VIVES, JUAN LUIS

(b. Valencia, Spain, 6 March 1492; d. Bruges, Netherlands [now Belgium], 6 May 1540), education, philosophy, psychology.

Probably born to Jewish parents who adopted Catholicism in the oppressive religious atmosphere of fifteenth-century Spain,¹ Vives became one of the greatest Catholic humanists of sixteenth-century Europe. After early schooling in liberal Valencia, he left Spain in 1510 (never to return) and entered the University of Paris, where Spanish masters and students flourished. There, under Gaspar Lax and Jean Dullaert of Ghent, Vives received a Scholastic education that emphasized Aristotelian terminist logic, dialectic, and disputation, a program against which his developing humanist inclinations soon rebelled.

In 1512 Vives was attracted to the Low Countries, especially Bruges, where in 1514 he took up permanent residence (he married Margaret Valdaura of Bruges in 1524), and Louvain, where he attended lectures at the university in 1514 and qualified as lecturer in 1520.

Over the years Vives left Bruges intermittently. Especially significant is the period between 1523 and 1528, when he lectured at Oxford University (Corpus Christi College) and met, or continued earlier friendships with, Thomas More, John Fisher, and Thomas Linacre, and was highly regarded by Henry VIII and his queen, Catherine of Aragon. When Henry sought to divorce Catherine and relations between Henry and Spain soured. Vives fell under a cloud. His lectureship at Oxford was terminated in 1527 and he was banished from England in 1528. Frequently ill and plagued with debt, Vives produced many of his most important works during the last decade of his life.

On intimate terms with the greatest humanists of his day, including Erasmus and Budé. Vives was not only a master of classical Latin literature (he apparently cared much less for the Greek classics) but also wrote on religion, education, rhetoric, philosophy, methodology, science, and politics. Science and philosophy were not of interest for their own sakes, but only insofar as they could prove of practical use in subduing human passions and improving morality. Vives believed that original sin had weakened human reason to the extent that it could not determine nature’s primary, necessary principles and was, therefore, incapable of arriving at scientific demonstration in the strict Aristotelian sense. Human knowledge was dependent on experience derived from the five fallible senses. Since the true essences of things transcended experience, knowledge of them lay beyond human reason. Man’s knowledge of things was therefore based upon probability, conjecture, and approximation, which were, however, adequate because, despite original sin, God had generously allowed man sufficient reason to master nature, as evidenced by human control over the sublunar region.² By assuming that God guaranteed the reliability of human knowledge to whatever extent was necessary, Vives avoided falling into total skepticism. The basic empiricism described here formed the foundation of his theories of education, which emphasized observation, simple experiments, and direct experience.

Vives has been justly hailed as a major figure in the history of psychology. He held that the essence of the soul—mind—was indescribable.³It could be known only by its actions, as observed by the internal and external senses. Before Descartes and Francis Bacon, Vives developed an empirical psychology in which he advocated the study of mental activity introspectively and in others. He formulated a theory of association of ideas from an elaborate analysis of memory. If two ideas are implanted in the mind simultaneously, or within a short interval of time, the occurrence of one would cause the recall of the other.⁴

In commemorating the fourth centenary of Vives’ death, the Bibliothèque Nationale exhibited over five hundred editions of his works.⁵ They bear witness to his great influence on his own and subsequent centuries.

NOTES

1. Carlos G. Noreña, “Juan Luis Vives,” 18-22.

2.De prima philosophia, bk, I, in Opera omnia, III, 188.

3.De anima et vita (Bruges, 1538), in Opera omnia, III, 332.

4.Ibid., 349-350.

