On the Immortality of the Soul

...he brings forward this reason: that the sensory part does not perform its duties without the body. The intellect, however, is not at all bound or obligated to the body in contemplation; this intellect he called both impassible and separable, and immortal, yet not remembering, since it is least of all acted upon, unlike the imagination. These points from Philoponus, a most genuine Peripatetic, we have willingly brought into the open from his Greek commentaries, partly translating and partly collecting them as if by a certain paraphrase—things which pertain to the abolition of mortality, and drawn from the principal places in which this matter is most discussed. For those things which are usually brought forward from other books of Aristotle—the Metaphysics, Physics, on Animals, On the World to Alexander, the Ethics, and many others—even if they are relevant to the matter, they nevertheless admit various interpretations more easily than those taken from the books in which he discusses the nature of the soul by design: because those foreign passages are not so supported by the context.

Note from which books it is appropriate to derive what Aristotle thought about the soul.

Let those be as an example from the books on morals: that the adversity and prosperity of those connected to them pertain to the dead; to which dead, I ask, unless the soul is immortal? Likewise that point: that one must rather die, as it is the lesser evil, than act basely; and in what way is it the lesser evil, if the soul were to be destroyed together with the virtue situated within it? These things, however, although they are clear, many have ineptly corrupted with various glosses.

Note how variously the opinion of Aristotle is drawn and in many parts corrupted.

Let there also be as an example that passage from the twelfth book of the First Philosophy, section seventeen. For when Aristotle had said that nothing prevents the intellect from surviving, Alexander interpreted this as the acquired intellect; Albert did not take "acquired" in the same way; Averroes spoke of the separate intellect; Saint Thomas, in the second volume of the Against the Gentiles, is thought to speak of that which is a part of the soul.

What Simplicius thought concerning the immortality of the soul, and how manifold a mention of the intellect he made.

Simplicius, who among the Peripatetics was gifted with the title of "Great Master," in his first commentary on On the Soul, almost immediately makes mention of the rational soul and the participated intellect, which he says is a middle between the species and the things made from them, so that the soul itself may demonstrate that it has a communion with both through its whole self. And he teaches that it happens that what is separable, according to some action of its own, is sometimes folded into that from which it is not separated; a passage which supports very much some of the modern theologians, and can also be best adapted to those who assert that the soul, insofar as it is a form, actually connotes the whole of which