The Castilian doctor Gómez Pereira, born in 1500,1 does not have much to thank the judgment of time for, because it has led him to a near total anonymity even though his work was at least mentioned by great figures of modern philosophy such as Bayle, Leibniz or Voltaire.2 Having been considered as a precursor of Cartesianism in the field of animal mechanism,3 he attracted the attention of those who wanted to attack Descartes by denying the originality of his philosophy in the closing stages of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century. This same consideration motivated some revitalization of his reputation in his own country, where Gómez Pereira boosted some kind of artificial pride because Spain had among her philosophers a man who deserved at least a small part of the lights which always accompanied the name of Descartes.4 As a result of this attention paid to him in Spain, one of his works, the Antoniana Margarita, was reedited in the eighteenth century and later, in the late nineteenth century, his name was modestly remembered in the debate about whether or not one could postulate the existence of a real scientific tradition in this country. In this case some relevant historians such as Menéndez Pelayo, Nicolás Salmerón or José MarÃa Guardia used the work of Pereira as proof that such a tradition did indeed exist, or at least that it was a laudable exception in a desert-like landscape.5 But in spite of this occasional and circumstantial revival, the truth is that the name of Gómez Pereira is more or less absent from the textbooks of the history of thought, even those which focus upon the philosophy of his time. In fact, he is completely unknown to current historical research apart from a small number of works developed in the Spanish academic field without any relevant international repercussions. (Even in works that deal specifically with the study of the history of Spanish philosophy, Gómez Pereira merits just a few pages which do not usually go beyond the locus communis of his influence on the animal automatism of Descartes).6
And yet, the figure of Gómez Pereira and in particular his most emblematic work, the Antoniana Margarita, deserve much more attention than they have got so far.7 This present edition has been designed from the beginning with the intention of serving as the basis of a rigorous and systematic rediscovery of a doctor and Spanish philosopher who saw the deficiencies of the Aristotelian model of explanation of human being and was able to build an interesting anthropology on this critical view. But this is not the only value of Pereiraâs thought. To make it apparent to the modern reader, a new edition of the Antoniana Margarita with scientific philological criteria is needed. This is, in fact, the only basis upon which one can accomplish an accurate translation of the text and contextualise its complex content, bearing in mind that the Antoniana must be understood within the general background of the natural philosophy of the mid-sixteenth century. Even if this is evident to anyone who approaches the topics which are present in its pages, it has been usually neglected, since nearly all the efforts concentrated on Pereiraâs philosophy have been directed to judge its doctrine according to the repercussions that it may have had on subsequent thought.
Gómez Pereira was a multifaceted man, from what little we know about his biography.8 Much of the information comes from his own works, the Antoniana Margarita and the Novae veraeque medicinae. Along with the data contained in these texts, the investigation carried out by Narciso Alonso Cortés in the past century presents us with the image of a prestigious doctor who practised his profession mainly in his native town, Medina del Campo, which at that time enjoyed economical prosperity as a great centre of commerce in livestock, manufacturing and raw materials. His medical reputation may have gone beyond the limits of Medina del Campo since he was summoned by the court of Madrid to look after the poor health of the Infante, the future Charles II, son of Philip II, at least as an adviser. The origin of his family, however, is uncertain. The history of the surname âPereiraâ places his origin in Galicia or even Portugal.9 But, in any case, what is clear is that his family was in trade and had an economically favourable position. Because of this professional activity as well as other circumstances it has been suggested that the family of Gómez Pereira were converts.10 Through some legal documents found in Medina del Campo we know that Gómez Pereira himself took over the family business or at least a part of it, while exercising his own profession. Previously, the young Pereira had been sent to study Arts at the University of Salamanca probably when he was 15 or 16 years old. Just at the moment he began to frequent the classrooms of these Studia a profound pedagogical renewal (which combined nominalistic logic and innovative teaching methods that promoted the active participation of students) was under way.11 Among the professors whose lectures he attended one must draw particular attention to Juan MartÃnez Guijarro, later Cardinal Silicium, who came from the University of Paris and developed at the University of Salamanca new teaching methods in the field of logic and natural philosophy which he brought from France.12 Many years later, Gómez Pereira would dedicate the Antoniana Margarita to him as a sign of affection and admiration for the man who was in charge of the education of young Philip II and became Archbishop of Toledo.
The University of Salamanca furnished our man with the conceptual and theoretical education he later developed both as a doctor and as a man interested in natural philosophy in general. In company with other figures of his time in Europe, Gómez Pereira found large lacunae in scholarly explanations of nature and put the pursuit of truth before anything he owed to a particular School. The Aristotelian scheme seemed to him insufficient, so he did not hesitate to direct severe criticism at it for being contradictory or unclear in some essential aspects of the topics on which he wrote, especially those which had to do with both the explanation of life and the controversial issue of the nature and origin of the soul.
