On the Interpretations of the Cultural and Techno-Scientific Significance of Portuguese Navigations: A Historiographic Approach

Asking why modern science appears in Europe, H. Floris Cohen (in How modern science came into the world) speaks about three traditions that merge in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe: speculative philosophy, pure and applied mathematics, and experimentalism that inquires into the facts of nature. This last tradition originated in navigation and exploration of new territories, trade, mining, and technological development that uses mathematics, producing a “coercive empiricism.” Floris Cohen and his mentor Reijer Hooykaas both relate Portuguese nautical knowledge with a new attitude decisive for the rise of modern science. Hooykaas learned the Portuguese language and read the Portuguese literature of the period and its interpretation by Portuguese historians who conceptualized the notions of experimentalism, geographic and intellectual revolution, and its social-cultural conditioning. This chapter offers an inquiry into the genealogy and on the affinity of the theses defended by Hooykaas and his Portuguese predecessors. Based on works produced essentially during the First Republic (1910–1926) and during the Estado Novo (1926–1974), it will be shown that there is a historiographic lineage, tainted with pragmatism, which links authors such as Joaquim Bensaúde, António Sérgio, the brothers Jaime and Armando Cortesão, Silva Dias, Barradas de Carvalho, and Reijer Hooykaas and which is related to the thesis of L. Olschki and E. Zilsel concerning the practical and social origins of modern science.