Descubrimiento de la aguja nautica, de la situacion de la America, del arte de navegar, y de un nuevo metodo para el adelantamiento en las artes y ciencias

[8],+320 pages. Small quarto (8 1/2" x 5 3/4") bound in contemporary vellum with title in script on spine. (Medina BHA 5346; Palau 214290; Sabin 58993) First edition.

Fray Antonio Raimundo Pascual was a Majorcan Cistercian brother. He wrote at least six works that were published in his lifetime, four of which dealt with Llull.

Treatise seeking to show that the medieval Catalan thinker Ramón Lull (or Llull; 1232?-1316), a native of Palma, Majorca, had discovered the use of the magnetic compass in navigation, and that Lull's theories regarding the existence of a Western continent influenced Columbus.

Llull's Art (in Latin Ars) is at the center of his thought and undergirds his entire corpus. It is a system of universal logic based on a set of general principles activated in a combinatorial process. It can be used to prove statements about God and Creation (e.g., God is a Trinity). Often the Art formulates these statements as questions and answers (e.g., Q: Is there a Trinity in God? A: Yes.). It works cumulatively through an iterative process; statements about God's nature must be proved for each of His essential attributes in order to prove the statement true for God (i.e., Goodness is threefold, Greatness is threefold, Eternity is threefold, Power is threefold, etc.). Llull's Art is sometimes recognized as a precursor to computer science and computation theory. With the discovery in 2001 of his lost manuscripts, Ars notandi, Ars eleccionis, and Alia ars eleccionis, Llull is also given credit for creating an electoral system now known as the Borda count and Condorcet criterion, which Jean-Charles de Borda and Nicolas de Condorcet independently proposed centuries later.

There are some curious notices regarding the early Majorcan cosmographers, and others with respect to the Benedictine Brother Bernardo Boil, who, with twelve companions, accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, with the aim of converting the Indians. Boil is supposed to have said the first mass in the New World.

Condition: Minor wear; minor dampstaining else very god.