Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 358 - Of Two Minds - Pomponazzi and Nifo on the Intellect.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode, Of Two Minds, Pomponazzi and Nifo on the Intellect. Some people just don't like being told what to do or what to think, and a lot of these people are named Peter. The tradition began with Saint Peter himself, who was not only martyred for his faith but even, according to legend, made the Romans crucify him upside down to avoid being tacitly compared with Christ. The Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, ruler of a land where all the men wore beards, decided that they should all go clean-shaven. Peter Pan refused even to grow up. The guitarist of The Who, Pete Townsend, was, well, Pete Townsend, while the reggae singer, Peter Tosh, was so annoyed at being forbidden to smoke marijuana that he wrote a song called Legalize It. I myself contributed to this grand tradition of rebellious Peters as a lad by occasionally refusing to eat my vegetables. Though, to be honest, this hardly counted as rebellion in my family, given that my father likes to say, I have a rule against eating anything green, but I make an exception for carrots. I don't eat those either. In any case, it was entirely predictable that when in 1513 the Pope declared that the human soul is immortal and that this can be proven by rational argument, some philosopher named Peter would refuse to play along. Three years later, Pietro Pompanazzi published his work on the immortality of the soul. The Pope would no doubt have approved of the title, but not the rest of it. It argues that philosophical arguments point rather towards the soul's mortality, its essential dependence upon the body. Pompanazzi concluded by acknowledging the truth of the Christian teaching, that the human soul does live on after death, but he denied that this can be established philosophically. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a hostile reaction. The treatise was burned at Venice and Pompanazzi was accused of heresy. Fortunately for him, his patron was named Peter too. This was the bishop, Pietro Bembo, whom we met as the author of a dialogue on love called Liasolani. Despite being himself a Platonist philosopher, Bembo gave Pompanazzi political protection. Meanwhile, Pompanazzi got busy mounting his own defense. He wrote two works responding to critics, the most significant one being Agostino Nifo. The two had clashed before, having been rivals since the 1490s when both lectured at the University of Padua. As we've seen, Padua was a center of peripatetic philosophy in the Italian Renaissance. Aristotle's treatises were assiduously taught and studied there, alongside commentaries on his works. But this does not imply that all the Paduans were in agreement about how to interpret Aristotle. Actually, the theory of soul most strongly associated with Padua is one that Pompanazzi would harshly criticize. It's a theory that we can trace to Aristotle's greatest medieval commentator, the Muslim thinker Imrosht, known in Latin as Ivaroese. One visitor to Padua at the end of the 15th century said that at the university there, all agreed to the positions of this author and took them as a kind of oracle. Most famous with all was his position on the unity of the possible intellect, so that he who thought otherwise was considered worthy of the name neither of peripatetic nor philosopher. To which you may well say, Latin Ivaroism? How is that still a thing? We last met the phrase in the 13th century, when the arts masters at Paris flirted with the dangerous ideas of this man, known simply as the commentator, in particular his belief in the eternity of the world and in the unity of the intellect. This provoked condemnation from the Bishop of Paris and refutations by colleagues, including Thomas Aquinas. But unlike the soul, according to Pompanazzi, Ivaroism managed to live on. It flourished above all in Italy, where at the end of the 14th century, Blasius of Parma was already reprimanded for accepting Ivaroese's view on the intellect. A hundred years later, the same teaching was receiving support from Nicolleta Vernia, who taught both Nifo and Pompanazzi. Again this provoked an official rebuke. In 1489, the Bishop of Padua threatened that Ivaroism would be punished by excommunication. Vernia's first name was not Peter, so he recanted, writing a treatise in 1492 against what he now called the perverse opinion of Ivaroese. This was presumably because of the pressure that had been brought to bear on him, though he claimed to have changed his mind upon reading more carefully and widely in the Aristotelian commentary tradition. And even here he smuggled in the caveat that in terms of its operation, the human intellect is universal and not individual. It was precisely this premise that had led Ivaroese himself to his notorious teaching on the intellect. He wrestled with the nature of the mind throughout his career, eventually reaching the conclusion that there is only one capacity for abstract, truly intellectual thought, which is shared by all humankind. The intellect's operation is universal, because its knowledge consists in grasping general realities or universals. By contrast, other forms of cognition like sensation and imagination grasp