ALESSANDRISM. – Philosophical trend inspired by the interpretation that Alexander of Aphrodisias (v.) gave of Aristotle’s thought, especially concerning the doctrine of the human intellect. The theory of the active intellect, identified with the mind emanating from God, was developed in a distinctly Neoplatonic sense by the Greek author of the so-called Theologia Aristotelis, which, when translated into Arabic, exerted a wide influence on the thought of Alfarabi, Avicenna, Avempace, and the Jew Maimonides.
For all of these thinkers, the active intellect is the lowest of the separate intelligences and presides over the world of generation and corruption, in which it irradiates the ideal forms it contains. The possible intellect proper to man is a capacity of the soul, which is the form of the body; it passes from the potentiality of understanding to actuality through the light of the active intellect that illuminates it, and thus becomes acquired intellect or intellect in habit. But does this acquired intellect, which is individual and personal, survive after it has been constituted in its act, beyond the dissolution of the body, or does it perish with it? According to the author of the Theologia Aristotelis, the human mind, freed from its dross, returns to unite with the active intellect and in some way becomes one with II. Alfarabi’s thought on this point is quite uncertain. The one closest to Alexander is Avempace, and with him Maimonides. Avempace attributes to Alexander the thesis that the potential intellect is nothing other than the sensitive faculty, called the imaginative faculty. This seems to be substantially the thesis of Maimonides as well. But for both, the acquired intellect, which results from the action of the active intellect upon the potential intellect, survives the dissolution of the body, at least in the case of thinking men, united with the active intellect from which it emanates. It is not clear, however, to what extent personal consciousness persists in such a union. To overcome this difficulty, Avicenna makes the potential intellect a faculty of the single human soul, which is the form of the body and is at once vegetative, sensitive, and rational, and, as rational, spiritual and immortal. Separated from the soul is only the active intellect, which produces it and continuously illuminates II. This residue of Alexandrism did not displease certain Christian scholastics, who would continue to identify the active intellect with the divine light that, according to the teaching of St. Augustine, shines upon human minds.
While the Arabs could read almost all of Alexander’s writings in translation, the scholastics knew only a few excerpts. The most important of these is certainly the one that, translated into Latin perhaps by Gerard of Cremona in the second half of the 12th century, circulated under the title De intellectu and is taken from De Anima (II, p. 106, lin. 18–113, lin. 24, ed. Bruns, Berlin 1887). Only in 1260 did William of Moerbeke translate the commentary on Meteorology.
But the scholastics could learn of the doctrine of the Aphrodisian on the human mind, besides from De intellectu, from the exposition and criticism that Avempace offers in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. It is not evident, however, that there was in scholasticism an Alexandrist current, as there was an Averroist one. Even prop. VII of the Paris condemnation of 1270, and CXVI of the condemnation of 1277, have a perfectly Averroist sense, since even the commentator from Córdoba held that the soul, which is the form of the body, is inseparable from it and corruptible.
An Alexandrist current, in opposition to Thomism and Averroism, instead took shape at the beginning of the 16th century, while as early as 1495 the Venetian patrician Girolamo Donato had published his translation of Book I of Alexander’s De Anima. The discussions around the immortality of the soul and the unity of the intellect must have flared up again, since the Master General of the Dominicans, Tommaso De Vio, known as Cardinal Gaetano, had to undertake a new commentary on De anima (published in Florence in 1510), in which he concluded that from Aristotle’s doctrine one could not derive a demonstration of the immortality of the soul; and if the Fifth Lateran Council, in its eighth session of 19 December 1513, deemed it necessary to reprove and condemn “all those who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal or unique in all men, or express doubts about it,” and to order that all professors of philosophy, when expounding the thought of the ancient philosophers on the immortality of the soul, its unity, or on the eternity of the world, should strive to resolve arguments contrary to the faith. With this, the Council left undecided the purely philological and hermeneutical question of whether Aristotle’s thought had been better understood by Averroes, by Thomas, or by Alexander. Meanwhile, in 1516, in Bologna, Achillini printed in his Opus Septem- mentatum the medieval translation of De intellectu, and the Veronese Girolamo Bagolino produced a new Latin version of II. In the same year, Pomponazzi (v.) published his treatise De immortalitate animae. He maintained, with the Aphrodisian, that the active intellect is a separate substance; he held, with St. Thomas, that the possible intellect is a faculty of the soul that is the form of the body; but whereas the Aquinate inferred the immortality of the soul from the immateriality of the act of understanding, he insisted on the bonds by which, for Aristotle, human understanding is linked to the corporeal organism, and concluded that it was not possible, within the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, to demonstrate immortality—just as Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Tommaso De Vio had already maintained. In this way, the problem of immortality remained a neutral problem, which only faith could resolve in a positive sense. But since the medieval prejudice persisted that human reason could not see more than Aristotle had seen, to affirm that immortality cannot be demonstrated within the Aristotelian system seemed to many to be equivalent to denying it or casting doubt upon II. Hence Pomponazzi’s thesis provoked a polemic, often bitter and intemperate, on the part of the Averroists and certain Thomists, who accused Pomponazzi of setting himself against the decision of the Council. Which was not true.
The polemic continued throughout the 16th century, and among its participants were Simone Porzio, Vincenzo Madio, Giulio Castelani, Giacomo Zabarella, Federico Pendasio, Cesare Cremonini, and Andrea Cesalpino, all Alexandrists more or less faithful to the Aphrodisian, and Ludovico Boccaferro, M. Antenuta, Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, Rinaldo Adoni, and Francesco Piccolomini for the Averroists. In the final years of the 16th century, the sceptic Filippo Fabro of Faenza, in his Philosophia Naturalis Joannis Duns Scoti, declared it rash to affirm that the philosophy of Alexander, Averroes, Aristotle, or any other philosopher is the whole of philosophy. In 1534, the Greek text of Alexander’s De Anima was printed in Venice, and fifteen years later Angelo Canini of Anghiari provided a Latin translation of Book II.