Background
Coimbra, Leonardo José was born in December 1883 in Lixa.
Coimbra, Leonardo José was born in December 1883 in Lixa.
University of Lisbon.
Professor of Philosophy, University of Oporto. The most important Portuguese thinker of his time.
Although usually categorized as a ‘creationist’, this term applies accurately only to the first phase of Coimbra’s thought, set out in 1912, 1913 and the simpler exposition of 1914. The key work of this phase is the first, in which Coimbra sets out a metaphysic with extensive debts to Leibniz and Hegel, exhibiting, not unexpectedly, strong elements of rationalism. Reality is monadic, manifesting itself as what we see as the mechanistic system of the world. This mechanism is a means of action of the monads, and only an absolute monad can dispense with it. The monads can be classified as they occur on a scale from those with a minimum of spontaneity to those with complete liberty. A monad is the more real the greater its power of synthesis. Liberty consists in continuous growth, which Coimbra in turn construes as creation: the ultimate process of reality, therefore, is creative thought. Whilst Coimbra retained the presupposition that reality is constantly changing, he came to find this monadism and its accompanying rationalism unsatisfactory. The change begins in the transitional works of 1916 and 1918. He could not accommodate within a rationalistic epistemology certain experiences which he held to be of central importance: they are those brief moments in which the dull façade of routine falls away, and experience is charged instead with sense, meaning and impregnable serenity. These 'nuclei of reality’ are associated with the experiences of happiness, pain and grace, and are emotional intuitions, not findings of reason. Having accepted such intuitions as a key means to truth, Coimbra had to abandon his early rationalism, and a new analysis of reason is developed in the major later works of 1920, 1922 and 1923, notably the last of these. Reason is no longer the locus of immutable laws and concepts and the ultimate arbiter of truth; rather, all its concepts are provisional and mutable, and Coimbra extends this revisability to the foundations ot mathematics. Again, the analytic-synthetic distinction is on this view held to be only a temporary conceptual convenience, and has no special significance. All branches of study, he argues, are révisable in the light of experience, as is reason itself, which he now qualifies as 'experimental reason’. In the works published after 1923, Coimbra turned to religious and moral issues, advocating the ethic which he had proposed throughout his career: acceptance of what there is, accompanied by a responsible use of freedom and belief in the life-enhancing power of love.