Avicenna says that intellectual cognition involves the emanation of an intelligible form by the ‘agent intellect’ upon the human mind. This paper argues that in order to understand why he says this, we need to think of intellectual cognition as a special case of a much more general phenomenon. More specifically, Avicenna's introduction of an agent intellect will be shown to be a natural consequence of certain assumptions about the temporality, the completion, and the teleology of (...) the causal processes by which things acquire forms. (shrink)

The following is an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views; whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can (...) find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the universal as content but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of the universal nature. This is because for Aquinas the universal nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

This paper discusses some aspects of the controversies regarding the operation of the agent intellect on sensory images. I selectively consider views developed between the 13th century and the beginning of the 17th century, focusing on positions which question the need for a (distinct) agent intellect or argue for its essential "inactivity" with respect to phantasms. My aim is to reveal limitations of the Peripatetical framework for analyzing and explaining the mechanisms involved in conceptual abstraction. The (...) first section surveys developments of Aristotelian noetics and abstraction in Ancient and Arabic philosophy. The second section presents a discussion of some "positive" accounts on abstraction and the agent intellect, and some "negative" accounts. (shrink)

Question: In Islamic philosophy, Active Intellect is Peripatetic tenth intellect. Also in Peripatetic epistemology, Potential human intellect, acts by unification or conjunction with active (agent) intellect. This intellective thrust has a wielder and more attractive role in Illuminative wisdom. Meted: The research methodology based on tradition Comparative studies to analyze and adapt votes Gazi Saeed Qummi and votes illuminated Suhrawardi.Results:1- Human’s archetype adjust with Gabriel, in religions and Active (agent) Intellect in Illuminative wisdom. (...) 2-Human’s archetype appears as “perfect nature” format during personal relation to every special individual.3 and also explains relation between Emam and believer in shiaa’s idea. (shrink)

Question: In Islamic philosophy, Active Intellect is Peripatetic tenth intellect. Also in Peripatetic epistemology, Potential human intellect, acts by unification or conjunction with active (agent) intellect. This intellective thrust has a wielder and more attractive role in Illuminative wisdom. Meted: The research methodology based on tradition Comparative studies to analyze and adapt votes Gazi Saeed Qummi and votes illuminated Suhrawardi.Results:1- Human’s archetype adjust with Gabriel, in religions and Active (agent) Intellect in Illuminative wisdom. (...) 2-Human’s archetype appears as “perfect nature” format during personal relation to every special individual.3 and also explains relation between Emam and believer in shiaa’s idea. (shrink)

This article explicates Averroes's understanding of human knowing and abstraction in this three commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima. While Averroes's views on the nature of the human material intellect changes through the three commentaries until he reaches is famous view of the unity of the material intellect as one for all human beings, his view of the agent intellect as 'form for us' is sustained throughout these works. In his Long Commentary on the De Anima he (...) reveals his dependence on al-Fârâbî for this notion and provides a detailed critique of the Farabian notion that the agent intellect is 'form for us' only as agent cause, not as our true formal cause. Although Averroes argues that the agent intellect must somehow be intrinsic to us as our form since humans are per se rational and undertake acts of knowing by will, his view is shown to rest on an equivocal use of the notion of formal cause. The agent intellect cannot be properly our intrinsic formal principle while remaining ontologically separate. (shrink)

This essay addresses arguments regarding the “place” or “non-place” in which ideas originate and whether they are wholly transcendental, wholly contingent, or a combination of transcendental and contingent. Far from a resuscitation or recitation of Medieval scholastic disputations, the essay seeks to situate these untimely concerns in the context of spent discursive and ideological systems that support capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons, exploitation only made possible because of a decisive and historically determined reduction of knowledge to fully contingent status (...) as spectral commodity. (shrink)

Este artículo explica la comprensión de Averroes sobre el entendimiento humano y la abstracción en estos tres comentarios al De Anima de Aristóteles. Mientras que las visiones de Averroes sobre la naturaleza del intelecto material humano cambian a través de tres comentarios hasta que alcanza su famosa visión de la unidad del intelecto material como uno para todos los seres humanos, su visión del intelecto agente como 'forma para nosotros' se sostiene a través de estas obras. En su Gran comentario (...) al De Anima revela su dependencia ante Al Farabi por esta noción y provee una crítica detallada de la noción farabiana que sostiene que el intelecto agente es 'forma para nosotros' sólo como causa agente, no como verdadera causa formal. Aunque Averroes sostiene que el intelecto agente debe, de alguna manera, ser intrínseco a nosotros como nuestra forma, ya que los humanos son racionales per se y emprenden actos de conocimiento por voluntad, se muestra que su visión se funda en un uso equívoco de la noción de causa formal. El intelecto agente no puede ser propiamente nuestro principio intrínseco formal mientras permanezca ontológicamente separable. (shrink)

This is a rough translation of Michael Frede's "La théorie aristotélicienne de l'intellect agent" published in 1996. This insightful paper contains an important interpretation of Aristotle's notoriously difficult theory of the active intellect from De Anima III, 5. I worked up a translation during some research and thought others might benefit from having an English translation available (I couldn't find one after a cursory internet search). It's not perfect, but it should give one a sense for Frede's (...) argument that the agent intellect is the same as the divine intellect of Metaphysics Lambda. I welcome any comments or suggestions for improvement, please email me at smurray7 [at] providence [dot] edu. (shrink)

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture is to be a highly focused exhibition/folio of works by perhaps 12 artists (preferably little-known or obscure), with precise commentaries denoting the discord between the autonomous object (the artwork or architectural object per se) and the larger field of reference (worlds); inference (associative magic), and insurrection (against power and privilege) – or, the Immemorial. Engaging the age-old “theological apparatuses” of the artwork, the folio is intended to upend the current fascination with personality, (...) celebrity, and fashion to reach the timeless horizon of the subject of Art and Architecture as the subject other than the subject of Art and Architecture proper. Word as image, and image as word, is the central paradox given to this discord – an elective, yet universal condition that also makes certain art and architectural works heedlessly existential-metaphysical (and, therefore, “theological”). This paper, as part of the essay “White Paper: Gray Areas and Black Zones,” is a preliminary investigation of the conceptual architecture for the overall, ongoing exhibition/book project. (shrink)

This article examines two medieval thinkers—Averroes and Aquinas—on the kind of causation exercised by the agent intellect in “abstracting” or producing intelligibles from images in the imagination. It argues that abstraction in these thinkers should be interpreted in causal terms, as an act whereby images in the imagination, through the power of the agent intellect, educe their intelligible likeness in a receptive intellect. This Averroan-Thomistic causal approach to abstraction offers an intriguing alternative to the usual (...) approach to abstraction as an epistemological content-sorting. The article also demonstrates the extensive common ground uniting these thinkers’ cognition theories, despite Aquinas’s well-known rejection of Averroes’s theory of separate Intellects. (shrink)

This paper deals with the differences between the concept of the agent intellect in Thomas Aquinas and in the early Franciscan school with a focus on St. Bonaventure. While according to Aquinas the agent intellect is the faculty of the human soul, in the thought of Alexander of Hales, John of La Rochelle and St. Bonaventure it has a double or even a triple meaning. In the Franciscan Masters the agent intellect is simultaneously considered (...) as a faculty of the human soul but also as God himself and in John of La Rochelle as an angelic intelligence, too. This comparison could be useful in a new interpretation of the Condemnation of 1277 where the proposition on the separate agent intellect is also considered. It seems that the condemnation of this proposition 118 is in accord with the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. What is actually being condemned here is the doctrine, partially held by the Franciscan friars, who are traditionally considered as initiators of the Condemnation. (shrink)

