 Nicolaus Taurellus (Oechslein) was born on November 26, 1547 in Montbéliard/Mömpelgard into the family of a poor city clerk (for biographic information, see Baier 1728: 1–14; Bayle 1730: vol. 4, p. 327; Schmid 1860: 1–22). At the time, the city was politically affiliated with the duchy of Württemberg, and patronage by the Duke of Württemberg allowed Taurellus to study philosophy at the University of Tübingen with the eminent Aristotelian logician and natural philosopher Jacob Schegk (on the intellectual scene in sixteenth-century Tübingen, see Methuen 1998; on Schegk, see Kusukawa 1999). After completing his master of arts in philosophy (1565), he began to study theology but soon moved on to medicine and completed his medical doctorate at the University of Basel (1570). In 1573, he published his first and most comprehensive work in metaphysics, The Triumph of Philosophy (PT), which pursued the plan to provide a unified account of philosophical and theological truth and thereby to offer a philosophical defense of the doctrine of creation (PT: 220–222, 250–252; for overviews of Taurellus’s metaphysics, see Petersen 1921: 219–258; Mayer 1959; Leinsle 1985: 147–165; Wollgast 1988: 148–153). In spite of its pious intention, and although it appeared with one of Europe’s leading academic publishers of the time, the Henricpetri press, the work was perceived as a provocation and, career-wise, initially turned out to be a failure.