Escuela de Salamanca

"La expresión Escuela de Salamanca se utiliza de manera genérica para designar el renacimiento del pensamiento en diversas áreas que llevó a cabo un importante grupo de profesores universitarios españoles y portugueses, pero especialmente los teólogos, a raíz de la labor intelectual y pedagógica de Francisco de Vitoria en la Universidad de Salamanca. No cabe duda de que el influjo de la Escuela se debió sentir en otras naciones, puesto que muchos de los componentes de la Escuela impartieron clases en universidades de fuera de España. Se inscribe dentro del contexto más amplio del Siglo de Oro español, en el que no solamente hubo una eclosión de las artes, también en Salamanca, donde floreció la escuela literaria salmantina, sino también de las ciencias, que se manifiesta especialmente en esta Escuela. Además de que, por la evolución política posterior, en España no interesaba seguir por los caminos marcados por los profesores de Salamanca, su reconocimiento internacional ha sido muy tardío, pues las naciones protestantes (que son mayoría entre las que han escrito la ciencia a partir del siglo XVIII) no debían sentirse cómodas reconociendo la modernidad de unos teólogos que fueron punteros en el Concilio de Trento. Sin embargo, poco a poco su labor se va rescatando del olvido y, por ejemplo, en los años 50 del siglo XX, Joseph Alois Schumpeter reivindicó la aportación de los salmantinos al origen de la ciencia económica (en la corriente de pensamiento económico español que se conoce con el nombre de arbitrismo), a lo que hay que añadir los amplios estudios de Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, sobre todos los temas que tocó la Escuela"

"The School of Salamanca (Spanish: Escuela de Salamanca) is the Renaissance of thought in diverse intellectual areas by Spanish and Portuguese theologians, rooted in the intellectual and pedagogical work of Francisco de Vitoria. From the beginning of the 16th century the traditional Catholic conception of man and of his relation to God and to the world had been assaulted by the rise of humanism, by the Protestant Reformation and by the new geographical discoveries and their consequences. These new problems were addressed by the School of Salamanca. The name refers to the University of Salamanca, where de Vitoria and others of the school were based. The leading figures of the school, theologians and jurists Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Martín de Azpilcueta (or Azpilicueta), Tomás de Mercado, and Francisco Suárez, were all scholars of natural law and of morality, who undertook the reconciliation of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas with the new political-economic order. The themes of study centered on man and his practical problems (morality, economics, jurisprudence, etc.), but almost equally on a particular body of work accepted by all of them, as the ground against which to test their disagreements, including at times bitter polemics within the School. The School of Salamanca in the broad sense may be considered more narrowly as two schools of thought coming in succession, that of the Salmanticenses and that of the Conimbricenses from the University of Coimbra. The first began with Francisco de Vitoria (14831546), and reached its high point with Domingo de Soto (14941560). The Conimbricenses were Jesuits who, from the end of 16th century took over the intellectual leadership of the Catholic world from the Dominicans. Among those Jesuits were Luis de Molina (15351600), the aforementioned Francisco Suárez (15481617), and Giovanni Botero (15441617), who would continue the tradition in Italy. The juridical doctrine of the School of Salamanca represented the end of medieval concepts of law, with a revindication of liberty not habitual in Europe of that time. The natural rights of man came to be, in one form or another, the center of attention, including rights as a corporeal being (right to life, economic rights such as the right to own property) and spiritual rights (the right to freedom of thought and to human dignity). The School of Salamanca reformulated the concept of natural law: law originating in nature itself, with all that exists in the natural order sharing in this law. Their conclusion was, given that all humans share the same nature, they also share the same rights to life and liberty. Such views constituted a novelty in European thought and went counter to those then predominant in Spain and Europe that people indigenous to the Americas had no such rights."