 Born in Mantua, Pomponazzi studied at Padua, obtaining his degree in arts in 1487. He then taught there, first as extraordinary and then ordinary professor from 1488–1496 (Nardi 1965: 54–55). His teacher and fellow professor at Padua Nicoletto Vernia as well as his colleague Alessandro Achillini openly endorsed Averroes’ view of the unicity of the material intellect, a view that Bishop Pietro Barrozzi condemned with the threat of excommunication in 1489, leading them to revise or hide their teachings (Hasse 2016: 184–214). Pomponazzi questioned and ultimately rejected Averroes’ unicity position. Perhaps influenced by his other teachers Pietro Trapolino and Francesco Securo da Nardò, he respected Thomas Aquinas’s views even if he found them to use theological premises that he believed were unwelcome in natural philosophy and contrary to Aristotle’s philosophy. Despite rejecting Averroes’ view on the material intellect, throughout his career, Pomponazzi’s lectures relied on Averroes’ commentaries. For example, among Pomponazzi’s writings are quaestiones based on Averroes’ De substantia orbis (On the Substance of the Orbs). Around 1496, he obtained a doctorate in medicine (Oliva 1926: 179), a common step for those who wished to rise in the universities of northern Italy, where philosophy was often taught as preparation to the study of medicine (see Kristeller 1993: vol. 3, 436–38; Kraye 2010: 93). Although Pomponazzi never taught medicine he was consulted for his medical expertise (see Park 2006: 175–76) and frequently considered medical teachings in his writings on wondrous phenomena, Aristotle’s zoological writings, and Meteorologica IV (see Perfetti 2004: xliii–xlv; Martin 2002). During this first stint at Padua, he wrote Quaestio de maximo et minimo (Question on the Maximum and the Minimum), which attacked William Heytesbury and the calculatory tradition (see Biard 2009). Beginning in the 1330s, Heytesbury and others at Merton College at Oxford applied mathematical and logical analysis on a range of topics, including natural philosophical questions regarding kinematics. Pomponazzi remained hostile to the calculatory and terminist traditions throughout his life because he considered their interpretations of Aristotle’s texts as veering too far from a strict exegesis of Aristotle. In 1496, Pomponazzi left Padua, after disputing with Agostino Nifo, and tutored Prince Alberto Pio da Carpi, who was in exile at Ferrara. Alberto Pio remained for years a supporter of Aristotelian thought, commissioning translations of Averroes and Aristotle, and Pomponazzi dedicated his 1514 De intensione et remissione formarum (On the Intension and Remission of Forms) to him (see Schmitt 1984).