ABSTRACT
Descartes mentions the commentaries of the Coimbrans only twice in his correspondence.1 In 1640, anticipating objections by the Jesuits to the Meditationes, and having some desire ‘to re-read a bit of their Philosophy’, he asks Mersenne to send him the names of the authors ‘whom they follow most closely’. Wondering whether anything new has appeared in the last twenty years, Descartes adds that he recalls ‘only the Coimbrans, Toletus, and Rubius’; he also remembers, but not by name, ‘a Chartreuse or Feuillant’ who wrote an abrégé of ‘the whole School Philosophy’.2 That author turned out to be Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, and it was to Eustachius’ Summa quadripartita, which is indeed a greatly condensed compilation of other philosophers’ works, that he eventually turned; he still wished, however, that the Coimbrans had written something as brief, since he would have preferred to ‘deal with the great Society itself, rather than with a particular person’.3 Descartes briefly envisaged the uncharacteristic project of a commentary on the School Philosophy – a reprint of the Summa, to which Descartes’ own disputationes would be attached.4 He gave that up after a year or so.5 The Principia philosophiae, which by then he had begun, contains no Aristotelian arguments; it mentions no philosopher of the Schools by name. Eustachius, Coimbra, Abra de Raconis, the tags remembered from his days sous la férule at La Flèche, the fruits of his recent attempts to arm himself against the ‘grande Société’: all are absorbed into a mass designated by the term ‘Philosophers’, from which only Aristotle himself emerges to be named. In that distinction one may already divine the subsequent divergence of Aristotle’s fortunes from those of almost all his commentators. His works, after a temporary eclipse, have regained their central place in the canon; all but a few of the commentators have vanished into the archive of the unread.
