This Day in Philosophy — 12 August: the death of Alessandro Achillini

The Italian philosopher and physician Alessandro Achillini died on 12 August 1512.

Philosophy at Bologna#

Achillini taught both philosophy and medicine at the University of Bologna. That double duty was a typical instance of the university order of the day: in the Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, natural philosophy and medicine were not separate fields. To understand how the body worked was part of understanding the principles of nature.

Among his contemporaries, we are told, he was known as a "second Aristotle" — about the highest praise a teacher in a Renaissance university could be given.

More than one Aristotle#

The period in which Achillini worked carries a tension that the history of philosophy usually misses. The Renaissance is generally recounted as the rediscovery of Plato; in the universities, however, Aristotle held the ground, and the real argument was over how Aristotle should be read.

Two lines of interpretation were in collision:

• The Averroist reading: it holds that the intellect which thinks in human beings is single and shared. Because the view conflicted with the doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul, it was a standing subject of dispute.
• The Alexandrist reading: it takes the intellect to be a faculty that comes to an end along with the body.

Achillini is counted among the names standing close to the Averroist line. The dispute was not merely a technical matter of metaphysics: the question of what it is that is immortal touched theology directly, and so it was a problem with political consequences too.

Why he is worth remembering#

Achillini's name is not as well known today as Descartes's or Bacon's. But the chairs at which men like him worked were the ground on which the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was built. Modern philosophy was not born in a void; it took over the instruments of scholastic argument, and then turned against them.