Jacques Rohault

Jacques Rohault, who lived from 1618 to 1672, was a French philosopher, physicist and mathematician and a follower of Cartesianism. Born in Amiens, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, he was educated in Paris, where, having grown up with the scholastic philosophy of his day, he adopted and popularised the new Cartesian physics. His Wednesday lectures in Paris, begun in the 1650s, became celebrated and drew pupils such as Pierre-Sylvain Régis. He held to the mechanical philosophy and gave qualified support to its corpuscular form of explanation. His Traité de physique of 1671 became a standard textbook for half a century and followed Henricus Regius in separating physics from metaphysics; the annotated Latin translation by Samuel Clarke, which corrected it with reference to the theories of Newton, gave it numerous further editions. He died in Paris in 1672.