Thought

Vives aspired at replacing the scholastic curriculum with one more appropriate to a classical education. His program of reformation starts with the publication of In pseudodialecticos (1520), a satirical diatribe against scholastic logic in which he voices his opposition on several counts. In his criticism, he follows in the footsteps of humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola, who set about to replace the scholastic curriculum, based on syllogistic and disputation, with a treatment of logic oriented toward the use of topics and persuasion. Vives’ severe censure of scholastic logic was based on his own experience with the scholastic curriculum at Paris. Thus, as he himself emphasized, no one could accuse him of condemning what he did not understand.

The main targets of Vives’ criticism are Peter of Spain’s Summule logicales, a work that kept an important place in the curriculum of the universities, and the theory of the property of terms. He repudiates the use of technical jargon accessible only to a narrow group of professionals and maintains that if the scholastic logicians only spoke plainly and according to common usage, many of their conundrums would disappear. Instead, they choose to fritter away their ingenuity on logically ambiguous propositions known as sophismata. Vives provides many examples of such propositions, which in his view make no sense and are certainly of no use. Since dialectic deals, like rhetoric and grammar, with language, its rules should be adapted to ordinary language. But with what language, he asks, has these propositions to do? Moreover, dialectic is an art to be learned not for its own sake, but as a support to the other arts, therefore no more effort should be spent on it than is necessary. His criticism is also informed by ethical concerns and the demand for a method that would be ofuse in everyday life rather than in academic disputations.

A more detailed criticism can be found in De disciplinis (1531). This encyclopaedic work is divided into three parts: De causis corruptarum artium, seven books devoted to a thorough critique of the foundations of contemporary education; De tradendis disciplinis, five books where Vives’ educational reform is outlined; and five shorter treatises De artibus dealing mainly with logic and metaphysics. These include De prima philosophia, a compendium of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics from a Christian point of view; De censura veri, a discussion of the proposition and the forms of argumentation; De explanatione cuiusque essentiae; De instrumento probabilitatis, which contains a theory of knowledge, as well as a thorough account of dialectical invention; and De disputatione, in which he discusses nonformal proofs. In these treatises, Vives not only continues the trends in humanist dialectic initiated by Valla and Agricola, but also proves a familiarity with philosophical technicalities that was unusual among most humanists and that reveals the more traditionally Aristotelian aspects of his thought. His appraisal of Aristotle’s works is also summarized in Censura de Aristotelis operibus (1538). A posthumous work entitled Dialectices libri quator (1550), which was one of Thomas Reid’s primary sources for his A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic (1774), appears to be a youthful work that Vives evidently did not consider suitable for publication.

Vives’ criticism of scholastic logic hinges on a profound analysis of the sermocinal arts. In his view, the supremacy of the sermo communis over the abstract language of metaphysics is indisputable. Moreover, philosophy ought not to invent the language and subject of its own specific investigation. Instead of the formal language of the dialecticians, which he found completely unfitted to interpret reality, he proposes the less rigorous but more concrete universe of everyday communication, which answers to our practical necessities and aims to a knowledge that is useful.

Vives was pessimistic about the attainment of knowledge as understood in Aristotelian terms and his thought anticipates the moderate skepticism of early modern philosophers such as Francisco Sanchez and Pierre Gassendi. Vives belongs, like Francis Bacon, to the so-called maker’s knowledge tradition, which regards knowledge as a kind of making or as a capacity to make. He often insists on the significance of the practical nature of knowledge, maintaining that peasants and artisans know nature much better than many philosophers. A central tenet of the maker’s knowledge tradition is that man can gain no access into nature’s intimate works, since these, as opera divina, are only known to their maker.

Vives subscribes to the Aristotelian principle that all of our knowledge has its origin in perception. In his view, we cannot learn anything except through the senses. But since that which is incorporeal or hidden cannot be grasped by the senses, sense perception does not yield any knowledge of the essence of things but only of their accidents. Vives’ view, however, is that sense knowledge must nonetheless be transcended. This step is meant to be taken by means of reasoning. However, one must not fail to notice that, according to Vives, the best thing human reason can accomplish in this process is to provide judgement with all the evidence available in order to increase the probability of the conclusion. In his view, our knowledge of the essence of a thing is only an approximate guess based on the sensible operations of the thing in question.

