the Renaissance, denying that animals are equal to humans, while acknowledging some resemblance. Both have a body with five senses, but in the case of animals, the senses do not lead to knowledge, but cause automatic reactions. Indeed, many animals are capable of acting on internal impulses (soma), upon external stimuli (specie and phantasma), and have some non-conscious ability to learn (memoria). Nevertheless, Pereira denies animals the capacity for real knowledge: "bruta sensu carent." The idea had many supporters, because, as indicated by the author himself, if animals feel just like humans, there would be nothing to differentiate, and if humans and animals are equal, animals can also learn about the Universal, which would be "absurd and impious." But he also had detractors, some of them very close. The physician Francisco de Sosa, who published in 1556 his work "Endecálago against Antoniana Margarita, in which is treated many and very sensitive reasons and authorities of the proofs of the feeling and movement of brutes." Human knowledge In this sense, Pereira's ideas are radically opposed to medieval scholasticism. He argues that knowledge enters through the sensory organs, as in animals, but only the human soul, its spirit, is capable of converting the information provided by the senses into real thought. This is one of the qualities of the soul, the ability to extract from physical sensations the substance of things (universals) through this process of abstraction. But Gómez Pereira believes that sensation and intellect go together in such a way that in human beings there is something that identifies the faculty of feeling with the quality of thought, in the same way, e.g., that thought and language are linked: "if you feel, you understand." The immortality of the soul Thus, knowledge would be an essential faculty of the soul, and, moreover, the human being has a soul conscious of itself, that exists thanks to the thoughts it develops. In this work (Antoniana Margarita), there is the phrase "I know that I know something, anyone who knows exists, then I exist" ("Nosco me aliquid noscere, & quidquid noscit, est, ergo ego sum"). History has not recognized his contribution even though Descartes had already been accused of plagiarism in his time, for example by Pierre Daniel Huet. Although Pereira recognizes that animals have souls, it dies with them. The human soul, however, is self-sufficient and thus immortal. He provides three proofs that he