5. Noreña, op. cit. 1. For the catalog of the exhibition, see J. Estelrich, Vivès, exposition organisée à la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, janvier-mars, 1941 (Paris, 1942).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Vives’ Opera ominia was first published at Basel in 1555. Relying heavily on the Basel ed., Gregorio Mayans y Síscar published the only other ed. of the collected works: Joannis Ludovici Vivis valentini Opera omnia, 8 vols. (Valencia, 1782-1790; repr. London, 1964). Although incomplete (as in the earlier Basel ed., it lacks the Commentaries on Saint Augustine and perhaps a few other minor works; see Noreña, “Juan luis Vives,” 4), it does include the works relevant to science and philosophy, which appear in vols. III and VI. In addition to a number of brief treatises vol III contains De Aristotelis operibus censura, De instrumento probabilitatis liber unus, De syllogismo, De prima philosophia, sive De intimo naturae opificio (in three books), and De anima et vita (a lengthy treatise in three books, which treats many of the traditional topics in Aristotle’s De anima; a photocopy repr. of the Basel ed. [1538] of this work was issued by Mario Sancipriano [Turin, 1959]); vol. VI contains the De disciplinis, composed of two parts, De causis corruptarum artium in seven bks., depicting the low state of the arts in Vives’ day (especially relevant are book 3, which treats logic, and book 5, which denounces natural philosophy, medicine, and mathematics), and De tradendis disciplinis, in five bks., devoted to the reformation and revitalization of the fallen arts.

For a chronological list of Vives’ works, see Carlos G. Noreñ, Juan Luis Vives, which is vol. 34 in International Archives of the History of Ideas (The Hague, 1970), app. 2, 307-308; app. 1, 300-306, is “Editions of Vives’ Main Works From 1520-1650” (also see Sancipriano’s bibliography of eds., pp. x-xiv of his repr. ed of De anima et vita, cited above). For the translations into Spanish and English, see Noreña, op. cit., 310-311; and, despite the title, for English translations of Vives’ Latin works, see Remigio Ugo Pane, English Translations From the Spanish 1484-1943; A Bibliography (New Brunswick, N.J., 1944), 201-202.

II. Secondary Literature. Extensive bibliographies of secondary literature appear in Noreña (see above), 311-321; and Sancipriano’s ed. of De anima et vita (see above), xiv-xviii. Noreña also includes a useful survey of the history of research on Vives in ch. 1: “The Vicissitudes of Vives’ Fame,” 1-14.

The standard biography and evaluation of Vives’ work is Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, Luis Vives y la filosofia del renacimiento, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1903). A briefer, but still substantial account of Vives’ life is Lorenzo Riber’s intro. to his Spanish trans. of Vives’ Opera omnia, in Juan Luis Vives Obras completas, 2 vols. (Madrid. 1947-1948), 13-225. Critical of previous biographical accounts, especially on the question of Vives’ Jewish parentage, is Noreña (see above), pt. 1. “The Life of Juan Luis Vives,” 1-6, 1-120; a briefer biographical sketch appears in Vives; “Introduction to Wisdom,” a Renaissance Textbook, edited, with an introduction, by Marian Leona Tobriner, S.N.J.M., which is no. 35 in the series Classics in Education (New York, 1968), 9-36.

Vives’ attitudes toward Scholastic philosophy and science and his own views of science appear to have received little attention. Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, 3 vols. (Paris, 1906-1913), describes Vives’ scornful and vivid denunciation of Scholastic education in medicine, logic, and natural philosophy at the University of Paris (III, 168-172, 180-181, 488, 490). Of substantive scientific ideas, Duhem mentions (III, 144-146) only Vives’ acceptance of the much debated Scholastic “moment of rest” (quies media) alleged to occur between the upward violent motion of a projectile and its subsequent downward motion. A sense of Vives’ attitude to Scholastic philosophy and science can be gleaned from Noreña (see above), pt. 2, “Vives’ Thought,” 131-299. For Vives’ role as an educational reformer. See William Harrison Woodward, “Juan Luis Vives, 1492-1540,” in Studies in Education During the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600 (New York, 1965; original publication, 1906), 180-210, and Foster Watson, “Vives On Education,” in Vives: On Education A Translation of the De tradendis disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives, with an introduction by Foster Watson and a foreword by Francesco Cordasco (Totowa, N. J., 1971; original publication, 1913), ci-clvii. Contributions by Vives to education and psychology are briefly summarized by Walter. A. Daly, The Educational Psychology of Juan Luis Vives (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1924); and Foster Watson, “The Father of Modern Psychology,” in Psychological Review, 22 , no. 5 (Sept. 1915), 333-353.

Edward Grant