DE ANIMAE IMMORTALITATE On the Immortality of the Soul

to a true and sincere way of philosophizing, nor is it the way to seek and hold onto truth. Therefore, I will perhaps seem to have performed a worthy task if I first gather into one place the very arguments by which almost everyone is accustomed to construct the immortality of the soul, and likewise those by which, conversely, mortality is often inferred, and if I refute them in a few words. For it is right to touch upon and note these rather than to explain them at length, lest I seem to do what has already been done, or to pass over in silence what others have brought into controversy. Then, I will undertake to bring into the middle Aristotle’s own words, their logic, and the authorities of those philosophers who were of great name in the Peripatetic Aristotelian family, so that it may be clear to those who do not know Greek, and placed beyond all controversy, that the ancient Peripatetics considered Aristotle to have thought differently about the immortality of the soul than Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes Ibn Rushd believed; I will make known how differently they are each regarded. Finally, I will produce the opinions of those who followed either Alexander or themselves in asserting mortality, and I will indicate the passages by which they were moved to argue that Aristotle thought this way. From those same passages, I will show that the strongest arguments for asserting the soul’s immortality can be drawn, so that the very weapons they use to attack immortality are turned back against their own mortality. Various authors use arguments to prove the soul’s immortality taken from its elevation, by which we understand potentiality, and from the fact that it is sufficiently established that the soul is perfected rather than corrupted the more it is removed from the body and its functions, through its own operation, which

What is commonly brought forth in general for the immortality of the soul: