Francisco Sanches

Works

• 1581That Nothing Is Known

  Argues against the Aristotelian ideal of science that the nature of things cannot be perfectly known by the human mind, and proposes a modest method of observation and judgement.

Position

Sanches is on the map as one of the main representatives of Renaissance scepticism, alongside Montaigne. In “That Nothing Is Known” he directed doubt not at faith or morals but at the claims of Aristotelian science. Knowledge in the full sense, grasping a thing through its causes, would require knowing everything, since all things are connected; but things are infinite and changing, the senses are coarse and deceptive, and the mind depends on them. Definitions only explain names, and syllogisms derive nothing that was not already assumed. What remains is a more modest knowledge based on careful observation and experience (experimentum) and on judgement (iudicium), as he practised it as a physician; a promised work on method never appeared. Bayle devoted an article to him in his Dictionary and called him a great Pyrrhonist. Richard Popkin’s history of scepticism placed him among the sources of the sceptical crisis to which, on Popkin’s account, Descartes responded. Whether Sanches was a Pyrrhonist or rather a mitigated sceptic who wanted to reform science is debated; his book appeared at almost the same time as Montaigne’s “Essays” (1580), but a connection between the two is not documented. Modern study of his work owes much to the edition and translation by Elaine Limbrick and Douglas Thomson (1988).

Life & context

Francisco Sanches was born in 1551, in Braga in Portugal or, according to other sources, in Tui in Galicia; his origin has long been disputed. His family, New Christians of Jewish descent, moved to Bordeaux when he was a child, and he attended the Collège de Guyenne there. He studied medicine in Rome and then in Montpellier, where he took his doctorate in 1574. He settled in Toulouse and practised there as a physician, among other places at the Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques. In 1585 he obtained a chair of philosophy at the University of Toulouse and in 1612 a chair of medicine. Besides “That Nothing Is Known” (Lyon 1581) he published a Latin poem on the comet of 1577 and a commentary on Aristotle’s treatise on divination in sleep. He died in Toulouse on 16 November 1623. His medical works appeared posthumously in Toulouse in 1636, and his philosophical treatises in Rotterdam in 1649.

Further main works

• Poem on the Comet of 1577 (Carmen de cometa anni MDLXXVII, 1578)
• On Divination in Sleep, on Aristotle (De divinatione per somnum, ad Aristotelem, 1585)
• Medical Works (Opera medica, 1636)
• Philosophical Treatises (Tractatus philosophici, 1649)