Andrew Halliday Douglas

“ But Pomponazzi could not fail to inherit the Averroist tradition; and we trace it in his conception of intelligence inhering in itself, timeless and incorporeal, as its subjectum; while in one place we shall find him labouring to prove that his own doctrine of anima intellectiva as forma corporis was not foreign to the true intention of Averroes 2 . On the other hand, so far from being simply an " opponent of St Thomas," there is no writer by whom he is more largely influenced, or from whom he borrows so much; he takes over St Thomas's criticisms of Averroes wholesale ”

“ Thus in order to establish intellectus agens as of the true nature of the human being, he denied the doctrine of sensus agens by which popular Averroism sought to make good the distinction of the sensitive from the intellectual soul. This he declared, and probably with truth, to be no part of the original scheme of Averroes; he rejected, as Pomponazzi also did, a compromise 1 suggested by John of Jandun, and came to the same conclusion which Pomponazzi afterwards adopted. ”

“ The Averroists denied immortality to the individual soul because it did not possess the attribute of intelligence. Pomponazzi only denied the possibility of the soul's exercising intelligence independently of corporeal embodiment and sense-experience. The philosophical difference had one odd result. Within six years of the decree of the Lateran Council condemning Averroism the strange anomaly was witnessed of the appearance of Niphus and Achillini to defend the immortality of the soul in the name of Averroism. ”

“ The impossibility of a soul without a body was by him stringently connected, first, with a clear consistent view of the nature of the soul; secondly, with a theory of knowledge which was steadily making way as the true doctrine of Aristotle and had been accepted by St Thomas himself the theory, namely, that all human know ledge is acquired through the bodily faculties of sense and imagination ”

“ In his first published work he maintained with Averroes that, besides the heavenly Intelligences and a single human Intelligence, there exist no spiritual beings 2 . But his strictures upon the anti-Averroist arguments of Albert and St Thomas brought him into trouble 3; and he subsequently fell back upon a modified and orthodox Averroism. He denied that Averroes had taught, as his enemies made out, and as John of Jandun had admitted, that intelligence was only forma assistens in man. ”

“ The accounts given of Pomponazzi in the Histories of Philosophy have all a strong family likeness; from Briacker downwards, through Tennemann, Ritter, to more modern writers, the same material is employed and the same general view taken. The only works giving evidence of a fresh and thorough study are those of Florentine and Ferri already referred to, of which the second is much the better. ”

“ The Thomists had never ceased to keep alive a vigorous opposition. And finally it became impossible, with a better knowledge of Aristotle and some acquaintance with the views of his earlier interpreters, to accept Averroism as the natural sense of Aristotle's language 1 .
The appearance of Pomponazzi meant a reaction against Averroism, and a reaction at the same time against the orthodox doctrine of spiritual substances. History has associated Pomponazzi's new departure with the name of Alexander of Aphrodisias ”

“ While calling himself an Averroist, he declined to believe in the unity of human intelligence, denying the distinction of the intellectual from the sensitive soul, and thus, in direct contradiction of Averroes, making an intellectual soul the form of human nature 6 . ”

“ The only evidence, he urged, which could justify a belief in its continued incorporeal existence would be evidence of its having now some mode of existence independent of its connection with the body. ”