particulars and their properties. You can see or imagine an individual giraffe like Hiawatha, but you must use your intellect to grasp the universal nature, giraffe, that belongs to all giraffes. Ivaroese did not see how this universal nature could be received in a physical organ like the brain. You can collect sensory images in the brain, remember them, fabricate new images you haven't experienced like a giraffe eating broccoli, and even think about particulars to make plans for the future. What might you do if your pet giraffe refuses to eat its vegetables? But your brain cannot be the seat of universal thoughts. This fits well with something Ivaroese could find stated clearly in Aristotle, namely that the intellect's activity is not realized in any bodily organ. But if the intellect's work takes place outside my bodily organs, Ivaroese thought, then it must not belong to me or any other individual embodied person. The intellect is universal and belongs to everyone. While this may seem an outlandish conclusion, Ivaroese's standing as the premier medieval commentator on Aristotle was by itself a good reason to take his view seriously. Vernier called him Aristotle's most famous interpreter, while Niepfel referred to him Aristotle's priest. And if Ivaroese's position had something else to recommend it, it at least made the human intellect immaterial and immortal. For Christian readers, this might well seem preferable to saying that the intellect is closely linked to embodied individuals, just a part of the human soul that Aristotle had famously defined as the form of the organic body, potentially having life. The form of a table doesn't survive when you destroy the body of the table. So if the human soul is the form of the human body, why should it survive when the body is killed? Renaissance readers could find this line of thought being followed through by the premier ancient commentator on Aristotle, namely Alexander of Aphrodisias. In the 15th century, he was standardly being interpreted as having held that the soul is indeed mortal, since it is only the form of a mortal body. So devotees of Aristotelian thought were caught between a rock and a hard place. The materialist theory of Alexander on the one hand, Ivaroese's hard to believe theory of the unity of the immaterial intellect on the other. Massilio Ficino thus complained, Ficino responded to the challenge with his massive work, The Platonic Theology, which devoted hundreds upon hundreds of pages to proving the immortality of individual human souls. Surely at least one of those arguments must be right? The pope evidently thought so, and Ficino's work has sometimes been credited with helping inspire the papal declaration that immortality can be rationally proven. But then Ficino was a Platonist, often arguing from different premises than would be accepted by the Aristotelians of Padua. It was an open question whether personal immortality was compatible with Aristotle's writings on the soul. Already around 1460, the Byzantine emigre John Argyropoulos, lecturing on Aristotle at Florence, decided that Ivaroism was the correct interpretation of Aristotle, though good Christians should still deem it to be false as an account of the soul. It would be nice if you could use Aristotle and rational argumentation to prove the Christian doctrine of the afterlife, but sadly you can't. The same conclusion was reached by Alessandro Aquellini and Luca Prasitio, Ivaroists who taught at Bologna and Naples respectively. Like Ficino, Aquellini said that both Alexander and Ivaroies put forward false views on the soul, Alexander denying its immortality, and Ivaroies accepting it as immortal, but only one for all humans. Still, Ivaroies was preferable in that he, not Alexander, had at least understood Aristotle correctly. Likewise, Prasitio said that Aristotle was never more truly interpreted than by Ivaroies, and that he could find nothing more certain and true on the immortality of the soul than what can be taken from Ivaroies. But Prasitio too hastened to add that this apparently certain and true teaching is deemed false by Christian faith. Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that Pomponazzi's treatise was a little less shocking than we might suppose. He differed from the Renaissance Ivaroists simply in his choice of which false theory of the soul should be ascribed to Aristotle. Alexander's reading was broadly correct, Ivaroies is completely wrong. Like the Ivaroists, Pomponazzi offered detailed arguments for his preferred interpretation of Aristotle, and then piously distanced himself from the resulting theory with some final disclaimers. But why was he so certain that Aristotle was committed to the mortality of the soul? He depended above all on passages where Aristotle closely associates intellectual thinking with imagination. Consider what happens when you think about giraffes, even at the most abstract scientific level. Clearly, you'll have a hard time doing that without having some sensory experiences of giraffes, and preserving representations of giraffes in your memory, the way they look, sound, and, yes, smell. You might remember seeing one graze on leaves and another walk past meat without showing the slightest interest, and come to the general truth that giraffes, unlike me as a