Abstract

Renaissance medical treatises in the psychology of Francisco Suarez: Spanish Renaissance physicians, especially Francis Valles, are a major source of inspiration for Suarez's commentary to De anima. This paper analyzes two concepts inherited from the medical tradition: experientia and theory of the sympathy of faculties. Suarez could be considered a precursor of gnoseological ocasionalism, but his psychology is rather far from the Cartesian mechanicism and much closer to the philosophical biology of Aristotle.