Abderitic is a play on words, a thought made up of charades, which according to José Anastácio da Cunha was a characteristic of a scholastic and Jesuit system of thought, marked by the Inquisition.
He then said in his “Literary News about Portugal”, written in 1780:-“What to expect from a Nation in which half awaits the Messiah and the other Dom Sebastião”. And he argued: -“The taste for geometry, for oriental languages, for Greek ended in Portugal. The taste for Concetti, word games, which then began to contaminate Italy, taken to excess by the Spaniards, quickly transformed us into abderites. “.
Cunha, a mathematician persecuted by the Inquisition, will largely be a path of scientific thought and literary studies in Portugal.