boy, gladly restrict themselves to a plant-based diet. Pomponazzi goes further than this though. He certainly holds that universal thinking has its origins in sensory awareness, but this is just the standard empiricism of the Aristotelian scientific tradition. More controversial is his claim that for Aristotle, every act of universal thinking comes together with an act of imagination. You can't think about the vegetarianism of all giraffes without remembering or imagining particular giraffes eating their veggies. So even if, as Aristotle stated, universal thinking itself is not realized in the brain or any other bodily organ, that thinking is nonetheless the act of a physical and organic body, as Pomponazzi puts it. Intellect depends on powers that are realized in the body, so it cannot remain once your body dies. And since everyone agrees that the intellect is the part of the soul with the most plausible claim to immortality, this shows that the soul is not immortal at all. In addition to setting out his own reading of Aristotle, Pomponazzi criticizes other views. Against Iberoides, he can make the obvious complaint that the single intellect of his theory may be immortal but does not belong to each of us as individuals, so it would not secure our immortality. Less obviously, Iberoides depicted human thinking as being just like the pure separate thinking that belongs to God and the celestial intellects of Aristotle's cosmology. The very fact that we need to use our imaginations to think is a clear sign that our intellects work quite differently than those exalted minds. In fact, Pomponazzi thinks that in comparison to them, we can claim to have only a shadow of intellect. Pomponazzi also takes aim at Thomas Aquinas. At this time, Aquinas was already seen as a great Christian theologian whose authority was more difficult to challenge than that of the Muslim Iberoides. In fact, Pomponazzi was himself thoroughly schooled in Thomas' philosophy as a student. Nonetheless, he dares to argue that Aquinas' theory cannot be sustained on rational grounds or as an interpretation of Aristotle. Pomponazzi agrees with Thomas in rejecting Iberoism. We all have our own single, individual souls. With the emphasis on single, we do not have two souls, a mortal one for sensation and a second immortal soul for intellection. On this view, soul and body would have no greater unity than oxen and plow, he says. But if the single soul is immortal and immaterial, as Aquinas claims, then why would intellect, the signature activity of the immaterial soul, depend on the body for its functioning, as we've seen that it does? Aquinas' view might be true in the end, as testified by religion, but it cannot be established by reason. Pomponazzi nonetheless acknowledges that the human soul has some share in immortality. He echoes the words of Pico della Mirandola, for whom the human being uniquely contains all creation, straddling the immortal and mortal, the immaterial and the material. Giraffes are pretty good at straddling, but even they can't do that. Still, immortality belongs to humans only in respect of the universal truths they grasp when they use their minds. We are temporary creatures that grasp eternal verities, material beings that receive immaterial objects of thought while using physical images to do so. Here, Pomponazzi responds to a distinction introduced by Iverroes, who contrasted the intellect's using the body as a subject to having body as its object. Our minds needing images when we think shows that the intellect uses the body as an object, drawing on memory and imagination as a kind of storehouse of information on the basis of which pure universals can be understood. Iverroes and his followers agreed that the universal mind draws on such images which are stored in individual human brains, but they claim that the intellect performs its activity separately from the body as a subject because it has no specific organ. Pomponazzi disagrees. If the mind needs material images as objects, then it needs the body as its subject too. So you can boil Pomponazzi's whole argument down to a claim that is apt to strike us as remarkably obvious. People think as individuals and cannot do so without their brains. But in the early 16th century this was far from obvious. Hadn't Pico and Ficino shown that we are part animal but part angel? Are we not made to partake even of divinity in some small way? In fact, didn't Aristotle himself say in his Ethics that we are capable of reaching beyond a merely human life to reach ultimate felicity through theoretical contemplation? How then can intellect be inevitably linked to embodiment? Pomponazzi anticipates this line of objection, and responds basically that contemplation is indeed something quasi-divine, which is precisely why we shouldn't make it the purpose of human life. Look around, most people are peasants or artisans, and even among the elite very few men and hardly any women are concerned with philosophy. Which is perfectly fine, says Pomponazzi. Our aim as humans is to be morally upright, to make good use of what Aristotle called practical intellect. We do have a theoretical intellect too, which can be used to grasp universal truths, but this is just a kind of bonus that comes on top of the happiness already secured through a virtuous