The origin of the intellective faculty within the 16th Century debate on the immortality of the soul: The interpretations of Aristotle’s noûs thýrathen

Abstract

One of the most important features of Renaissance Aristotelianism was the large number of exegetical debates that were raised around the texts of Aristotle. These discussions were heightened further after the publication of Pietro Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae in 1516. His thesis, relegating the discussion about the immortality of the soul to the exclusive sphere of faith, produced an enormous controversy which had several aspects. One of them was precisely the battle for the rightful reading and interpretation of a handful of texts among which we can find that in which Aristotle noted that in the process of natural generation only Reason comes from outside (De generatione animalium II 3). This paper seeks to explore the different interpretations of this text in the aforementioned context.