The Antoniana Margarita contains many topics which were common in the manuals of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. When, at one point while Pereira is developing his argument, he boasts of having found a rational demonstration of the immortality of the soul, as incontrovertible as any mathematical deduction,13 his pen leaves clear proof that he shared with many of his contemporaries the same wish to cover himself in glory among mortals while announcing that this earthly existence is not the only one. Obviously, a kind of survival based on fameâthis mark left on the memory of menâcan be only a figurative or metaphorical version of the permanence of our identity beyond death. It reflects rather the result of our external activity within the limits of this life. But we are more than this activity; we are sentient and thinking beings whose existence post mortem brings us to the very deep considerations that inhabit the core of existential and philosophical reflection. The question is no longer about fame among mortals: now the aim is to look for reasons to subscribe or not to the belief that fame is finally the only thing that we can leave behind. From the point of view of Renaissance philosophy, this reflection, the reflection on the immortality of the soul, was what the cult of fame meant from a social and artistic point of view. Both, fame and the hope that we shall live after our own death, are complementary events which must be placed in the context of the Renaissance individualism.14 For this reason, we see so many men in this period sharing the same desire to preserve their names by giving a rational and convincing explanation of the immortality of the soul. Gómez Pereira was undoubtedly one of them.
Certainly, the centrality of the question of the immortality of the soul in the Antoniana Margarita has already been noted with great success by Teófilo González Vila, who has provided the most serious and comprehensive study of the work until now.15 However, he did not seem to realise that the work entered a debate on immortality that had been occurring especially, but not only in Italy, since the appearance of Pietro Pomponazziâs De immortalitate animae in 1516. Consequently, one of the tasks we shall undertake throughout this Introduction will be to demonstrate that Gómez Pereira was fully cognizant of the doctrinal elements involved in this debate. In fact, he wanted to take part in it by introducing his very particular vision of the main issue: what is the relationship between the soul and the body? The Antoniana Margarita was written as an answer to this question. Gómez Pereira integrated many elements from different originsâAristotelianism, Augustinian Platonism, Galenism, etc.âin order to emphasize the complete independence of the rational soul. Thus, without naming him, Gómez Pereira picks up the glove that, some decades earlier, Pomponazzi had thrown down to anyone who tried to prove the immortality of the soul exclusively in terms of natural philosophy. The Mantuan philosopher pointed out that, in order to achieve such a proof, it was not enough to say that the rational soul has no corporeal seat; it was necessary to demonstrate that it does not need the body at all in order to perform its activity: in scholastic terminology, one has to show that the soul is independent of the body both ut subiectum and ut obiectum.16 When Gómez Pereira formulates his theory of the complete indivisibility of the soul and the substantial identification of the soul and its faculties, and when he claims in a really original way that knowledge is but self-perception, he wants to show the complete ontological distinction that Pomponazzi requested to give the necessary rational support to the hope of immortality. Moreover, Pereiraâs denial of sensory perception in animals must be understood in the context of the controversy over the immortality of the rational soul, since one of the elements involved in it, in no marginal way, was the real distinction that could be established between humans and beasts: if finally it is accepted that the rational soul does not go beyond the limits of the definition of natural form and therefore owes its being to the same natural process of generation which leads to the living being, where and how is it possible to determine the difference between us and the rest of the animals?17
All the biographical references which appear in this Introduction are taken from the following works: Alonso Cortés 1914, pp. 1â29; González Vila 1976, pp. 95â117; Llavona-Bandrés 1992, pp. 158â168; RodrÃguez Pardo 2008, pp. 171â199.
See Llavona-Bandrés 1993, pp. 131â137. For the reference to Gómez Pereira in Bayle, see Bayle 1697, vol. III âPereiraâ, p. 649. For the reference to him in Leibniz, see Leibniz 1734â1742: Epistolae cviii, 4; xxiii and cxcv. Finally, for the reference to him in Voltaire, see Voltaire 1785, pp. 195â196.
See the fourth section of this Introduction.
See González Vila 1976, p. 107.
See the fourth section of this Introduction.
