Abstract
This article presents Noam Chomsky's standpoint on the relevance of Juan Huarte de San Juan's work Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The Examination of Men's Wits, 1575-1594) for Cartesian linguistics and cognitive science. Huartian conceptions relevant to psycholinguistics and to Chomskian generativism include: (a) the generative quality of human understanding, (b) qualitative differences between human and animal capacity, (c) universality of language structure, (d) the brain as the material site for what we would call cognitive functions, and (e) the innateness of cognitive functions. These issues are discussed in the context of Cartesian linguistics and the history of science. Among the topics discussed: (a) relationship between the Huartian conception, Cartesian linguistics and modern psycholinguistics, (b) dualism and physicism present in Descartes and Huarte, and (c) mind-body relationship in Descartes' and Huarte's works.
