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Agostino Nifo

Agostino Nifo or Augustini Niphi (c. 1473 – 1538 or 1545) was an Italian philosopher and commentator.

Life

He was born at Sessa Aurunca near Naples. He proceeded to Padua, where he studied philosophy. He lectured at Padua, Naples, Rome, and Pisa, and won so high a reputation that he was deputed by Leo X to defend the Catholic doctrine of immortality against the attack of Pomponazzi and the Alexandrists. In return for this he was made Count Palatine, with the right to call himself by the name Medici.

Theologian

In his early thought he followed Averroes, but afterwards modified his views so far as to make himself acceptable to the orthodox Catholics.

In 1495 he produced an edition of the works of Averroes; with a commentary compatible with his acquired orthodoxy. In the great controversy with the Alexandrists he opposed the theory of Pomponazzi, that the rational soul is inseparably bound up with the material part of the individual, and hence that the death of the body carries with it the death of the soul. He insisted that the individual soul, as part of absolute intellect, is indestructible, and on the death of the body is merged in the eternal unity.

Works

His principal philosophical works are:

De immortalitate animi (1518 and 1524)
De intellectu et daemonibus
De infinitate primi motoris quaestio, and
Opuscula moralia et politica.

His numerous commentaries on Aristotle were widely read and frequently reprinted, the best-known edition being one printed at Paris in 1654 in fourteen volumes (including the Opuscula).

Other works were De Auguriis (Bologna, 1531) and a commentary on Ptolemy.

The famous phrase, to 'think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar' is attributed to Nifo.₁

References

[1] John Watkins, 'Hobbes's System of Ideas' (London: Grower, 1965), p. 56

[2] F. Edward Cranz, 'Two debates about the intellect: 2) Nifo and the Renaissance philosophers,' in Idem, Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006) (Variorum Collected Studies Series).