ABSTRACT
A native of the city of Valencia in eastern Spain, Juan Luis Vives was a Renaissance Humanist scholar who spent most of his adult life in the southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). His family, the descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity, was targeted by the Inquisition. After studying at the University of Paris, Vives became a professor at the University of Leuven in Flanders. De Anima et Vita (On the Soul and Life, first printed in 1538) is one of Vives’ most important works and Book Three of this book features an important discussion of human emotions and a complex taxonomy of human emotions. Vives considered emotions to be the result of judgments (sometimes unreasoned judgments) of good and evil. Moreover, influenced by the medical theories of the ancient Greek authorities Galen and Hippocrates, Vives argued that emotions could be divided up into hot/warm, cold, moist, dry or a combination of these four. In this chapter (chapter 2 of book 3), Vives explores love, the first emotion he seeks to understand: Why do we love? How do we love? What different types of love exist?
