Coronel, Luis Nuñez

Coronel, Luis Nuñez

(b. Segovia, Spain, second half of fifteenth century; d. Spain or Canary Islands, 1531),

logic, natural philosophy.

Coronel received his early education at Salamanca and then went, around 1500, to the Collège de Montaigu at the University of Paris, where he was taught by John Major. He was at the Sorbonne in 1504 as a guest and in 1509 as a fellow. Ordained a priest in 1512, he received the licentiate in theology on 26 January 1514 and the doctorate on 29 May 1514. His brother, Antonio, was John Major’s favored disciple and a close friend of Peter Crokaert of Brussels and other Dominicans at St.-Jacques; Antonio is important for his works on logic.

Coronel left Paris around 1517, after Francisco (later Domingo) de Soto’s arrival there; in 1520 he was in Flanders as preacher and adviser at the court of Charles V, and in 1521 or 1522 served with the Inquisition at Brussels. Here he came to know Erasmus, who regarded him as an ally and with whom he later corresponded. In 1527 he was secretary to Alfonso Monrique, archbishop of Seville; and in the same year, according to a letter of Juan Luis Vives to Erasmus, he was made bishop of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

At Paris, Coronel published his Tractatus [de formatione] syllogismorum in 1507 (or 1508) and his more important Physicae perscrutationes in 1511; the latter was based on his lectures at Montaigu and went through three additional known editions (Lyons, 1512, 1530; Alcalá, 1539). Coronel’s physical doctrines were influenced by Jean Dullaert of Ghent and Alvaro Thomaz; and he cites approximately the same sources as they among the Oxford “calculators,” the Paris “terminists,” and various Italian writers. Jean Buridan, Richard Swineshead, Albert of Saxony, and Gregory of Rimini are mentioned by him with greatest frequency.

Coronel’s “investigations” (166 folios in the Lyons edition of 1512) are located in the framework of Aristotle’s Physics, with long digressions on motion (thirty-five folios in book III) and on infinity (thirty-eight folios in book VIII). The tract on motion successively investigates local motion, alteration (including the intensity of forms), augmentation, and the velocities of motions; it contains little original apart from the thesis that impetus is not really distinct from local motion. Coronel treats infinity mainly in relation to God’s power, holding that God can produce a syncategorematic, but not a categorematic, infinity; in this he differs from John Major and Juan de Celaya.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Neither of Coronel’s works is translated into English; a copy of the Perscrutationes is at the University of Wisconsin. Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, III (Paris, 1913), gives numerous brief excerpts in French translation. Hubert Élie, ed., Le traité “De l’infini” de Jean Mair (Paris, 1938), appendix 5, provides a lengthy French translation from the tract on infinity.

II. Secondary Literature. Coronel’s work is discussed in Hubert Elie, “Quelques maîtres de l’université de Paris vers l’an 1500,” in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 18 (1950–1951), 193–243, esp. 212–213; R. G. Villoslada, La universidad de Paris durante los estudios de Francisco de Vitoria, O. P. (1507–1522), vol. XIV in Analecta Gregoriana (Rome, 1938), esp. pp. 386–390; and William A. Wallace, “The Concept of Motion in the Sixteenth Century,” in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 41 (1967), 184–195.

William A. Wallace, O. P.