Juan Luis Vives
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Joan Lluís Vives i March (6 March 1493 – 6 May 1540), better known as Juan Luis Vives (y March), was a Spanish scholar and humanist from Valencia.
Academic career
[[File:Lluís vives.jpg|thumb|left|Statue of Juan Luis Vives at Valencia, by Josep Aixa Íñigo]] Vives studied at the University of Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Leuven. At the insistence of his friend Erasmus, he prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England. Soon afterwards, he was invited to England, and acted as tutor to the Princess Mary, for whose use he wrote De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae (1523) and, ostensibly, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, on the education of girls (a book he dedicated to the English queen Catherine of Aragon).
While in England, he resided at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where Erasmus had strong ties. Vives was made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy. Having declared himself against the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, he lost royal favour and was confined to his house for six weeks in 1528. On his release, he withdrew to Bruges, where he devoted the rest of his life to the composition of numerous works, chiefly directed against the scholastic philosophy and the preponderant unquestioning authority of Aristotle. The most important of his treatises is the De Causis Corruptarum Artium, which has been ranked with Bacon's Novum Organon.Template:Sfn
His most important pedagogic work are Introductio ad sapientiam (1524); De disciplinis, which stressed the urgent importance of more rational programs of education and studying; De prima philosophia; and the Exercitatio linguae latinae, which is a Latin textbook consisting of a series of brilliantTemplate:Citation needed dialogues. His philosophical works include De anima et vita (1538), De veritate fidei Christianae; and "De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus" (On Assistance To The Poor) (1526), the first tract of its kind in the Western world to treat the problem of urban poverty and propose concrete suggestions for a policy of social legislation. Vives detected through philological analysis that the supposed author of the so-called Letter of Aristeas, purporting to describe the Biblical translation of the Septuagint, could not have been a Greek but must have been a Jew who lived after the events he described had transpired.
He died in Bruges in 1540, at the age of 47,Template:Sfn and was buried in the St. Donatian's Cathedral.Template:Cn
See also
