asserted that, according to Aristotle, the soul was mortal, the Averroists, that the rational part which is common to all men was immortal; while to this were added the further questions, if and how the Aristotelian view could be reconciled with the Church doctrine, which demanded a continued personal existence. The most eminent Aristotelian of the Renaissance, Petrus Pomponatius (De Immortalite Animae, 1516; De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, Providentia et Praedestinatione), was on the side of the Alexandrists. Achillini and Niphus fought on the other side. Caesalpin (died 1603), Zabarella, and Cremonini assumed an intermediate, or, at least, a less decided position. Still others, as Faber Stapulensis in Paris (1500), and Desiderius Erasmus (1520), were more interested in securing a correct text of Aristotle's works than in his philosophical principles.
Among the Anti-Aristotelians only two famous names need be mentioned, that of the influential Frenchman, Petrus Ramus, and the German, Taurellus. Pierre de la Ramée (assassinated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 1572), attacked the (unnatural and useless) Aristotelian logic in his Aristotelicae Animadversiones, 1543, objecting, with the Ciceronians mentioned above, to the separation of logic and rhetoric; and attempted a new logic of his own, in his Institutiones Dialecticae, which, in spite of its formalism, gained acceptance, especially in Germany.[1] Nicolaus Oechslein, Latinized Taurellus (born in 1547 at Mömpelgard; at his death, in 1606, professor of medicine in the University of Altdorf), stood quite alone because of his independent position in reference to all philosophical and religious parties. His most important works were his Philosophiae Triumphus, 1573; Synopsis Aristotelis Metaphysicae, 1596; Alpes Caesae (against Caesalpin, and the title punning on his name), 1597; and De Rerum Aeternitate, 1604.[2] The thought of Taurellus inclines toward the ideal of a Christian philosophy; which, however, Scholasticism, in his
