Francisco Sanches
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Francisco Sanches (c. 1550 – 1623) was a Portuguese or Galician philosopher of Jewish origin, and a refugee from the Inquisition. He taught philosophy and medicine at Toulouse. In his Quod Nihil Scitur (That Nothing Is Known), written in 1576 and published in 1581, he used the classical skeptical arguments to show that science, in the Aristotelian sense of giving necessary reasons or causes for the behavior of nature, cannot be attained. He then argued that even his own notion of science - perfect knowledge of an individual thing - is beyond human capabilities because of the nature of objects ant the nature of man. The interrelation of objects, their unlimited number, and their ever-changing character prevent their being known. The limitations and variability of man's senses restrict him to knowledge of appearances, never of real substances.
Sanches' first conclusion was the usual fideistic one of the time, that truth can be gained by faith. His second conclusion was to play an important role in later thought: just because nothing can be known in an ultimate sense, we should not abandon all attempts at knowledge but should try to gain what knowledge we can, namely, limited, imperfect knowledge of some of those things which we become acquainted with through observation, experience, and judgment. The realization that nihil scitur ("nothing is known") thus can yield some constructive results. This early formulation of "constructive" or "mitigated" skepticism was to be developed into an important explication of the new science by Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and the leaders of the Royal Society.
[edit] Works
- That Nothing Is Known (QVOD NIHIL SCITVR). Introduction, notes, and bibliography by Elaine Limbrick. Latin text established, annotated, and translated by Douglas F. S. Thompson. Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 0 521 35077 8
