Pietro Pomponazzi

Pietro Pomponazzi
Born	16 September 1462 Mantua
Died	18 May 1525 Bologna
Academic advisors	Nicoletto Vernia
Notable students	Giovanni Battista della Monte Vittore Trincavelli

Pietro Pomponazzi (16 September 1462 – 18 May 1525) was an Italian philosopher. He is sometimes known by his Latin name, Petrus Pomponatius.

Pomponazzi was born in Mantua and began his education there. He completed his studies at Padua, where he became a medical doctor in 1487. In 1488 he was elected extraordinary professor of philosophy at Padua, where he was a colleague of Alessandro Achillini, the Averroist. From about 1495 to 1509 he occupied the chair of natural philosophy until the closing of the schools of Padua, when he took a professorship at Ferrara where he lectured on the Aristotle's De anima (the soul) and entelechy. In 1512 he was invited to Bologna where he remained until his death and where he produced all his important works.

The predominance of medical science at Padua had cramped his energies, but at Ferrara, and even more at Bologna, the study of psychology and theological speculation were more important. In 1516 he produced his great work De immortalitate animae (On the Immortality of the Soul), which gave rise to a storm of controversy between the orthodox Thomists of the Catholic Church, the Averroists headed by Agostino Nifo, and the so-called Alexandrist School. The treatise was burned at Venice, and Pomponazzi himself ran serious risk of death at the hands of the Catholics. Two pamphlets followed, the Apologia and the Defensorium, wherein he explained his paradoxical position as Catholic and philosophic materialist. His last two treatises, the De incantationibus and the De fato, were posthumously published in an edition of his works printed at Basel.

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