COIMBRA, LEONARDO. – Portuguese philosopher and politician, born in the district of Felgueiras on 30 December 1883, died in an automobile accident in the Serra of Baltar on 2 January 1936. He was first a professor in the secondary schools of Porto and Lisbon, and subsequently taught philosophy (1919–31) at the University of Porto. He was a deputy and Minister of Public Education on two occasions, in 1919 and 1922.
Like Sampaio Bruno, he defended metaphysics against the claims of scientism and positivism. He shared with Antero de Quental the idea that knowledge does not have sensible representation as its type, but rather the intimate apprehension of the spirit and of its process; yet he rejected 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 be unable to establish any equation.”
Initially a systematic idealist in the works Creacionismo (1902; whose title and content recall Bergson’s Evolution 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 increasingly displayed religious concerns, which found expression in an uneasy and dramatic quest 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 maintained that knowledge is an approximation, greater or lesser, to an absolute truth, never an adequate apprehension of II. Philosophy culminates in religion, which presents itself almost as its supernatural end.