Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 23
Commentator’ in the universities, humanists like Barbaro, echoing—from a more
informed position—Petrarch’s hostility, were determined to replace this Arabic
influence with ancient Greek expositors more acceptable to their classical
tastes. 47 A few works by the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle had been
translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, and some of their views, especially
those of Alexander of Aphrodisias, were known through reports given by
Averroes; but the vast bulk of the material was unavailable to Western readers. 48
To help remedy this situation, Barbaro in 1481 published a Latin translation of
the paraphrases of Themistius; and in 1495 Girolamo Donato, a Venetian
humanist who belonged to Barbaro’s circle, published a translation of Alexander
of Aphrodisias’s commentary on De anima. These versions were soon to have a
significant impact on philosophical discussions in Padua. 49
While Barbaro and Donato were producing their Latin translations of Aristotle
and his ancient commentators, other humanists also working in Venice were
directing their efforts towards editing the Greek texts of these works. Their
supreme achievement was the Greek Aristotle published between 1495 and 1498
by Aldus Manutius (c. 1452–1515). 50 This multi-volume deluxe edition was
primarily the fruit of humanist philology, but important contributions came from
the scholastic side as well: Francesco Cavalli (d. 1540), a physician who taught at
Padua, worked out the proper arrangement of the treatises on natural philosophy
and convinced Aldus to substitute Theophrastus’s botanical works for De
plantis, a work he recognized to be pseudoAristotelian. 51 Aldus also had
ambitious plans to publish Greek editions of the Aristotelian commentators, but
the project did not get off the ground until early in the next century. 52
The rest of the thriving Venetian publishing industry, with an eye to profit
rather than to intellectual lustre, focused its energies on producing Latin editions
of Aristotle, still, and for some time to come, the staple diet of the philosophical
curriculum. One such work, published in 1483–4 and containing the
commentaries of Averroes as well as the medieval translations of Aristotle, was
edited by Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499), the leading professor of natural philosophy
at the University of Padua. For much of his career Vernia was a typical
scholastic, who regarded Averroes and Albertus Magnus as the greatest of
Aristotelian commentators. Insisting on the double-truth distinction between
theological and rational discourse, Vernia maintained that although the belief in
the soul as the substantial form of individual human beings was true according to
faith, it was nevertheless completely foreign to Aristotle, whose thought should
not be interpreted as if he had been a Christian. Averroes, not Thomas Aquinas,
had correctly understood Aristotle, recognizing that according to Peripatetic
principles (e.g. the indivisibility of separate substances) there was only one
intellective soul for all mankind. 53
Vernia’s stance had to be altered when, in 1489, the bishop of Padua banned
any further discussion of the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the intellect. Just
as earlier scholastics had been forced to recant views which were unacceptable to
the Church, Vernia abandoned his Averroist beliefs. In the 1490s he completely