Juan Luis Vives

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.

Early life

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.