ALESSANDRIANISM. – A philosophical tendency inspired by 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 emanating from God, was developed in an unequivocally Neoplatonic sense by the Greek author of the so-called Theologia Aristotelis, which, translated into Arabic, exerted a wide influence on the thought of Alfarabi, Avicenna, Avempace, and the Jew Maimonides.
For all of them, the agent intellect is the lowest of the separate intelligences and presides over the world of generation and corruption, upon which it radiates the ideal forms that 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 potency to understand to the act of understanding through the light of the agent intellect, which illuminates it, and thus becomes the acquired or habitual intellect. But does this acquired intellect, which is individual and personal, survive the dissolution of the body after having been constituted in its act, or does it die with the body? For the author of the Theologia Aristotelis, the human mind, freed from its dross, returns to unite itself with the agent intellect and in some way forms one thing with II. Alfarabi’s thought on this point is very uncertain. The thinker 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 faculty. This seems, in substance, also to have been Maimonides’ thesis. But for both of them the acquired intellect, which results from the action of the agent intellect upon the intellect in potency, survives the dissolution of the body, at least in men of thought, united with the agent 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 one human soul, which is the form of the body and is at once vegetative, sensitive, and rational; insofar as it is rational, it is spiritual and immortal. Separated from the soul is only the agent intellect, which produces it and continually illuminates II. This remnant of A. will not displease certain Christian scholastics, who will continue to identify the agent intellect with the divine light which, 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 which, translated into Latin, perhaps by Gerard of Cremona, in the second half of the twelfth century, circulated under the title De intellectu; it is taken from the De Anima (II, p. 106, line 18–113, line 24, ed. Bruns, Berlin 1887). Only in 1260 did William of Moerbeke translate the commentary on the Meteora.
The scholastics, however, were able to learn about Aphrodisias’s doctrine of the human mind not only from the De intellectu, but also from the exposition and criticism that Averroes gives of it in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. There is no evidence, however, that an Alexandrian current existed within scholasticism, as there was an Averroist one. The seventh proposition of the Parisian condemnation of 1279 and the 116th of the condemnation of 1227 likewise have a perfectly Averroist meaning, since for the commentator from Córdoba too, the soul which is the form of the body is inseparable from it and corruptible.
An Alexandrian current, in opposition to Thomism and Averroism, took shape instead at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while as early as 1495 the Venetian patrician Girolamo Donato had published his translation of Book I of Alexander’s De Anima. Discussions concerning the immortality of the soul and the unity of the intellect must have been rekindled, since the master general of the Dominicans, Tommaso De Vio, known as Cardinal Cajetan, had to undertake a new commentary on the De anima (published in Florence in 1510), in which he reached the conclusion that a demonstration of the immortality of the soul could not be derived from Aristotelian doctrine; and since the Fifth Lateran Council, in its eighth session on 19 December 1513, deemed it necessary to reproach and condemn “all those who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal or one in all men, or express doubts concerning this,” and to order that all professors of philosophy, whenever they expounded the thought of the ancient philosophers concerning the immortality of the soul, its unity, or the eternity of the world, should undertake to resolve the arguments contrary to the faith. In this way, the Council left open the purely philological and hermeneutical question of whether Aristotle’s thought had been better understood by Averroes, Thomas, or Alexander. Meanwhile, in 1516, at Bologna, Achillini printed in his Opus Septiegementatum the medieval translation of the De intellectu, and the Veronese Girolamo Bagolino produced a new Latin version. Pomponazzi (v.) published the brief treatise De immortalitate animae. He maintained with Aphrodisias that the agent intellect is a separate substance; with Thomas, he held the possible intellect to be a faculty of the soul, which is the form of the body; but whereas Aquinas argued from the immateriality of the act of understanding to the immortality of the soul, he stressed the bonds that, according to Aristotle, link human understanding to the bodily organism, and concluded not that the soul died with the body, as Alexander was thought to have maintained, but rather that its immortality could not be demonstrated by the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, as Duns Scotus, Occam, and Tommaso De Vio had already maintained. Thus 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 beyond what Aristotle had seen, asserting that immortality could not be demonstrated within the Aristotelian system seemed to many equivalent to denying it or casting doubt upon II. Hence Pomponazzi’s thesis provoked a polemic, often hostile and intemperate, on the part of the Averroists and certain Thomists, who accused Pomponazzi of having set himself against the Council’s decision. This was not true.
The controversy continued throughout the sixteenth century, and was joined by Simone Porzio, Vincenzo Madio, Giulio Castellani, Giacomo Zabarella, Federico Pendasio, Cesare Cremonini, and Andrea Cesalpino, all Alexandrians more or less faithful to Aphrodisias; and by Ludovico Boccadiferro, M. Ant. Genua, Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, Rinaldo Adoni, and Francesco Piccolomini on the Averroist side. In the final years of the sixteenth century, the Scotist Filippo Fabro da Faenza, in his Philosophia Naturalis Joannis Duns Scoti, declared that it was rash to assert that the philosophy of Alexander, Averroes, Aristotle, or any other philosopher constituted the whole of philosophy. In 1534, Alexander’s Greek text of the De Anima was printed in Venice, and fifteen years later Angelo Canini d’Anghiari also prepared a Latin translation of Book II.