THE ROOTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL TURN PROVOKED BY FRANCISCO DE VITÓRIA

Abstract

The late Spanish scholastic had proposed a great turn in knowledge. The head of this school, Francisco de Vitoria, broken the medieval speculative thought and replaced it. By the humanist lenses, a practical thought was developed for solving problems arising from the great navigations, namely, the rights of man in lower civilizations standards. In this panorama, Vitoria proposed the concept of potentiae rationales and many others, which had extraordinary importance to the subsequent German’s natural law school. Thus, Vitoria is in the roots of the concept of Human rights.