Alexandrists

Alexandrists

Italian Renaissance philosophers, led by Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who followed the explanation of Aristotle's De anima given by Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd–3rd century AD). Alexander held that De anima denied individual immortality, considering the soul a material and therefore a mortal entity, organically connected with the body. The Alexandrists disagreed with Thomas Aquinas and his followers, who interpreted Aristotle as saying that the individual soul is immortal, and with the Latin Averroists (see Averroës), who held that the individual intellect is reabsorbed after death into the eternal intellect.