A Prima Constitutione Foetus. The Wit Theory as a Natural Faculty in Some Medical Sources of the Late Renaissance
Authors
Fabrizio Bigotti
Sapienza, University of Rome
Keywords:
Galen, Quod animi mores, Jean Fernel , Juan Huarte, Bernardino Telesio, Giovanni Battista Persona, Renaissance psychology, Wit theory , Embryology
Abstract
After publication of the Examen de ingenios para la ciencias of Juan Huarte de San Juan (Baeza 1575), Galen’s theories on the inheritance of character traits were strongly recovered, especially in Italy, both by physician and philosophers. In this way it has been established an analogy between the natural generation and intellectual generation which will be the basis of seventeenth-century attempts to naturalize the mind.
