Juan Luis Vives y March (Spanish: [ˈbiβes]; Latin: Joannes Ludovicus Vives; Catalan: Joan Lluís Vives i March; Dutch: Jan Ludovicus Vives; 6 March 1493 – 6 May 1540) was a Spanish (Valencian) scholar and Renaissance humanist who spent most of his adult life in the southern Habsburg Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the "father" of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how psychology is perceived today.
Luis Vives was born in Valencia to a converso family which had converted from Judaism to Christianity, in the case of his mother's side of the family, several decades before the Alhambra Decree.
While still in Spain, he attended the University of Valencia (Estudi General), where he was taught by Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso. Vives later recalled that the school was dominated by scholasticism, with the dialectic and disputation playing a central role in delivering of education:
Even the youngest scholars are accustomed never to keep silence; they are always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost to their minds, lest they should seem to be giving up the dispute. Nor does one disputation, or even two a day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner. They wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast; they wrangle before supper and they wrangle after supper. At home they dispute, out of doors they dispute. They wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating room, in the church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private. At all times they are wrangling.
His mother, Blanquina, born 1473, was investigated by the Inquisition for the heresies of being a Marrano and a Judaizer in 1491. She admitted that as a girl of nine, her own mother had insisted following their conversion that their family continue to celebrate Yom Kippur. On displaying that she was able and willing to recite the Nicene Creed, she was acquitted. She died of the plague in 1508, when Vives was 15 years old; in 1509 he left Spain never to return.
In around 1524, Vives' father, grandmother, and great-grandfather, as well as several other members of their wider family, were convicted and executed by the Inquisition for Crypto-Judaism, after his uncle was caught hosting a secret synagogue inside his house.
A few years later (c. 1528), allegedly to avoid providing doweries to Vives' sisters, local authorities brought up their mother's heresy investigation once again. Based on her own Yom Kippur testimony, Blanquina Vives' corpse was re-exhumed and posthumously burned at the stake. Even though his own belief in Roman Catholicism was very genuine and sincere, Vives was living at the time in Thomas More's house in Chelsea and entered a severe depressive state.
Vives studied at the University of Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Leuven. At the insistence of his friend Erasmus, he prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England. Soon afterwards, he was invited to England, and acted as tutor to the Princess Mary, for whose use he wrote De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae (1523) and, ostensibly, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, on Christian education for young women and which Vives dedicated to Queen Catherine of Aragon.
While in England, he resided at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where Erasmus had strong ties. Vives was made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy. Once he sided in 1528 with his patroness and openly declared himself against the annulment of the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Vives immediately fell from royal favour and was confined to his house for six weeks.
On his release, he returned to Bruges, where he devoted the rest of his life to the composition of numerous ethical and philosophical writings, chiefly directed against the unquestioning authority of scholasticism within some circles, and of Aristotle in others. The most important of his treatises is the De Causis Corruptarum Artium, which has been ranked with Bacon's Novum Organon.
His most important pedagogic work are Introductio ad sapientiam (1524); De disciplinis, which stressed the urgent importance of more rational programs of education and studying; De prima philosophia; and the Exercitatio linguae latinae, which is a Latin textbook consisting of a series of brilliant dialogues. His philosophical works include De anima et vita (1538), De veritate fidei Christianae; and "De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus" (On Assistance To The Poor) (1526), the first tract of its kind in the Western world to treat the problem of urban poverty and propose concrete suggestions for a State policy of poverty relief and reduction. Vives detected through philological analysis that the author of the Letter of Aristeas, which describes the making of the Pre-Christian translation of the Old Testament into Koine Greek as the Septuagint, could not have been a contemporary ethnic Greek but must have been a Jewish writer who lived long after the events he described.
He died in Bruges in 1540, at the age of 47, and was buried in St. Donatian's Cathedral.
Vives imagined and described a comprehensive theory of education. He may have directly influenced the essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne as well as John Henry Newman. His writings were also admired by his close friends Thomas More and Erasmus, who wrote that Vives "will overshadow the name of Erasmus."
Vives is considered the first scholar to analyze the psyche directly. He did extensive interviews with people, and noted the relation between their exhibition of affect and the particular words they used and the issues they were discussing. While it is unknown if Sigmund Freud was familiar with Vives's work, historian of psychiatry Gregory Zilboorg considered Vives a godfather of psychoanalysis. (A History of Medical Psychology, 1941) and the father of modern psychology by Foster Watson (1915.)
Vives taught monarchs. His idea of a diverse and concrete children's education long preceded those of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and may have indirectly influenced Rousseau through the essays of Montaigne.
However influential he may have been in the 16th century, Vives now attracts minimal interest beyond specialized academic fields. The values of Vives inspired two Belgian Schools for higher education (KATHO and Katholieke Hogeschool Brugge-Oostende) to choose the name 'Vives' as the name for their cooperation/merger starting from September 2013. Also, the regional link of Vives with the province of West Flanders, of which Bruges is the capital, played a role.
State assistance for those in poverty
During the Middle Ages, poor relief was usually the responsibility of the Church and individuals through almsgiving. As society became more complex, these efforts became insufficient. In 1525, the Dutch city of Bruges requested Vives to suggest means to address the issue of relief for the poor. He set out his views in his essay De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus (On Assistance To The Poor). Vives argued that the state had a responsibility to provide some level of financial relief for the poor, as well as craft training for the unskilled poor, but considered that a "right to laziness" doesn't exist.