La influencia de la epistemología sensualista en la enseñanza literaria de comienzos del siglo XIX: ciencia y literatura en Justino Matute (1804), José María Blanco White (1804) y Félix José Reinoso (1816)

Abstract

In 1804, Justino Matute and José María Blanco White proposed to the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País of Seville the creation of a Humanities Course to complement the mathematics studies already sponsored by the institution. In these speeches vindicating the humanities, to which we must add a later one by Félix José Reinoso (1816), the academics were forced to reorganise the field of knowledge into which their new discipline, mainly oriented towards poetics and rhetoric, fitted. To do so, they used the epistemological schemes of Locke’s and Condillac’s sensualism, resulting in a gnoseology in which science and literature were distinguished by the faculties that hierarchised each type of knowledge.