Between 1592 and 1606, four jesuit professors from the College of Coimbra published a course of Aristotelian Philosophy, known by the title Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Jesu. Given its intrinsic value, he eventually knew a global influence: from the Atlantic to the Urals, the Far East and Latin America. Also some eminent philosophers (e.g. Descartes or Peirce) were readers of the work of Coimbra but, due to the numerous editions that the work met abroad, its overwhelming presence in the european university libraries, has determined the study of philosophy by thousands of students. Written in an accessible language, this monograph aims to give an updated, systematic and rigorous perspective of the main themes addressed in the work Coimbra – logic, physics, psychology, ethics and metaphysics – for the first time presented as «an exposition of philosophical science in a systematic, deductive and disputational form».

Jami explores how the emperor Kangxi solidified the Qing dynasty in 17th-century China through the appropriation of the 'Western learning', and especially the mathematics, of Jesuit missionaries. This text details not only the history of mathematical ideas, but also their political and cultural impact.

This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on “Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period” held in 1999 in Valencia, Spain. The conference was part of the “Five Centuries of the Life of the University of Valencia” (Cinc Segles) celebrations, and from the outset we had the generous support of the “Patronato” (Foundation) overseeing the events. In recent decades, as a result of a renewed attention to the institutional, political, social, and cultural context of scienti?c activity, we have witnessed a reappraisal of the role of the universities in the construction and development of early modern science. In essence, the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the attitudes regarding scienti?c progress or novelty differed from country to country and follow differenttrajectoriesinthecourseoftheearlymodernperiod;(2)institutionsofhigher learning were the main centers of education for most scientists; (3) although the universities were sometimes slow to assimilate new scienti?c knowledge, when they didsoithelpednotonlytoremovethesuspicionthatthenewsciencewasintellectually subversivebutalsotomakesciencearespectableandevenprestigiousactivity;(4)the universities gave the scienti?c movement considerable material support in the form of research facilities such as anatomical theaters, botanical gardens, and expensive instruments; (5) the universities provided professional employment and a means of support to many scientists; and (6) although the relations among the universities and the academies or scienti?c societies were sometimes antagonistic, the two types of institutionsoftenworkedtogetherinharmony,performingcomplementaryratherthan competing functions; moreover, individuals moved from one institution to another, as did knowledge, methods, and scienti?c practices.

Aristotle in Coimbra is the first book to cover the history of both the College of Arts in Coimbra and its most remarkable cultural product, the Cursus Conimbricensis, examining early Jesuit pedagogy as performed in one of the most important colleges run by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The first complete philosophical textbook published by a Jesuit college, the Cursus Conimbricensis (1592–1606) was created by some of the most renowned early Jesuit philosophers and comprised seven volumes of commentaries and disputations on Aristotle’s writings, which had formed the foundation of the university philosophy curriculum since the Middle Ages. In Aristotle in Coimbra, Cristiano Casalini demonstrates the connection between educational practices in a sixteenth-century college and the structure of a scholastic philosophical commentary, providing insight into this particular form of late-scholastic Aristotelianism through historiographical discourse. This book provides both a narrative of the historical background behind the publication of the Cursus and an analysis of the major philosophical and educational issues addressed by its seven volumes. It is valuable reading for all those interested in intellectual history, the history of education and the history of philosophy.

Jesuit Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity, edited by Cristiano Casalini, is the first comprehensive volume to trace the origins and development of Jesuit philosophy during the first century of the Society of Jesus (1540–c.1640). Filling a gap in the history of philosophy, the volume seeks to identify and examine the limits of the “distinctiveness” of Jesuit philosophers during an age of dramatic turbulence in Western thought. The eighteen contributions by some of the leading specialists in various fields are divided into four sections, which guide the reader through cultural milieus, thematic issues, and intellectual biographies to show the impact of Jesuit philosophy on early modern thought.

In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey. Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes. The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.

A craze for intricate metaphors, referred to as conceits, permeated all forms of communication in seventeenth-century Italy and Spain, reshaping reality in highly creative ways. The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe situates itself at the crossroads of rhetoric, poetics, and the history of science, analyzing technical writings on conceits by such scholars as Baltasar Gracián, Matteo Peregrini, and Emanuele Tesauro against the background of debates on telescopic and microscopic vision, the generation of living beings, and the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. It contends that in order to understand conceits, we must locate them within the early modern culture of ingenuity that was also responsible for the engineer’s machines, the juggler’s sleight of hand, the wiles of the statesman, and the discovery of truths about nature.