Humanus Animus Nusquam Consistit: Doctor Sanchez'S Diagnosis of the Incurable Human Unrest and Ignorance

It is undeniable that one of the most conspicuous features characterizing seventeenth-century “modern or Cartesian philosophy”¹ is both the complete loss of interest in any consideration or discussion of Aristotelian-scholastic cognitive psychology² and a parallel new tendency to substitute traditional logic for an inquiry into the method of science.

It is therefore of historical interest to find these philosophical aspects already fully outlined in one of the exponents of sixteenth-century scepticism, Francisco Sanchez. The arguments he develops and expresses are very mature from a philosophical perspective. They represent a new epistemological approach which, whilst ignoring the objectifying Aristotelian-scholastic account of knowledge as a continuous process of actualisation, presents knowledge as a discontinuous and insuperably unknown relation between “res” and “spectra.” At the same time his work combines a radical criticism of Aristotelian logic with an insistence on the preliminary and primary importance of method. Only the titles are left of those texts that he refers to as being devoted to the method and science accessible to men³ (and in fact we do not know if they actually existed or were perhaps only drafts or even just ideas). Nonetheless, the philosophical works that are still available to us describe this science which is accessible to men (imperfecta scientia) as strictly concerned with “res”, i.e. with things open to empirical obser vation and inquiry, as based in “experimentum iudiciumque”⁴ and proceeding according to what was to become none other than the shibboleth of the Royal Society: “nullius in verba.”⁵ Moreover, his attention to the impediments and “imper fections” — historical, human, personal, medical, cultural⁶ etc. — encumbering even this limited science seems to be a sort of a prelude or destruens part of the method, so that these latter methodological aspects of Sanchez's philosophy may suggest a Baconian attitude towards science. However, more interestingly, the former ' namely the sceptical themes concerning the criticisms of Aristotle and of the logici and the new epistemological approach — fully expanded in his magnum opus, are such as to suggest a clearer connection with two different seventeenth-century “ways of ideas” developments: the Cartesian metaphysical one, and the Lockean empiricist one (and for different reasons, addressed elsewhere,⁷ also with Hobbes's epistemological materialism).