 In this debate Pereira wanted to intervene formulating a discourse whose principal aim was to resolve those difficulties which were inherent in the relation between the soul and the body. This discourse was clearly linked to the theoretical assumptions of his time, but it had in addition traits of certain originality which has gone alas largely unnoticed. The author of the Antoniana Margarita put his finger on the deficiencies of the Scholastic-Thomist philosophy when it was applied to demonstrate the immortal nature of the human soul. In this sense, he clearly assumed that the criticism of the Alexandrist Aristotelians, and in particular of Pietro Pomponazzi, was essentially correct (Pine 1986: 124 ff.; Perrone 1999: xlvi–lxvii). Pereira concluded that assuming that the rational soul is potentially capable of exercising the activities related to vital functions implies recognizing that it is linked to the body. Thus, given the premises established by Aristotle himself in his De generatione animalium (II, 3), the origin of that soul must be found in the same process of natural generation that gives rise to the living body, but this process is essentially material. For Pereira, then, if we really want to save the immortality of the soul, we must radically separate it from all activity that is related in one way or another to the body. He accepted the consequences of the dilemma that Pomponazzi had established in his De immortalitate animae (1516): if the soul has the body as its own substratum (ut subiecto) or cannot operate without the support of the body (ut obiecto), it is inseparable from it, being then perishable (see Pine 1986: 55–123; Kessler 1988: 500–504). It can be said that, to a great extent, the Antoniana Margarita was conceived to give a satisfactory answer to this unavoidable syllogism (see Valverde 2017: 541–553). Pereira tried to show that the rational soul has nothing to do with the body because it is a simple and independent substance dissociated from all those vital functions that have the body as their object or as their substrate: these functions belong then to a psychic principles different from the intellect: 