Aristotle’s Immortal Intellect

Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75:97-106 (2001)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Recent scholarship understands Aristotle to hold that the human intellect is in part corruptible and in part immortal. The main textual support claimed for this understanding is De Anima III.5, where Aristotle, it is said, presents his doctrine of an immortal active intellect and a mortal passive intellect. In this paper I show that Aristotle distinguishes at III.5 not an active and a passive intellect, but an agent and a potential intellect, both immortal. I further show that the mortal passive intellect mentioned at the end of III.5 is an analogous use of the term intellect, and refers to imagination, the act of a corruptible bodily organ, here called intellect only because it supplies the images from which intellect abstracts concepts.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,386

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Aristotle’s Immortal Intellect.Mark Amorose - 2001 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75:97-106.
Human Thinking and the Active Intellect in Aristotle.Daren Mathew Jonescu - 2000 - Dissertation, Mcmaster University (Canada)
The Place of Intellect in Aristotle.Kurt Pritzl - 2006 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80:57-75.
Thought and Perception in Aristotle's "de Anima".John Edward Sisko - 1995 - Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick
The Place of Intellect in Aristotle.Kurt Pritzl - 2006 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80:57-75.
Aristotle and the Soul Problem in Thirteenth Century.Ling Gao - 2007 - Philosophy and Culture 34 (5):21-36.
Al-Farabi, Avicenna, & Averroes on Intellect.Herbert Alan Davidson - 1992 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Más allá de Aristóteles: un análisis metafísico del entendimiento.David Torrijos-Castrillejo - 2009 - In Alfonso Pérez de Laborda (ed.), El Dios de Aristóteles. Νόησις Νόησεως. Ediciones de la Facultad de Teología San Dámaso. pp. 345-366.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-02-17

Downloads
14 (#965,243)

6 months
3 (#992,474)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references