Antoine Arnauld 1612 – 1694

Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, logician, and philosopher and the leading figure of the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal. With Pierre Nicole he produced the Port-Royal Logic, a Cartesian-influenced manual of reasoning that long defined the teaching of logic in France and elsewhere. He carried on a long and celebrated correspondence with Descartes and Leibniz on metaphysics and divine grace, while his polemical writings against the Jesuits made him a controversial public figure. He spent the last decades of his life in exile in the Netherlands.