According to Vives, the most reliable guide of human inquiry is represented by a natural propensity toward what is good and true. This light of our mind, as he also calls it, is always, directly or indirectly, inclined toward what is good and true, and can be regarded as the beginning and origin of prudence and all sciences and arts. Human knowledge can nevertheless be nothing other than a finite participation into creation. Because of the limitations that characterize man’s fallen state, investigations into the realm ofnature can only lead to conjectures, and not to firm and indubitable knowledge, which we neither deserve nor need. In his view, certainty is not a prerequisite for advances in science and philosophy, and as a criterion for scientific progress and for the rational conduct of life, he advocates a method consisting in sound judgement based on experience.

Vives’ moral philosophy stems mainly from his Christian humanism and aims at the reform of both individuals and society. He often proclaims the superiority of Christian ethics above pagan wisdom. In De causis corruptarium artium, he argues at length that Aristotle’s ethics, on account of its worldly conception of happiness and virtue, is completely incompatible with Christian religion. He has more sympathy for Platonism and Stoicism, which he believes are broadly in line with Christian morality. Inspired by the teaching of Socrates and the Stoics, he recommends self-knowledge as the first step toward virtue, which he regards as the culmination of human perfection. In his view, vice follows from a wrong judgment about the value of things. To be wise, however, is not only to have true opinions about things, but also to translate this knowledge into action by desiring honorable things and avoiding evil. Wisdom therefore requires the subordination of the passions to the leadership of the intellect. Vives professed the belief that moral and practical training of the individual are the best means to secure the reform of society. He saw the development of society as a distinctly human achievement based on the ability to profit from experience and turn knowledge to useful ends. He regarded social problems, such as poverty and war, as the result of emotional disorders.

Vives’ philosophical reflections on the human soul are mainly concentrated in De anima et vita (1538), which provides the psychological underpinnig for many of his educational ideas and might be characterized as a prolegomenon to moral philosophy. His approach attempts 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. He also pays close attention to physiology and, following the Galenic tradition, maintains that our mental capacities depend on the temperament of the body.

The organizing principle of the treatise is indebted to the traditional approach of faculty psychology in which the soul is described as being composed of a number of different faculties or powers each directed toward a different object and responsible for a distinct operation. The first book covers the functions of the vegetative soul, that is, nutrition, growth, and reproduction; the sensitive

Soul, that is, the external senses; and the cogitative soul, that is, the internal senses. The second book deals with the functions of the rational soul, whose faculties are mind, will, and memory; as well as with topics stemming from Aristotle’s Parva naturalia, such as sleep, dreams, and longevity. The third and final book explores the emotions, which he conceives, rejecting the Stoic view, as natural responses to the way things appear to us and as essential constituents of human life.

Vives’ writings saw hundreds of editions and were translated into several vernacular languages. They became widely read and extremely influential during the century after their publication. His critical attitude toward the Aristotelian orthodoxy of his day left a mark on several authors. Psychology was another area whithin which he enjoyed considerable success. His views were recommended, quoted, or discussed by Phillipp Melanchon, Francisco Suarez, Robert Burton, Rene Descartes, and William Hamilton, among many others. During the second half of the nineteenth century and the fist decades of the twentieth century, Vives was read and studied by philosophers such as Ernest Renan, Friedrich Albert Lange, Wilhelm Dilthey, Pierre Duhem, Ernst Cassirer, and Jose Ortega y Gasset. Lange regards him as one of the most important reformers of philosophy of his time, and as a precursor of Bacon and Descartes. In Vives’ method based on experience, as well as in his emphasis on a culture that ought to be founded, not on barren speculation, but on the usefulness of knowledge, one could, according to Ortega y Gasset, discern some anticipations of the modern Zeitgeist.