Martinus Smiglecius

Marcin Śmiglecki (Latin: Martinus Smiglecius or Leopolitanus, ; 11 November 1564 – 26 or 28 July 1618) was a Polish Jesuit philosopher and logician, known for his erudite scholastic Logica.

Life He was born on 11 November 1564 in Lwów (Leopolis) in the Kingdom of Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). He used the surname Lwowczyk, or Leopolitanus, and later adopted the name Śmiglecki or Smiglecius (after the town of Śmigiel, from which his family originated). He attended the Jesuit school in Pułtusk and until 1586 studied in Rome, where he joined the Jesuit order in 1581. His education was financed by the prominent Polish statesman Jan Zamojski. He obtained a master's degree in philosophy and a doctor's degree in theology at the Academy of Vilnius, and taught philosophy and theology there.

He spent the last 20 years of his life teaching in the colleges of Pułtusk, Poznań, Kraków and Kalisz. He died in Kalisz on 26 or 28 July 1618. It harked back to Gregory of Rimini, discussing mental propositions. As a textbook author his reputation survived in the satirical poem The Logicians Refuted, attributed to both Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. Samuel Johnson, writing in 1751 as a fictitious correspondent in The Rambler, claimed that as a student he "slept every night with Śmiglecki on my pillow."

Views In a live controversy of the time, Śmiglecki sided with Benedict Pereira against Giuseppe Biancani. The issue was the status of mathematical proof in physics, where Pereyra denied mathematics an essential status.