PORCACCI (Porcatins), Filippo. Skeptical philosopher and theologian of the Conventual Friars Minor, born at Bagnacavallo (Ravenna), died at Rome in the church of the SS. Apostoli where he is buried, on 13 Sept. 1511.
He taught theology at Venice, metaphysics (1506–10) and moral philosophy (1507–10) at the University of Bologna, which had admitted him to its College of Theologians on 9 Apr. 1488 (1488, 1504, 1507). He served as provincial minister of his Bolognese province (1500–1504, 1508–10); at the General Chapter of Terni (1500) he was one of the provincials deputed to draft the new constitutions of the Order (the “Alessandrine”). He became procurator general (1505–1509), and at the Chapter of Rome in 1510 was elected the 42nd minister general of the Order after St Francis. He governed for one year and three months, highly esteemed by Pope Julius II who had summoned him to Rome for important Church affairs.
To his philosophical and theological studies we owe the editions of Scotus’s Opus Oxoniense and Quaestiones quodlibetales (Venice 1497, 1503, 1505). At the end of Book I of the Sentences of the Opus Oxoniense he collected the Addictiones prologi primique Sententiarum libri, which in other editions are found scattered elsewhere; to Book II he appended the Opusculum in II Librum Sent. Scoti by his confrere B. Bellati (v.); to the entire work, which treats the Quaestiones quodlibetales as one book, he added (v. ed. 1505) the Tabula Generalis ac mare magnum scoticae subtilitatis by Antonio de Fanti. The text is illustrated with marginal notes citing opinions of various doctors and passages from Aristotle’s commentaries. Hence perhaps the Aristotelian commentaries attributed to him by Wadding. Other writings and sermons are ascribed to him by Sbaralea.