Conoscenza e azione. La teoria delle intentiones nella Escuela de Salamanca (XV‐XVI secolo)

The main goal of this work is the reconstruction of the concepts of knowledge and intentionality, as stated by some ‘voces significativae’ of the Escuela de Salamanca, starting from the second part of XV century. We will consider some texts of different scholars belonging to the Order of the Dominicans that, by developing their own theories in the Convent of San Esteban, bring them to fruition and spread in the University of Salamanca. This university is the motor center of the spread of the Iberian culture between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, both in Spain and throughout Europe of the time. This culture, inheriting also the medieval reflections on the theme of knowledge and intentionality, will transpose it and will reach it to full maturity. On this line, the height of the issue will be the Aristotelis Logica Magna of the Dominican Juan Sánchez Sedeño (1552-1615), published in Salamanca in 1600, in which these issues are dealt with in the light of the whole of tradition brought by returning a complete and mature cross to what the Escuela de Salamanca meant by knowledge and theory of intentionality. To achieve full understanding of such insight, the work will be divided into three chapters, each devoted to a particular historical-conceptual stage of the development of these theories. The first chapter will reconstruct some stages of the problem in the Middle Ages. In particular, in this chapter we will consider the theories of Thomas Aquinas, of Hervaeus Natalis and Duns Scotus, among the leaders of the deepening of the theory of knowledge and the formulation of intentiones as instruments for the apprehension. These authors analyze the most significant quaestiones of their works, including, respectively, the Summa Theologica, the Tractatus de secundis intentionibus and commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, in which the three scholars in a widespread manner shall consider modalities of access to the world the man and like the latter may have been aware of and act in it. At first, it will be understood as is a knowledge from the physiological point of view, showing how the theme of intentionality engages in matters related to the operation of the senses and how they allow the intellect to be familiar. Next, it will investigate the importance of the theory of knowledge and intentionality to understand fully human existence in the world. Finally, we will proceed to the analysis of the anthropological structures, individual and social, that allow humans to live fully, thus making possible knowledge and action. In the second chapter, we show how the questions on knowledge and intentionality analyzed in the first chapter are inherited by salmantini scholars, representatives of the homonymous Escuela, kind university in the second half of the fifteenth century, especially with the new directives of the statutes that Pope Martin V gives off to adjust the Spanish operation of the university. Of these scholars, they will be studied Lope de Barrientos, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Melchor Cano and Domingo Báñez, which will resume the medieval tradition, but gives original interpretations to the problem. Barrientos, in Clavis Sapientiae, consider the matter by analyzing the terms cognitio and intentio, declining them with a view to their membership in the theory of knowledge, according to the new interpretative demands on man as a person who knows and acting, fate in Salamanca since the second half of the fifteenth century. Las Casas, in De vocationis unique way up the problem of human knowledge in connection to the Thomistic concept of 'belief', indicating the reasons for which to know is to join the world in order to understand how it can be learned in a analog perspective, neither unequivocal nor equivocal. Cano, in De locis theologicis and the introduction to the Tratado de la victoria de sí mismo, examines the issue of knowledge in connection to land the role of man, he understood as the person fully realizes himself by knowing and acting in the world. Thus, Cano proves deep knowledge of medieval theories and keen observer of those developed in the Council of Trent, in which he took part. Báñez, in the commentary on the Summa Theologica of Thomas, incorporates the theories of medieval tradition and its surroundings cultural and reworks in an original way, having as a result a homogeneous theory that explains the knowledge and intent, taking into account both the logical side of that the volitional problem. In the third chapter, we show you how all the theories of medieval voces and representatives of the Escuela de Salamanca should come to Sánchez Sedeño, which processes in its Aristotelis Logica Magna a 'summa cognitionis et intentionalitatis', analyzing in detail the problem of knowledge according to tradition and, from this, we are creating a personal theory that defines best the previous.