Name Robert Sanderson Role Biographer | Died January 29, 1663 | |
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Books Works of Robert Sanderson | ||
Robert Sanderson (19 September 1587 – 29 January 1663) was an English theologian and casuist.
He was born in Sheffield in Yorkshire and grew up at Gilthwaite Hall, near Rotherham. He was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. Entering the Church, he rose to be Bishop of Lincoln.
His work on logic, Logicae Artis Compendium (1615), was long a standard treatise on the subject. It enjoyed at least ten editions during the seventeenth century and was widely read as a textbook. Sanderson's biographer, Izaak Walton writes that by 1678 'Logicae' had sold 10,000 copies. In her introduction to the 1985 facsimile edition E. J. Ashworth writes that "The young Isaac Newton studied Sanderson's logic at Cambridge, and as late as 1704." Thomas Heywood of St. John's College, Ashworth adds, recommended Newton "Sanderson or Aristotle himself". Sanderson's logic remained popular even after the appearance of the influential Port-Royal Logic.
Sanderson's sermons were also admired; but he is perhaps best remembered for his Nine Cases of Conscience Resolved (1678), in consideration of which he has been placed at the head of English casuists. He left large collections of historical and heraldic matter in MS.
Sanderson is today perhaps best known as the subject of one of Izaak Walton's Lives, published in 1678.