Did we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too—along with Kant—had made the “turn to the subject”; as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it; as if St. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is intelligible not (...) only when we think of it, but because we think of it. After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. Could I explain those reasons, could I pinpoint the problem leading Kant to think in those terms? Could I show Aquinas facing the same problem and clearly taking a different direction in his proposed solution? That is what I have tried to do in this book. This book provides an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views, whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the intelligible object but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of this object. This is because for Aquinas the universal as nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. In this four-chapter book, Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal as nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

This paper examines some passages in the Treatise on Human Nature in which Thomas Aquinas, following Themistius, refers to Plato’s analogies between the sun and the soul in order to prove that the agent intellect is something that belongs to the soul. It also analyzes the analogy between the light and the soul that Aquinas mentions, which is taken from Aristotle. The main task at hand will be to revisit the question of how Aquinas interprets Plato and Aristotle (...) in this particular section of the Treatise on Human Nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of (...) the function of the agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way. (shrink)

In this work we review the three principal theses that Ignatio Vincentio, a Spanish thinker of the seventeenth century, defends about the agent intellect: 1) it is the same potency as the possible intellect, only with a formal distinction and plurality of names; 2) it has three tasks: a) to illuminate phantasmata, b) to make them intelligible in act, and c) to abstract the intelligible species from them; and 3) it will remain in the separated soul performing (...) the same task as in the present situation [?], but without conversion to phantasmata. (shrink)

Henri Bate de Malines a développé dans son Speculum divinorum une théorie de l’intellect profondément influencée par Averroès et Thomas d’Aquin, mais qui ne peut être considérée ni comme averroïste ni comme thomiste. Dans sa perspective néoplatonicienne, l’intellect agent est la forme immanente et transcendante du corps humain, tandis que l’intellect possible est un étant relatif et privatif.

This article examines Averroes’ interpretation, found in his Long Commentary on the De Anima, of a famous passage in Aristotle’s De An. III 5 which presents the intellect “producing all things, as a kind of positive state, like light”. Averroes, clearly heir to Alexander of Aphrodisias for whom hexis refers not to the intellect “agent” itself but to its product, defends nevertheless, via the comparison with light, the conception of the agent intellect as an hexis, (...) which leads us to the inevitable consequence that the agent intellect is the prime object of the material intellect, acting as a condition for all subsequent thoughts. (shrink)

At the end of the Middle Ages, the friar Dominican Peter Schwarz wrote The shield of the Thomists. It is a handly book of philosophy in which he presents the main thesis of thomist school, between them is the theory of active intellect.

The treatise On Formative Power of Ferrara's emblematic medical humanist, Nicolò Leoniceno, is the one of the first embryological monographs of the Renaissance. It shows, at the same time, the continuity of medieval Arabo-Latin tradition and the new elements brought by Renaissance medical humanism, namely through the use of the ancient Greek commentators of Aristotle like Simplicius. Thus this treatise stands at the crossroad of these two currents. The present study analyses the range of Leoniceno's philosophical discussion, determines its exact (...) sources and brings to light premises for the early modern development of the concept of formative force, which will end up in the theory of "plastic nature" at the heart of the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

The treatise On Formative Power of Ferrara's emblematic medical humanist, Nicolò Leoniceno , is the one of the first embryological monographs of the Renaissance. It shows, at the same time, the continuity of medieval Arabo-Latin tradition and the new elements brought by Renaissance medical humanism, namely through the use of the ancient Greek commentators of Aristotle like Simplicius. Thus this treatise stands at the crossroad of these two currents. The present study analyses the range of Leoniceno's philosophical discussion, determines its (...) exact sources and brings to light premises for the early modern development of the concept of formative force, which will end up in the theory of "plastic nature" at the heart of the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

