A sizable body of other writings has been preserved in manuscript, and the study and publication of this material have barely begun. The most important among these unpublished writings are questions on Aristotelian and other problems, which Pomponazzi probably worded himself and that therefore directly reflect his thought. A much larger group consists of his class lectures on various works of Aristotle. Since they were taken down by students and show a certain amount of oscillation from year to year and from copy to copy, they must be used with caution in any attempt to reconstruct Pomponazzi's thought and philosophical development.
Pomponazzi was a product and in many ways a typical representative of the tradition of scholastic Aristotelianism that flourished at Bologna, Padua, and other Italian universities from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. This school, often referred to as Paduan Averroism, had no institutional or doctrinal connections with theology, as did its northern counterparts, but rather with medicine, and this accounts for its secular orientation. In the study of Aristotle, whose writings served as the prescribed texts for the teaching of the philosophical disciplines, the emphasis was, as in Paris and elsewhere, on logic and natural philosophy rather than on ethics and metaphysics.
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