Fonseca Pedro da (1528–99), Portuguese philosopher and logician. He entered the Jesuit order in 1548. Apart from a period (1572–82) in Rome, he lived in Portugal, teaching philosophy and theology at the universities of Evora and Coimbra and performing various administrative duties for his order. He was responsible for the idea of a published course on Aristotelian philosophy, and the resulting series of Coimbra commentaries, the Cursus Conimbricensis, was widely used in the seventeenth century. His own logic text, the Institutes of Dialectic (1564), went into many editions. It is a good example of Renaissance Aristotelianism, with its emphasis on Aristotle’s syllogistic, but it retains some material on medieval developments, notably consequences, exponibles, and supposition theory. Fonseca also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (published in parts from 1577 on), which contains the Greek text, a corrected Latin translation, comments on textual matters, and an extensive exploration of selected philosophical problems. He cites a wide range of medieval philosophers, both Christian and Arab, as well as the newly published Greek commentators on Aristotle. His own position is sympathetic to Aquinas, but generally independent. Fonseca is important not so much for any particular doctrines, though he did hold original views on such matters as analogy, but for his provision of fully documented, carefully written and carefully argued books that, along with others in the same tradition, were read at universities, both Catholic and Protestant, well into the seventeenth century. He represents what is often called the Second Scholasticism. E.J.A.