Cognitive and Moral Psychology in Renaissance Philosophy: A Study of Juan Luis Vives' De anima et vita

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the cognitive and moral psychology of Juan Luis Vives (1493-1540), paying close attention to the background out of which his views developed. Vives’ philosophical reflections on the human soul are mainly concentrated in his treatise De anima et vita (1538), which became very influential during the century after its publication. The first chapter of the dissertation is devoted to a discussion of Vives’ descriptive approach to the philosophical study of the soul, emphasizing the relation between this method and the tradition of Academic scepticism. The second chapter examines Vives’ views on the soul and its relation to the body. His approach is described as an attempt to reconcile the Aristotelian view of the soul as an organizing and animating principle with the Platonic conception of the soul as an immaterial and immortal substance. This chapter also contains a discussion of the question of the immortality of the soul, which was perhaps the most hotly debated philosophical issue of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century, to which Vives devotes the longest chapter of his treatise. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with Vives’ approach of faculty psychology and provide a survey of his account of the vegetative and sensitive faculties (Chapter 3), as well as of the three faculties of the rational soul, i.e. mind, memory and will (Chapter 4). The last chapter is devoted to a discussion of Vives’ view of emotions, to which he dedicates almost half of his treatise.