Jacques Rohault (; 1618 – 27 December 1672) was a French people philosopher, physicist and mathematician, and a follower of Cartesianism.
Life
Rohault was born in
Amiens, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and educated in
Paris. Having grown up with the conventional scholastic philosophy of his day, he adopted and popularised the new Cartesian physics. His Wednesday lectures in Paris became celebrated; they began in the 1650s, and attracted in particular Pierre-Sylvain Régis.
Rohault died on December 27, 1672, in Paris.
Works
Rohault held to the mechanical philosophy, and gave qualified support to its "corpuscular" or atomic form of explanation, assuming that "small figured bodies" were the underlying physical reality. His
Traité de physique (Paris, 1671) became a standard textbook for half a century.
It followed the precedent set by
Henricus Regius in separating physics from
metaphysics.
It also included the theory of
gravitation of Christiaan Huygens, given in terms of an experiment.
The translation of
Samuel Clarke (initially into Latin) gained an independent status, and numerous editions, through its annotations that purported to correct it with reference to the theories of
Isaac Newton. Rohault's experimental orientation remained popular, despite the criticisms of his theories.
The Traité referred to a model of the eye that Rohault had worked on.
