Anticipating the fifth centennial of Vives' birth in 1992, this is the first comprehensive study of two of Vives' main works, De Anima et Vita, Book 3 and De Prima Philosophia, accompanied by the first general biography based on recent research. Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish sixteenth-century humanist who spent most of his life as an exile in England and the Low Countries. De Anima et Vita, the third book of which makes up the tract on emotions, represents the (...) culmination of Vives' effort to understand human nature. Noreña has organized Vives and the Emotions into three parts. Part one incorporates recent research on Vives and corrects some of the inaccuracies of Noreña's 1970 Luis Vives. He provides expanded accounts of Vives' attitude toward Erasmus and religion, his reaction to terminist logic, his social and legal views, and his contributions to Renaissance pedagogy. The second part of the book examines in detail one of Vives' most philosophical and forgotten tracts, a lengthy summary of his metaphysical views published in 1531 under the title De Prima Philosophia seu de Intimo Naturae Opificio, which is probably the most speculative of Vives' works. Part three compares Vives' thoughts on emotion to those of Aristotle, some ancient Stoic sources, Saint Thomas, Descartes, and Spinoza, while dividing the entire material under such headings as the nature, the classification, the interaction, and the therapeutic control of emotion. (shrink)

For humanists the perfect language was a revived Classical Latin. For scholastics it was a practical logic adapted to the needs of education. Though they have long been portrayed as arch rivals, Alan Perreiah here argues that humanists and scholastics were working in complementary ways toward some of the same goals: most significantly, the early modern search for the perfect language. The study advances research on language pedagogy in the Renaissance by clarifying the connections between truth and translation.

This article seeks to locate Vives's work in the tradition of humanist thought that criticized the linguistic and philosophical abstraction of the scholastics. After discussing Vives's views on language and knowledge as functions of man’s biological nature, the article argues that for Vives the topics, as seats of argumentation, are a reflection of the ontological order and as such an instrument and heuristic aid for the human mind. They form a grid through which knowledge can be acquired and arguments be (...) formulated. The topics bridge the world of (unknown) essences and man’s epistemic categories. (shrink)

Subsequent chapters discuss Vives's ideas on the soul, especially his analysis of the emotions, his contribution to rhetoric and dialectic and a posthumous defense of the Christian religion in dialogue form."--BOOK JACKET.