ABSTRACT
The Galenic approach to the study of the cognitive faculties was so deeply ingrained in the educational system of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance that it managed to rival the most advanced results of philosophical investigations. The Galenic notion of unsentient knowledge in attempting to mediate the doctrine of natural faculties with a newfound appeal to the Platonic notion of the mind was the aforementioned Cardano (1501-1576). Thomas Fienus (1567-1631), a physician and a professor of medicine at Louvain, explained delusions as originating from a surplus of empathetic responsiveness in the faculty of the imagination and from a disruption of the natural bond connecting the powers of knowledge, desire and motion in the body. In Helmont's medical philosophy, the mind was immaterial and separated from the body, therefore immune to passions and illnesses. Pietro sets up the discussion by differentiating between the philosophical and the medical approach.
