The Philosophical Doctors: Huarte de San Juan, Pereira and Sabuco de Nantes.
A review of the main Philosopher Doctors: among them, Huarte de San Juan or Gómez Pereira.
The medical philosophers are independent thinkers with medical training, who assume the Hippocratic-Galenic doctrine of typological differences based on constitution and temperament as the cause of psychological behavior.
Physician Philosophers: a summary of their lives and contributions
The following are several of these Philosopher Physicians who, during the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Age.
1. Gómez Pereira (1500-1560)
Gómez Pereira was a Castilian physician who can be considered a precursor, almost a century ahead of Descartes. In his work "Antoniana Margarita"he makes thought the essence of the soul and defends the automatism of animals. The following sentence, prior to the famous Cartesian "cogito", may give an idea of this: "I know that I know something, and he who knows exists: therefore I exist.”.
2. Oliva Sabuco of Nantes
Oliva's work "New Philosophy of the Nature of Man"(1587) was attributed to her father, Miguel, who was blind, which gives an idea of how unusual it is for a woman to sign a scientific work.
It is written in the form of a colloquy between three shepherds and can be considered a treatise on the passions and their relation to physiological life. It establishes the psycho-somatic or psycho-physiological interaction as an explanation of all kinds of human behavior. He also defends the effectiveness of verbal therapy together with other organic therapies.
3. Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-1585)
Patron of psychology in our country, he is one of the Spanish authors who has achieved the greatest universal projection for his work "Examen de ingenio para las ciencias.Examen de ingenio para las ciencias"published in 1575. Huarte's work was translated into Latin, English, French, Italian and Dutch, being republished in some of these languages.
It is based on the doctrine that all souls are equal, being the cerebral temperament the cause of the different abilities of man, according to the predominance of the primary qualities in him. primary qualities (heat, humidity and dryness). Dryness favors wisdom or intelligence, humidity favors memory, and heat favors imagination.
Huarte describes himself as a "natural philosopher" and as such wants to search for the particular causes of any effect. While recognizing that God is the ultimate cause, he is interested in natural causes, and avoids supernatural explanations. It is up to the scientist to discover the relation of cause and effect between things "because there are ordered and manifest causes.because there are orderly and manifest causes from which such an effect can arise“.
Huarte is an empiricist thinker. He adopts, therefore, the Aristotelian-Thomistic Aristotelian-Thomistic by defending the idea that if souls are equal, individual differences appear due to the difference between bodies. Matter is thus constituted as the differentiating principle. Huarte rejects the previous existence of a soul capable of knowing Ideas. He recognizes, however, that the soul - in its rational aspect as well as in its sensitive and vegetative aspect - is wise, without being taught by anyone. He establishes a mediating instrument in the brain with respect to the abilities of the soul, which affects all kinds of skills.
He is the creator of a first evolutionary psychology by admitting that the temperament of childhood is more suitable to the sensitive and vegetative souls than to the rational one, in order to gradually acquire a temperament more inclined to imagine, understand and remember. Old people are dominated by understanding because they have a lot of dryness and little humidity, the scarcity of which causes their poor memory, while the opposite would be true for young people, which is why childhood would be more apt for learning languages, an activity that according to Huarte depends on memory.
Huarte can also be considered as a pioneer of the eugenicsHuarte can also be considered a pioneer of eugenics, since temperament would depend on the seed of the parents and, later, on the regime of life.
The notion of temperament goes back to Greek thinkers. Hippocratesin the 5th century BC, explains health as the balance of four humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. If heat and humidity (air) predominate, a sanguine temperament results. If cold and dryness (earth), characteristic of phlegm, the phlegmatic; if heat and dryness (fire), characteristic of yellow bile, the temperament will be choleric, and if cold and humidity of black bile (water) predominates, the temperament will be melancholic. (See Table 1).
Huarte combines the Hippocrates' theory of the Humors with the powers of the "rational soul" established by Aristotle: memory, imaginative and understanding.
Memory passively receives and retains data. In order for the brain to be a good instrument of this faculty it must be dominated by the humidity. The imaginative, according to the Aristotelian notion, is the one that writes in the memory the figures of things, and the one in charge of introducing and recovering them from the memory. For the brain to be a good instrument of this faculty, heat must predominate in it: "Heat raises the figures and makes them boil, through which all that is to be seen in them is discovered".
The understanding needs the brain to be dry and composed of very subtle and delicate parts. The tasks of the understanding are to infer, to distinguish and to choose.
These three powers are mutually exclusive: with memory and the predominance of moisture, understanding is lost, which needs dryness and warmth, and vice versa. He who has great imagination will not be able to have much understanding either because the heat that it requires "consumes the most delicate part of the brain, and leaves it hard and dry".
Huarte refutes Cicero's opinion that all the arts could be achieved with study, since they are based on principles that can be learned. For Huarte there are three types of witthe intelligent, the memory and the imaginative. Each profession, on the other hand, will require a certain type of wit.
A preacher needs understanding to reach the truth, memory to quote phrases from others and good imagination to know how to teach eloquently and attract attention, so a good preacher should have great understanding and much imagination. However, since great imagination predisposes to pride, gluttony and lust, he recommends that the preacher should not be imaginative in excess, since he could incur evil and drag the faithful to it.
A good lawyer or judge will need a great memory to learn the many laws and a good understanding to distinguish, infer, reason, and choose.. Although it is always preferable for a lawyer to have much understanding and little memory than the opposite.
Medicine also needs good understanding and memory, although it requires imagination for the clinical eye, the medical conjecture, the guessing of causes and the remedies for each sick person.
The military profession requires a certain malice for which a special kind of imaginativeness is required that confers the ability to guess the "deceptions that come under some cover". In his opinion, the game of chess is one of the games that most develops the imagination.
The office of king, finally, would find its ideal temperament in a "temperate man.temperate man"that is to say, with a compensated or balanced temperament. This is accompanied by hair that gilds with age, and by grace, gracefulness and good figure. Other signs of this temperament are virtue and good manners.
If coldness and humidity predominate in the engendered body, the result will be a woman. In his life he will manifest poorly the qualities that the soul possesses to the highest degree. If warmth and dryness predominate, on the other hand, a man will be born, whose qualities will be skill and ingenuity. From the variations of the corporal temperament derive the greater or lesser clumsiness in the woman and the greater or lesser ingenuity and ability in the man.
Huarte picks up from Aristotle the idea that desire, imagination and movements during the carnal act contribute to engender good children. According to this doctrine, wise parents tend to have foolish children, because they are clumsy in the sexual act, while the foolish and instinctive, being more skillful, can beget ingenious children.
Huarte is considered a pioneer in different fields: for Menéndez Pelayo he is the father of phrenologyHe can also be considered the ancestor of the approach of differential psychology. differential psychology and professional orientation and selection. He is also a pioneer, as we have already said, of eugenics and age psychology.
(Updated at Apr 13 / 2024)