COIMBRA, Leonardo. - Portuguese philosopher and political figure, born in the district of Felgueiras on 30 Dec. 1883, died in a car accident in the Serra de Baltar on 2 Jan. 1936. He first taught in the lyceums of Porto and Lisbon, later teaching philosophy (1919–31) at the University of Porto. He served as a deputy and twice as Minister of Public Instruction, in 1919 and 1922.
Like Sampaio Bruno, Coimbra defended metaphysics against the claims of scientism and positivism. Sharing with Antero de Quental the view that knowledge is not a matter of sensible representation but rather of the intimate grasp of the spirit and its processes, he rejected the idea of an immobile and absolute reason. “If on one side we posit an identical reason and on the other a variable experience, we cannot establish any equation.”
Initially a systematic idealist in works such as Creacionismo (1902; whose title and content recall Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice), A Morte (1913), O Pensamento criacionista (1914), and A Alegria, a Dôr e a Graça (1916), after a period of crisis represented by A Luta pe la Immortalitade (1916), he grew increasingly preoccupied with religious concerns, which found expression in an anxious and dramatic search with a Catholic orientation in the writings Feno (1923) and A Russia de hoje e a Homem de sempre (1935). In A Razão Experimental (1923) he argued that knowledge is an approximation, greater or lesser, to an absolute truth, never an adequate grasp. Philosophy culminates in religion, which appears almost as its supernatural end.