Jesuits scholars played a crucial role in science and philosophy teaching in Early Modern Portugal. From the mid-16th century until 1759, when the Society of Jesus was expelled from Portugal, Jesuits taught natural philosophy and mathematics to generations of students, disseminated the novelties of Western science as far as China and Japan, and studied the wonders of non-European fauna and flora. Portuguese historians tend to perceive Jesuits scholars as a homogeneous group, unified by a common religious programme. This chapter challenges that view and argues that Jesuits scholars often disagreed among themselves on fundamental questions, such as the planetary systems, celestial matter and dynamics, theory of mixtures, substantial forms, and classification and hierarchy of sciences. However, given the strong confessional strand that lay at the heart of the Society of Jesus, this learned community was particularly affected by official efforts to maintain doctrinal uniformity, as the debates on Copernicanism, universe infinitude or atomism demonstrate. These efforts to circumvent the emergence of tensions and conflicts of ideas resulted in disciplinary decrees that tried to establish limits to the Jesuit spheres of action in the sciences and philosophy. Appeals to preserve the subordination of natural philosophy to metaphysics and the Thomist theology, for example, were regularly issued by the Jesuit authorities until as late as the eve of the Jesuit expulsion from Portugal. Although those institutional constraints did not fossilize Jesuit learning in this country, they contributed to diverting it away from the scientific mainstream.
...MoreBook Sánchez, Antonio; Fontes da Costa, Palmira; Leitão, Henrique de Sousa (2021) Ciência, Tecnologia E Medicina Na Construção de Portugal. 1: Novos Horizontes (Sécs. XV a XVII).
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