(210) 31st Article : Cristoforo Borri and the epistemological status of mathematics in seventeenth-century Portugal

Contrary to the traditional historiography of the introduction of new astronomical theories to Portugal, Borri does not do advanced astronomers to assess Copernicus's ideas or to defend Brahe's cosmological model, nor him. Even the first to describe astronomical observations by Galileo. About 12 years before his arrival on the Lusitanian land, those issues were discussed at the main Portuguese mathematics training center, Jesuit Colégio Santo Antão. reject the established historiographical understanding of the strict notion of its main precursor Functions involving the communication of scientific ideas, I argue that Borri laid the epistemological foundation of a new approach to cosmology through his advocacy of the mathematical nature of mathematics within the Aristotelian Philosophical frameworks Challenging views traditionally supported by Jesuit philosophers in quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum, Borri states not only that Euclidean math conforms to all the main features of the Aristotelian. Through the epistemological improvement of the mathematical rank of the scientist Aristotle, Borri manages to overcome the traditionally separate chasm of mathematical astronomy from the study of the physics of the heavens. Moreover precisely because he advanced mathematics in Aristotle's rigorous background, revealing to his fellow philosophers the potential mathematical assumptions as the place where Aristotelian scientific demonstrations could be based, Borri succeeded in placing the mathematical data firmly in philosophical debate. Mathematical knowledge derived from astronomical observations, From trigonometric calculations, or from geometric diagrams, emerges as a key element in Aristotle's understanding of nature.