Juan Luis Vives

Vives, Juan Luis - hwän looēsˈ vēˈvās, 1492–1540, Spanish humanist and philosopher; friend of Erasmus. At the invitation of King Henry VIII he went to England, where he lectured at Oxford and served as tutor to Princess Mary (later Queen Mary I). Opposed to the divorce of Henry and Katharine of Aragón, he left England and until his death lived in Bruges. Vives, a vigorous and adventurous thinker, opposed the authority of Aristotle and the conventions of scholasticism. He was the forerunner of Francis Bacon by his application of induction to philosophical and psychological inquiry and by his pragmatic testing of hypotheses. In De anima et vita (1538) Vives produced one of the first works on modern psychology. Another one of his books, De disciplinis (1531), is an important analysis of educational theory.

See study by G. E. McCully (1967); R. P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor (1962).

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