

Abstract

Otto Casmann was a German humanist professor of philosophy and theology of the late sixteenth century who became an important early figure in the history of anthropology and psychology due to his two-volume Psychologia Anthropologica (Anthropological Psychology, 1594–1596). Over the next decade Casmann published on a wide range of subjects, all of them grounded in a “Scriptural” or “Mosaic” Philosophy (Blair 2000). The first were works of natural philosophy, one on the sea and tides, Marinarum quaestionum tractatio philosophica (A Philosophical Treatise on Marine Questions, 1596), another Cosmopoeia et Uranographia Christiana (Christian World-Formation and Description of the Heavens, 1598). In the latter, Casmann refuted the sixth-century arguments of the Neoplatonist Simplicius against the biblical account of creation and aimed at eliminating the doctrine of “double truth,” in which, for example, the eternity of the world could be true in philosophy but false in theology (Lüthy 2012; Martin 2014). Casmann also published works of a more esoteric nature: his Angelographia (Angelography, 1597) appeared as a counterpart to the Psychologia Anthropologica, again a study of “spirited beings” (Bell 2005), but this time concerned with angelic psychology (Hotson 2007), as well as the knowledge and powers of demons (Clark 1997, 2007).