Speaker
Description
Antonio Gómez Pereira (1500-1558) was a philosopher and physician who played a significant role in the intellectual renaissance in Spain during the second half of the 16th century. His major opus, Antoniana Margarita (Medina del Campo, 1554) ensured his European reputation beyond the 16th century to the point of being considered a precedent for the Cartesian theory of the animal machine. The Antoniana Margarita addresses various issues, based on a philosophical investigation of the immortality of the soul. However, the consideration about matter emerges as a major theme. Generation and corruption are linked to the description of pure material elements in the experience of sensitivity and sensations. The aim of this paper is to study the movement of Gómez Pereira's thought from the anatomy of the physical perception and the power of the intellect as an act of understanding in sensation to the rhetoric employed in order to question doctrines and to resolve paradoxes. The text reflects important digressions that connect natural philosophy to the political events of the time such as the condition of the Indians, the repercussions of irreligion on civil peace. Political reflections and personal opinions are intertwined in a new way to expand the limits of philosophical doctrine.
Short Biography
Karine Durin is full professor at Nantes University. Her research focuses on the history of ideas in the Hispanic world in the modern period, natural philosophy and moral and political thought in the Republic of Letters. She is the author of a monograph on Épicure et l’épicurisme en Espagne. Critique et hétérodoxie aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (forthcoming, Classiques Garnier). The thought of Jerónimo Muñoz plays an important role in the second part of her book proceeding from her Habilitation (2012). She has since devoted works to Muñoz as part of a research project on 'Pliny the Elder and the Rise of a New Philosophy of Nature in the Spanish Golden Age' (since 2015), natural philosophy in Spain and the renewal of scientific thought in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author of contributions on Oliva Sabuco de Nantes. She is currently preparing the French translation of Nueva filosofía del hombre (Paris, Vrin).
| Keywords | Rhetoric, natural philosophy, experiment, matter, immortality of the soul, digression |
|---|---|
| karinedurin@yahoo.fr | |
| Affiliation | Nantes University |
| Position | Professor |
