On the Immortality of the Soul

Introduction

Pomponazzi published this Latin treatise in Bologna in 1516. Three years earlier the Fifth Lateran Council had called on philosophers to defend the immortality of the soul. In fifteen chapters he weighs the positions of Averroes, who taught a single intellect, and Thomas Aquinas, who held the individual soul to be immortal, and concludes that Aristotle’s principles support neither: the human intellect always needs sense images, and so by natural reason it is mortal. Immortality is accepted on the authority of faith. The book was burned publicly in Venice; Pomponazzi answered critics with an “Apology” (1518) and a “Defence” (1519).

Connections

Builds on

• On the Soul (De anima)c. 350 BCE · Aristotle

Criticizes

• On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists1270 · Thomas Aquinas