Fonseca, Pedro

Abstract

Pedro da Fonseca, S.J., was a Jesuit philosopher in the sixteenth century during Iberia’s second scholasticism. Known as the “Portuguese Aristotle,” Fonseca helped organize and oversee the massive project known as the Cursus Conimbricensis that commented on many of the works of Aristotle. Fonseca also helped devise and implement the Jesuits’ Ratio Studiorum, which was a kind of ground plan for the nature and dynamics of Jesuit education. Fonseca himself contributed to Jesuit education with the composition of his Institutionum dialecticarum, which was an eight-volume treatise devoted to logic and was eventually adopted as an official textbook at a number of Jesuit universities. Fonseca also produced a critical edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, to which he added a Latin translation and commentary. Later in life, Fonseca authored yet another logical text, a shorter one this time: the Isagoge philosophica. Fonseca died in Lisbon in 1599.