The work of the Jesuit Juan Martinez de Ripalda On the use and abuse of Divine Thoma’s doctrine it is a response to the dominical community accusations in the controversy sustained with the Jesuits in the seventeenth century about university academic privileges in the New Kingdom of Granada. The work is not only a historical record of the polemic; it also reveals the thematic content of the philosophical teachings of the Jesuits during the Colonial period. This paper places the general (...) historical context in which the work appeared in order to analyze the modern spirit of the Jesuit Juan Martinez de Ripalda’s doctrine on the nature of human knowledge. (shrink)