Alonso Briceño

Alonso Briceño (1587–1668) was born at Santiago de Chile and educated at Lima, where he entered the Franciscan order in 1605. He taught philosophy and theology at Lima, held offices in his province, and travelled to Spain, where he published his major work. He was appointed bishop of Nicaragua in the 1640s and later bishop of Caracas, and he died in Venezuela in 1668.

Briceño is one of the earliest and most important Scotist writers born in the Americas. His Celebriorum controversiarum in primum Sententiarum Ioannis Scoti, printed at Madrid in two volumes between 1638 and 1642, sets out and defends the teaching of Duns Scotus on the first book of the Sentences, on God's being, attributes and knowledge, and discusses the positions of the Thomists and the Jesuits at length. Writers on the history of Latin American thought regard it as a principal work of colonial scholasticism.

The library holds the second tome of the Celebriores controversiae, on God's knowledge and the divine ideas. It is a substantial example of seventeenth-century Scotism, to be compared with Frassen's Scotus academicus.