How can we portray the history of Renaissance knowledge production through the eyes of the students? Their university notebooks contained a variety of works, fragments of them, sentences, or simple words. To date, studies on these materials have only concentrated on a few individual works within the collections, neglecting the strategy by which texts and textual fragments were selected and the logic through which the notebooks were organized. The eight chapters that make up this volume explore students' note-taking practices behind (...) the creation of their notebooks from three different angles. The first considers annotation activities in relation to their study area to answer the question of how university disciplines were able to influence both the content and structure of their notebooks. The volume's second area of research focuses on the student's curiosity and choices by considering them expressions of a self-learning practice not necessarily linked to a discipline of study or instructions from teaching. The last part of the volume moves away from the student's desk to consider instructions on note-taking methods that students could receive from manuals of various kinds. (shrink)

This paper surveys the main issues in Suárez’s theory of visual perception, which in its complexity and systematical ordering has not been explored yet. These questions, exposed in the first five questions of the seventh disputation De sensibus exterioribus in particulari of Suárez’s Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis and in the first two sections of the fifth disputation De potentiis cognoscitivis in communi, are the following: 1) the nature of light; 2) the nature of colour; 3) the formal (...) object of vision; 4) the necessity and the nature of the visual species; 5) the critique of the theory of extramission; and 6) the organ of visual power. The main emphasis is laid on the presentation of the systematical dimension of Suárez’s visual theory. (shrink)

Renaissance medical treatises in the psychology of Francisco Suarez: Spanish Renaissance physicians, especially Francis Valles, are a major source of inspiration for Suarez's commentary to De anima. This paper analyzes two concepts inherited from the medical tradition: experientia and theory of the sympathy of faculties. Suarez could be considered a precursor of gnoseological ocasionalism, but his psychology is rather far from the Cartesian mechanicism and much closer to the philosophical biology of Aristotle.