Jacques Rohault

Jacques Rohault (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, and educated in Paris, he grew up with scholastic philosophy but adopted and popularised the new Cartesian physics. His celebrated Wednesday lectures in Paris, begun in the 1650s, attracted among others Pierre-Sylvain Régis. He held to the mechanical philosophy and gave qualified support to its corpuscular explanation of nature. His Traité de physique of 1671 became a standard textbook for half a century and followed Regius in separating physics from metaphysics. Samuel Clarke's annotated translation later corrected it by the theories of Isaac Newton. Rohault's experimental approach drew on Descartes, Pascal, Harvey and others and stayed popular despite criticism of his theories.