NATURPHILOSOPHY SYSTEM OF DR. P. BERON

Petar Beron is born at 1800 in the town Kotel, “a miniature of Nuremberg”, in a rich family of handcrafts and merchants. In Kotel he receives his primary education at the cell school of Stoiko Vladislavov and Raino Popovich. Further he goes to Bucharest where he enters the school of Greek educator Konstantin Vardalach. The latter, a famous for his time pedagogist and encyclopedist, has influenced a lot for the formation of Beron as scientist and philosopher.

In 1824 he is compelled to leave Bucharest, because he participated in a “Greek plot”, and goes to Brashov, another Rumanian town, where he compiles “The Fish Primer”. This book is fundamental for the Reformation in Bulgaria and an achievement for the young scholar. In 1825 P. Beron enrolls as a student in Heidelberg University where he proceeds philosophy until two years later when he transfers to Munich to study medicine. On the 9 July 1831 after successfully defending a doctoral dissertation Beron is promoted Doctor in Medicine. Dissertation is in Latin and concerns a methodology of obstetrics and gynecology.

The young physician works in Bucharest and Kraiova but after several years of general practice he quits his job and starts merchandise. After fifteen years he makes a fortune and goes to Paris where he lives as a renter. Here he starts a real scientific career. His scope is to entail all the human knowledge by that time and to make a naturphilosophical evaluation by creating a new “Panepisteme”. His encyclopedism is remarkable. Dr. Beron spoke nine languages and wrote about 30 volumes not regarding two dictionaries, one atlas, his doctoral dissertation and the “Fish Primer”.

There are certain facts, which come to show that Dr. Beron was appreciated by his contemporary scientific community. On the session of the Royal Academy of Science in London, held on the 20 June 1850, Sir John Lee presents his work “On the system of atmospherology” and gives tribute to Beron’s activity. In 1853 Dr. Beron is invited by the Association of Natural Sciences in Athens where he reads an article “Earth before the Deluge”. In 1955 he publishes in German language his “Slavic philosophy” where an outline of his Panepisteme is featured. In 1858 is printed in French language “Origins of physical and natural sciences and of metaphysical and moral sciences”. Next two years are devoted to a huge cosmographical atlas with text. The maps in the atlas were designed by the famous bulgarian painter Nicolaus Pavlovich. But the height of his scientific endeavors is the “Panepisteme”, in seven volumes, which is published in French starting 1961. Until the end of his life on 21 March 1871 he is devoted to this interesting and creative task.

Dr. Beron has spent certainly 25 years of his life in Paris and other European cities. He has seriously and systematically studied western philosophy and culture. He witnessed the endeavors of classical positivism, most obviously in his contemporary Auguste Comte, to replace materialism and idealism with a third line in philosophy. However Beron sincerely believed in the independence of his philosophy Panepisteme. The only scholar whom he accepts as authority is Aristotle. These are the principal ends of his theoretical and logical views.