Christian Thomasius 1655 – 1728

Christian Thomasius was a German jurist, philosopher, and reformer and one of the founders of the German Enlightenment. The first university lecturer in Germany to teach philosophy in German rather than Latin, he opened the way for a vernacular German learned culture and helped found the new University of Halle, which became the leading center of early German enlightenment thought. He combined a natural-law theory drawn from Pufendorf with a vigorous campaign against the use of torture in criminal procedure and against the prosecution of accused witches, both of which contributed to the abolition of those practices in many German states.