Examen de ingenios, de Juan Huarte de San Juan, y los albores de la Neurobiología de la inteligencia en el Renacimiento español

Abstract

The Spanish renaissance doctor Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-1588) was the author of a unique and immortal work, The Examination of Men's Wits, the edition princeps of which was printed in Baeza in 1575. Since then it has been reprinted at least 80 times and translated into seven languages, which makes it the most influential Spanish contribution to medicine ever published. In this paper we review the unjustly little-known figure of Huarte as the founder of Neuropsychology, and we also analyse his works from a historical and neuroscientific point of view. Huarte's writings deal with the problem of the organic relations between the brain and understanding, and accept the possible influences exerted by temper on the will within the field of the Neurobiology of Intelligence. Thus, over four centuries ago Huarte became the founder of Differential or Physiological Psychology, Neuropsychology, Eugenics and Career Guidance. Huarte's work not only played a fundamental role in the history and development of the body of neuroscientific knowledge, but has also been a clear (although not always cited) influence on scientists, philosophers and men of letters such as Alarcón, Bacon, Cabanis, Cervantes (whose Don Quixote was inspired by him), Charron, Chomsky, Gall, Goethe, Hume, Kant, Kretchmer, Lessing, Lope de Vega, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Nietzsche, Quevedo, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Thomasius, Tirso de Molina and Ziegler. In the middle of the 16th century, Huarte and his Examination of Men's Wits, together with the works of the naturalist philosophers Gómez Pereira (Antoniana Margarita, 1554) and Miguel Sabuco (New Philosophy, 1587), constituted the prestigious triumvirate of Spanish Renaissance scholars who, for the first time in history, contemplated the workings of the brain from a point of view that had more to do with science than the supernatural.