COIMBRA, LEONARDO. - Portuguese philosopher and politician, b. in the district of Felgueiras on 30 Dec. 1883, d. in an automobile accident in the Serra de Baltar on 2 Jan. 1936. A teacher first in the lyceums of Porto and Lisbon, he later taught philosophy (1919-31) at the University of Porto. He was a deputy and Minister of Public Education on two occasions, in 1919 and in 1922.
Like Sampaio Bruno, he defends metaphysics against the claims of scientism and positivism. With Antero de Quental he shares the idea that knowledge does not have sensible representation as its model, but rather the intimate apprehension of the spirit and of its process, yet he rejects the idea of an immobile and absolute reason. « If on the one hand we posit an identical reason and on the other a variable experience, we shall not be able to establish any equation ».
At first a systematic idealist in the works Creacionismo (1902; whose title and content recall Bergson's L'Évolution créatrice); A Morte (1913); O Pensamento criacionista (1914); A Alegria, a Dór e a Graça (1916), after a period of crisis represented by A Luta de la Immortolidade (1916), he shows ever more vividly the religious concerns that are translated into a restless and dramatic search with a Catholic orientation in the writings Jena (1923) and A Russia de hoje e o Homen de sempre (1935). In Razão Experimental (1923) he maintains that knowledge is an approximation, greater or lesser, to an absolute truth, never an adequate apprehension. Philosophy leads to religion, which presents itself almost as its supernatural term.
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Andrea Ferro