ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the contribution to neuroscience and philosophy of mind of three Spanish thinkers whose ideas circulated in Cervantes’s time: Gómez Pereira, Oliva Sabuco, and Juan Huarte de San Juan. Pereira’s theory of the automatism of beasts, by dispensing with the concept of “soul,” lies at the very foundation of modern physiology and is an example of the mechanistic method that discards any Aristotelian metaphysical vestiges in explaining natural processes. The theories of Sabuco have greatly impacted medical historiography, thanks to her psychosomatic view of health and her concept of succus nerveus. The modernity of Huarte’s ideas especially stems from his view of understanding as emanating from the brain (organicism) at the same level as imagination and memory and of the faculties as mixed and balanced in a mutual interdependence in the cerebral ventricles. The ideas of these thinkers constitute the backdrop of the intellectual production of Spanish early modernity, permeating literary discourses. Thus, the importance of considering them vis-à-vis Cervantes’s production cannot be underestimated.