An exception may be found in the Historia de la filosofÃa española of Marcial Solana (see Solana 1941, pp. 209â271): however, the pages here devoted to Gómez Pereira contain, as González Vila has pointed out, many mistakes which are due to a poor and incomplete reading of the Antoniana Margarita. What is more, the judgement made by Solana of the importance of Pereiraâs philosophy is full of an ideological hostility inappropriate to an impartial study. For example, Solana goes so far as to say that Pereiraâs doctrine that tries to explain the movement of beasts is âextremely dangerous and can lead to materialismâ (p. 227). One can read a more detailed and systematic account of Gómez Pereiraâs work in Sánchez Vegaâs study on animal mechanism in Pereira and Descartes (see Sánchez Vega 1954, pp. 359â508); even if this study is focused on the âCartesian questionâ, we can find in it a wide and balanced study of many topics approached by the author of the Antoniana. More recently, in the second volume of his monumental Historia crÃtica del pensamiento español, José Luis Abellán embraces the figures of Gómez Pereira and Francisco Sánchez under the epigraph of âThe Spanish Precartesiansâ; so concretely the author of the Antoniana is principally approached from the perspective of the topics which announced the philosophy of Descartes, that is to say, the animal automatism and the prototypical cogito ergo sum, which in Pereiraâs version sounds as nosco me aliquid noscere, et quicquid noscit est, ergo ego sum. See Abellán 1979, pp. 187â198.
Gómez Pereira edited his Antoniana Margarita in 1554. A year later, a new work appeared: the Apologia with which Pereira answered the Objectiones the Professor of Theology at the University of Salamanca, Miguel de Palacios, had previously written at the request of Pereira himself. Both works, the Objectiones and the Apologia, were included in the Antoniana in the successive reprints of the text of 1554. In addition to these works, Gómez Pereira wrote Novae veraeque medicinae experimentis et evidentibus rationibus comprobatae, edited in 1558 in Medina del Campo. These Novae veraeque medicinae experimentis were written following an empirical methodology that aimed to discover the true causes and the effects of diseases and affections. For example, against the common opinion of his time and the criteria of Greek and Arab medical treatises, Pereira explained fever as a mechanism of our body devoted to recover a lost equilibrium.
See above note 1.
See González Vila 1976, pp. 96â97; RodrÃguez Pardo 2008, pp. 195â199.
Because of this suspicion J.M. Guardia held out in the nineteenth century the image of a Pereira who professed some kind of cryptojudaism which gave him serious problems with the Castilian Inquisition: Guardia even referred to a registered process against a Pereira which ended in a public auto-de-fé presided by Philip II in Valladolid (see Guardia 1889, p. 290). Today, there is no documentary evidence of Gómez Pereiraâs being prosecuted by the Santo Oficio: on the contrary, he seems to have been very careful to show an irreproachable professional orthodoxy: see González Vila 1976, p. 110. However, as Vila says here, the hypothesis of Guardia must not be abandoned before the fact that it is completely unknown the date of Pereiraâs death as well as the fortune of his last years.
See Muñoz Delgado 1964, pp. 75â89. In the third part of this Introduction we shall deal with the influence of nominalism in the thought of Gómez Pereira.
See Beltrán de Heredia 1942; Muñoz Delgado 1964; González Vila 1976, pp. 101â¯ff.
See Gómez Pereira 1554, pp. 223â224: âPorro, crediderim ego demonstrabile esse animam nostram aeternam esse rationibus adeo validis in physico negotio, ut quibus suadentur geometrica in mathematicis quas usque in haec tempora inventas non fuisse, ut neque quadratura circuli usque ad Aristotelis aetatem mihi compertum est, qui (ni fallor) quae extant de hac re commentaria universa aut potiorem partem perlegerim, omnesque facillime dissolubiles repererim.â
See Kristeller 1979, p. 183: âThe cult of fame was linked with the belief in the dignity of man and certainly with the pervasive individualism of the period, a phenomenon admirably described by Burckhardt and often misunderstood by his critics. When we speak about Renaissance individualism, we do not mean the actual presence of great individuals who may be found at any period of history (â¦). We rather mean the importance attached to the personal experiences, thoughts, and opinions of an individual person, and the eager or, if you wish, uninhibited expression given to them in the literature and art of the period. Behind the endless display of gossip and invective, of description and subtle reflection there is the firm belief that the personal experience of the individual writer is worth recording for the future, preserving his fame and, as it were, prolonging his life. I cannot help feeling that the widespread and prominent concern of Renaissance thinkers with the immortality of the soul was on the metaphysical level another expression of the same kind of individualism. For in his immortal soul, the individual person continues to live more effectively than in his fame and to extend his experience into eternity.â
See González Vila 1974; González Vila 1976; González Vila 1977.
See Perrone 1999, pp. xlvi ff.; Valverde 2010, pp. lix ff; Valverde 2013, pp. 87â¯ff. We will retake this question in the fourth part of this Introduction.
See, for example, the classic studies of Bruno Nardi (Nardi 1958; Nardi 1965) and Giovanni Di Napoli (Di Napoli 1963).