ALEXANDRINISM. - A philosophical current inspired by the interpretation that Alexander of Aphrodisias (v.) gave of Aristotle's thought, especially as regards the doctrine of the human intellect. The theory of the agent intellect identified with the mind that emanates from God was developed in a frankly Neoplatonic sense by the Greek author of the so-called Theologia Aristotelis, which, translated into Arabic, exercised a broad influence on the thought of Alfarabi, Avicenna, Avempace and the Jew Maimonides.
For all of these, the agent intellect is the lowest of the separate intelligences and presides over the world of generation and corruption, into which it radiates the ideal forms that it contains. The possible intellect proper to man is a capacity of the soul that is the form of the body; it passes from the potency of understanding to the act, through the light of the agent intellect that illuminates it, and thus becomes the acquired or habitual intellect. But this acquired intellect, which is individual and personal, does it survive, after it has been constituted in its act, the dissolution of the body, or does it die with it? For the author of the Theologia Aristotelis, the human mind, freed from its dross, returns to unite with the agent intellect and in some way forms one thing with it. Alfarabi's thought on this point is quite uncertain. The one who comes closest to Alexander is Avempace, and with him Maimonides. Averroes attributes to the former the thesis that the intellect in potency is nothing other than the sensitive faculty, called the imaginative. This seems in substance to be also the thesis of Maimonides. But for both of them the acquired intellect, which results from the action of the agent intellect on the intellect in potency, survives the dissolution of the body, at least in men of thought, united to the agent intellect from which it is emanated. It is not clearly seen, however, to what extent, in such a union, personal consciousness persists. 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, insofar as it is rational, spiritual and immortal. Separate from the soul is only the agent intellect, which is its producer and which continually illuminates it. This residue of Alessandrismo did not displease certain Christian scholastics, who would continue to identify the agent intellect with the divine light that, according to the teaching of St. Augustine, shines upon human minds.
If the Arabs could read almost all of Alexander's writings in translation, the scholastics knew only a few extracts of them. 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 the 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 the Meteorologica.
But the scholastics were able to know the doctrine of Aphrodisias on the human mind, besides from the De intellectu, from the exposition and criticism that Averroes makes of it in his commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. It does not appear, however, that there was in scholasticism an Alessandrist current, as there was an Averroist one. Even prop. VII of the Paris condemnation of 1279, and CXVI of the condemnation of 1227 have a perfectly Averroist meaning, since even for the commentator of Cordoba the soul that is the form of the body is inseparable from it and corruptible.
An Alessandrist current, in opposition to Thomism and Averroism, took shape instead 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 concerning the immortality of the soul and the unity of the intellect must have been rekindled, if the master general of the Dominicans, Tommaso De Vio, known by the name of Cardinal Cajetan, had to undertake a new commentary on the De anima (published in Florence in 1510), where he reached the conclusion that from Aristotelian doctrine no demonstration of the immortality of the soul could be derived; and if the Fifth Lateran Council, in the eighth session of 19 Dec. 1513, deemed it necessary to reprove and condemn "all those who assert the intellectual soul to be mortal or one in all men, or express doubts concerning this," and to ordain that all professors of philosophy, when they had to expound the thought of the ancient philosophers concerning the immortality of the soul, its unity, or concerning the eternity of the world, should strive to resolve the arguments contrary to the faith. With this the Council left unprejudiced the purely philological and hermeneutic question whether Aristotle's thought had been better understood by Averroes, by Thomas, or by Alexander. Meanwhile in 1516, at Bologna, Achillini printed in his Opus Septiegementatum the medieval translation of the De intellectu, and the Veronese Girolamo Bagolino made a new Latin version of it. The same year Pomponazzi (v.) published the little treatise De immortalitate animae. He maintained with Aphrodisias that the agent intellect is a separate substance; he held with Thomas that the possible intellect is a faculty of the soul that is the form of the body; but while the Aquinate argued from the immateriality of the act of understanding to the immortality of the soul, he insisted on the bonds that for Aristotle bind human understanding to the bodily organism and concluded from this, not that the soul dies with the body, as it was held Alexander wanted, but rather that it was not possible, with the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, to demonstrate its immortality, as Duns Scotus, Ockham and Tommaso De Vio had already maintained besides. 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 what Aristotle had seen, to affirm that immortality cannot be demonstrated in the Aristotelian system seemed to many to be equivalent to denying it or casting doubt on it. Hence Pomponazzi's thesis aroused a polemic, often spiteful and intemperate, on the part of the Averroists and of certain Thomists, who accused Pomponazzi of having set himself against the decision of the Council. Which was not true.
The polemic dragged on throughout the 16th century, and Simone Porzio, Vincenzo Madio, Giulio Castellani, Giacomo Zabarella, Federico Pendasio, Cesare Cremonini and Andrea Cesalpino took part in it, all Alessandrists more or less faithful to Aphrodisias, and Ludovico Boccadiferro, M. Ant. Genua, Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, Rinaldo Adoni and Francesco Piccolomini for the Averroists. In the last years of the sixteenth century, the Scotist Filippo Fabro da Faenza, in his Philosophia Naturalis Joannis Duns Scoti, declared it rash to affirm that the philosophy of Alexander, of Averroes, of Aristotle or of another 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 d'Anghiari also procured the Latin translation of Book II.