Note on Descartes’s entrance at the Coimbra Colégio das Artes (mid-17th century)

I will confront some testimonies on the earliest entrance of Cartesian ideas in Coimbra with a new testimony taken from a French travelogue (B. de Monconys), referring to a personal visit to the Colégio (Dec. 1645) and the newly appointed Professor of mathematics, John Rishton; only one year after the publication of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (1644), this Jesuit, coming from Liège, was apparently very well informed on Cartesian ideas about the tides and gravity. This fact confirms again how very ‘modern’ ideas penetrated the milieu of the Coimbra Colégio, and the role of international contacts in it, in this case again Jesuit ‘Indipetae’. During the same ‘tour’ de Monconys also met in Lisbon (São Roque) the English Jesuit mathematician Thomas Barton, and received a copy of Cristoforo Borri’s Collecta Astronomica.

Jaar van publicatie:2020

Toegankelijkheid:Open