Robert Balfour
Robert Balfour (
1550?—
1625?),
Scottish philosopher, was educated at
St Andrews and the university of
Paris. He was for many years principal of the Guienne College at
Bordeaux. His great work is his
Commentarii in Organum Logicum Aristotelis (Bordeaux,
1618); the copy in the
British Museum contains a number of highly eulogistic poems in honour of Balfour, who is described as Graium aemulus acer. Balfour was one of the scholars who contributed to spread over
Europe the faine of the praefervidum ingenium Scotorum. His contemporary, Dempster, called him the "phoenix of his age, a philosopher profoundly skilled in the
Greek and
Latin languages, and a mathematician worthy of being compared with the ancients." His Cleomedis meteora, with notes and Latin translation, was reprinted at
Leiden as late as
1820.