ALEXANDRIST

Italian Alessandristo, plural Alessandristi, any of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance who, in the controversy about personal immortality, followed the explanation of Aristotle's De anima (On the Soul) given by Alexander of Aphrodisias, who held that it denied individual immortality. Thomas Aquinas and his followers had maintained that Aristotle, who regarded reason as eternal, also regarded it as a faculty of the individual soul and so should be cited as believing that the individual soul is immortal. The Latin Averroists, on the other hand, had evolved a doctrine of universal (as opposed to individual) immortality, holding that the individual intellect is reabsorbed after death into the eternal intellect. The Alexandrists, however, led by Pietro Pomponazzi, denied that either the Thomist or the Averroist view could justly be attributed to Aristotle. Instead, they held that Aristotle considered the soul as a material and therefore a mortal entity, operating during life only under the authority of universal reason and organically connected with the body, on the dissolution of which it would become extinct.