ABSTRACT
There is a single place within the whole Cursus where Conimbricenses deal expressly and extensively with education: this place is in the commentary on Topics, when Couto has to deal with the renowned first sentence of Posterior Analytics: “Omnis doctrina, & disciplina ex antecedente cognitione fit” (every doctrine and every discipline comes from a previous knowledge). The Aristotelian sentence presented several pitfalls, which were made more complicated and dangerous by a long-lasting series of Scholastic glossae and commentaries. The first book of Posterior Analytics deals with the logic structure of scientific discourse, that is, the debate on conditions for knowing, arguing on first principles, on demonstrations, on mathematical reasoning. In short, on the logical legitimation for knowledge. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the very beginning of the book was still a delicate issue for Jesuit logicians, all the more so as under their influence men as Galileo Galilei exercised themselves in Aristotelian logic. Galilei’s De Praecognitionibus et Praecognitis dealt with the most thorny problem implied in the sentence.1 The inheritance by Galileo of some teachings of the Collegio Romano was founded on certain aspects of that teaching which were peculiar to the Jesuits in relation to the most widespread Thomistic positions. Moreover, in the commentary on this section of Posterior Analytics (i.e. at the core of the Topics, where logical questions become foundations for knowledge), the Jesuits made room for an empirical attitude toward language and education, an attitude cleansed of the last residues of Platonism.
