In book 15 of his Platonic Theology on the Immortality of the Soul , Marsilio Ficino names Averroes and the Averroists as his opponents, though he does not say which particular Averroists he has in mind. The key position that Ficino attributes to Averroes—that the Intellect is not the substantial form of the body—is not one that Averroes holds explicitly, though he does claim explicitly that the Intellect is not a body or a power in a body. Ficino's account of (...) what Averroes said about the soul's immortality comes not from texts written by Averroes but from arguments made against Averroes by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa contra gentiles. (shrink)

Change in the human past, studied by historians, includes changes in philosophy's past, which can be explained by causes, motives and reasons. In the case of philosophy, must explanatory antecedents of change always be philosophical? Should philosophers ever treat non-philosophical reasons as belonging to the history of philosophy? Saying ‘never’ is absolutely internalist, while ‘sometimes’ rejects this absolutely internalist rule. To show that ‘sometimes’ is the better answer, I examine two case histories from the early modern period: these cases, framed (...) by a taxonomy of historical narrative, eliminate absolute internalism. (shrink)