János Apáczai Csere (Apáca, 1625 - Kolozsvár, 1659)

He studied in the Gyulafehérvár Calvinist secondary school, as Heinrich Bisteeerfeld's student. He travelled to Holland with the help of a scholarship, where he gained a doctorate degree and got married (to Aletta van der Maet). He came home in 1653, and he had a job in Gyulafehérvár. He wanted to reform the Transylvanain educational system in a puritan way, but he was unsuccessful. In his life's work the modern spiritual trends of the age (encyclopedism, puritanism, cartesianism) formed a harmonious system. His work, Hungarian Logic appeared in 1654, in which he tried to make the specialist language of philosophy more Hungarian. His main work, the Hungarian Encyclopaedia (Utrecht, 1655) is based on Bisterfeld's and Alsted's works and findings. Its aim is to summarise the scientific achievements of the age in Hungarian for school use. The great benefit of his work is his scientific thinking and the formation of Hungarian terminology for science. His opponents, who were orthodox Calvinists, humiliated him in a public debate, and György Rákóczy II dismissed him from his job of the time (1655). Thanks to the influence of Lórántffy Zsuzsa one year later he got a job as a teacher in Kolozsvár. By that time he had problems with his health - as his student, Miklós Bethlen put it "because of awful learning", and he died soon after.

ÁP-SzJú-UG