Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
of which he himself translated into Latin) but also drawing on Byzantine
commentaries and on standard Western authorities such as Boethius and Peter of
Spain. 29 Natural philosophy, another subject shunned by humanists like Petrarch
and Bruni, was embraced with enthusiasm by Argyropulos, who began his
course on the Physics by exclaiming: ‘How great is the nobility of this science,
how great its perfection, its strength and power, and how great also is its
beauty!’ 30
In his lectures on De anima, delivered in 1460, Argyropulos tackled the same
problems which had exercised scholastic commentators since the thirteenth
century: whether there was only one immortal intellect for all mankind, which
directed the body’s operations in the way that a sailor steered his ship, as
Averroes maintained; or whether the soul was instead the substantial form of
each individual person, giving the body existence (esse); and if so, whether it
died with the body, as Alexander of Aphrodisias—according to Averroes—
believed, or continued to exist after death, as Christian tradition asserted.
Argyropulos rejected both the opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias that the soul
was mortal and the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the intellect, which many
believed to be the authentic position of Aristotle. Challenging the double-truth
doctrine, which dictated that reason should be kept separate from faith,
Argyropulos asserted that there were philosophical as well as religious
arguments in favour of the Christian dogma of the immortality of individual
souls. 31 On other issues, however, Argyropulos had no qualms about relying on
Averroes, whose works he had studied while at Padua. 32 And in his lectures on
the Nicomachean Ethics, he made use of Albertus Magnus, Walter Burley and
other medieval commentators. These lectures were assiduously taken down by
his devoted student, Donato Acciaiuoli (1429–78), who later reworked them in
the form of a commentary, which, despite his humanist credentials, had a great
deal in common, in terminology, organization and content, with scholastic
treatises. 33 Humanism and scholasticism were still moving down their separate
paths, but in the second half of the fifteenth century those paths were
occasionally beginning to cross.
A large number of Aristotle’s works, mostly in the field of natural philosophy,
were translated by another Greek émigré, George of Trebizond (1395/6–1472/3),
as part of a plan, devised and financed by the humanist pope Nicholas V, to
produce a new version of the entire corpus. 34 Like Bruni and most other fifteenthcentury
Aristotle translators, George made use of the medieval versions; but
unlike them, he went out of his way to acknowledge and praise them. His own
translations resembled the medieval ones in that he tried as far as possible to
produce word-for-word versions, avoiding, however, their readiness to violate
the rules of Latin syntax and usage. George had a sophisticated understanding of
Aristotle’s style and was aware that he had not attempted, or had not been able,
to write eloquently when dealing with technical subjects. It was therefore
misguided to impose elegance where it was lacking in the original. 35