 Despite numerous negative assessments, some sixteenth-century philosophers pursued Pomponazzi’s approach. For example, Simone Porzio, a professor of philosophy at Pisa, followed his mortalist and Alexandrian take on the human intellect (Del Soldato 2010). Even though many throughout the seventeenth century condemned his view that the soul dies with the body, Pierre Bayle absolved Pomponazzi of impiety, found him to be an example of freedom of thought, and praised him for his ethical teachings that spurned the inducements of the afterlife (Bayle 1740: vol. 3, 777–83). In the nineteenth century, he was championed by positivists, such as Ernest Renan and Roberto Ardigò, who upheld Pomponazzi as a model for the scientific spirit that opposed religious oppression (Ardigò 1869; Renan 1852: 284–88). During the twentieth century, a number of scholars endorsed the views of seventeenth-century libertines, interpreting Pomponazzi as insincere, a promoter of religious imposture, or as a determined enemy of Christianity (see Busson 1957: 44–69; Charbonnel 1919: 220–74, 389–438). Accordingly, he gained among some the epithet “Radical Philosopher” (see Pine 1986). Other scholars, following the leads of Bruno Nardi and Paul Oskar Kristeller, placed him in the context of the secular tradition of medieval philosophy that separated theology from philosophy (Bianchi 2008). Under that interpretation, Pomponazzi was not necessarily an instigator or harbinger of the conflicts between church and science of the modern period but rather better understood as continuing scholastic philosophical practices, which included open inquiry, that took root in the thirteenth century.