life. In fact, to insist that human life loses its purpose if we are not immortal is to suggest that the only reason to be good is to gain reward and avoid punishment in the afterlife, whereas in fact virtue should be pursued here and now for its own sake. When Pomponazzi published his treatise in 1516, it attracted the attention of his old rival, Agostino Nifo. Nifo had been thinking about these issues for decades. Around the turn of the century, he reprised the intellectual journey travelled by his teacher, Nicoletto Vernier, at first presenting Averroes's theory of the single intellect sympathetically, and then turning against it. Having devoted great effort to commenting on the works of the great commentator, he turned against Averroes in 1503, writing a treatise on the intellect, which declares that the Averroist position is against both faith and Aristotle. It errs in supposing that the subject of thinking must be just as universal as its object, that if what we all grasp when learning about giraffes is a single intelligible form of giraffe, then there can be only a single intellect that grasps it. Instead, we can say that each human intellect receives a unique form of its own, by means of which it understands the universal nature of giraffe. This is a major concession, since it gives up on an idea found in Aristotle and always stressed by Averroists like the younger Nifo, namely that the mind actually becomes identical to the universal nature it grasps. Now, Nifo replaces this with the idea that the mind has its own representation of that nature, sometimes called in scholastic jargon an intelligible species. Or as Nifo puts it, the mind does not actually have within itself the object of intellect, but something through which it understands the object of intellect intellectually. It's sort of like having a picture of the giraffe rather than the nature of the giraffe itself. Having persuaded himself of this, Nifo is able to make the politically convenient move of embracing a position more like that of Aquinas. The human intellect is not so exalted as to be single and universal, but it is nonetheless immortal and independent from the body in its operation. As a result, the philosophical study of the soul is itself like human nature according to Pico della Mirandola, it spans the material and immaterial realms and is thus a science that belongs to both physics and metaphysics. It is from this position that Nifo attacks Pomponazzi. He makes short shrift of Pomponazzi's main proof of the soul's mortality, namely that it cannot think without bodily images. While it is true that images are needed at first, so the intellect can learn about universal truths, it can dispense with the images thereafter and occupy itself with nothing but universals. So the mind can still be active after bodily death. Thus Nifo is able to say that humans are after all made for more than a morally upstanding embodied life. We are made to contemplate, as Aristotle said, and it is specifically the speculative intellect that differentiates us from other animals. Of course, we are not born using this intellect but need to work at it. As Nifo writes, the rational soul develops until it reaches the metaphysical intelligibles when the speculative intellect is formed. One problem with this is that if the afterlife consists only in pure activity of the mind, it seems that very few people will be prepared for it. If you haven't acquired universal knowledge in this life by becoming a philosopher or a scientist, what will you think about after you die? And it's not just that, as Pompanazzi said, almost an infinite number of men seem to have less intellect than many beasts. It's also that many infants die before they even have the chance to start actualizing their capacity for intellectual thought, a problem that Pompanazzi pointed out in his response to Nifo. To answer this kind of problem, Nifo too has to retreat into invocations of religion, assuring his readers that those humans who failed to join the intellectual elite in this life may nonetheless be granted beatitude through God's mercy. But to be on the safe side, it's probably better if you become an elite philosopher. So it would be really helpful if one of these Paduans would tell us how to go about doing that. Actually, many philosophers at Padua and other Renaissance Aristotelians were keenly interested in the study of scientific method, which would reveal the stages along the journey from ignorance to knowledge. But the man most famous for his discussion of these issues was Jacopo Zabarela. In his theory of intellect, Zabarela was sympathetic to the approach of Pompanazzi. He likewise rejected the views of Aquinas and Iverroes and agreed with Pompanazzi that the mind needs body for its operation because it always has to use images, albeit that the universal thinking it can do on the basis of those images requires no bodily organ. That's the metaphysical side of things, but what about the methodological and epistemological side? How exactly do we go from experience of particulars to universal understanding? To find out, I'll tell you to join me next time, unless your name is Peter, in which case you'll do whatever you're darn well please, for Zabarela's Philosophy of Science, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.