In "De anima" 3.5, Aristotle argues for the existence of a second intellect, the so-called "Agent Intellect." The logical structure of his argument turns on a distinction between different types of soul, rather than different faculties within a given soul; and the attributes he assigns to the second species make it clear that his concern here -- as at the climax of his other great works, such as the "Metaphysics," the "Nicomachean" and the "Eudemian Ethics" -- is (...) the difference between the human and the divine. If this is right, we needn't go on a wild goose chase trying to invent a role for the so-called Agent Intellect to play. God moves our intellects as he moves the heavenly spheres, "as a beloved": he constitutes the complete actualization towards which all of our intellectual striving is directed. Aristotle regards such final causation as an efficient cause, but not in a way that would make it part of what we would call the causal processes or mechanisms of human psychology. But, he would insist, it is essential for appreciating who we are and what our place is in the world. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to analyze some of the ambiguities of the Thomistic theory related to the agent intellect. Precisely, it is about those contradictionsor confusions that appeared as a consequence of Saint Thomas necessity to prove the existence and continuity of intellectual human activity after the death. These ideas are mainly found in Quaestiones disputatae de anima, where they generate two doctrines relatively opposed with regards to agent intellect, but they do not completely (...) vanish in Summa theologica. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to analyze some of the ambiguities of the Thomistic theory related to the agent intellect. Precisely, it is about those contradictionsor confusions that appeared as a consequence of Saint Thomas necessity to prove the existence and continuity of intellectual human activity after the death. These ideas are mainly found in Quaestiones disputatae de anima, where they generate two doctrines relatively opposed with regards to agent intellect, but they do not completely (...) vanish in Summa theologica. (shrink)

Due to his innatist theory, James of Viterbo brings original answers to a number of late-thirteenth century questions concerning cognition. While he maintains a certain distinction between the soul and its faculties, and among these faculties, he rejects the Aristotelian distinction between agent and patient intellects. Thanks to its predispositions to knowing, the mind is able to be an agent for itself. Correlatively, James rejects the usual conception of abstraction. Neither does the intellect act on the phantasms, (...) nor the phantasms on the intellect. The intellect simply actualizes a conceptual scheme at the occasion of adequate sensory representations. Since the innate predispositions are the intrinsic principles of cognitive acts, James maintains with Giles of Rome the notion of intelligible species. But he agrees with Godfrey of Fontaines that an act of intellection is nothing else than the fully actualized species itself. He also concedes to Henry of Ghent that the form of an intelligible object need not be ontologically received in the intellect, but can just have an “objective” presence. Finally, thanks again to his theory of predispositions, he has an easy solution to the vexed problems of the knowledge of substance essences and of the self. (shrink)

Historical and philosophical background -- Del Medigo on the material intellect -- Del Medigo on the agent intellect -- Del Medigo on conceptualisation -- Hic homo intelligit?

Desperately difficult texts inevitably elicit desperate hermeneutical measures. Aristotle's De Anima, book three, chapter five, is evidently one such text. At least since the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias, scholars have felt compelled to draw some remarkable conclusions regarding Aristotle's brief remarks in this passage regarding intellect. One such claim is that in chapter five, Aristotle introduces a second intellect, the so-called 'agent intellect', an intellect distinct from the 'passive intellect', the supposed focus of (...) discussion up until this passage.1 This view is a direct descendent of the view of Alexander himself, who identified the agent intellect with the divine intellect.2 Even the staunchest defender of such a view is typically at a loss to give a plausible explanation of why the divine intellect pops into and then out of the picture in the intense and closely argued discussion of the human intellect that goes from chapter four through to the end of chapter seven.3 Revolting against an extravagant postulation of entities, Michael Wedin, for example, has argued with considerable subtlety and ingenuity that there is in fact only one intellect discussed in De Anima.4 This unified intellect is fully capable of being integrated into Aristotle's hylomorphic psychology. In order to make his case, though, Wedin is himself forced (1) to discount the importance of some texts and (2) to interpret others in a way that strains credulity. (shrink)

El presente artículo se enfrenta al problema clásico sobre cómo interpretar lo que Aristóteles, en de An. III, 5, denomina “el intelecto que produce todas las cosas”, llamado comúnmente intelecto agente. Históricamente, se han presentado dos lecturas: una, que se remonta a Alejandro de Afrodisia, que lo asocia con el motor inmóvil y con la divinidad y otra, asociada a Teofrasto pero que tiene en Filópono y St. Tomás de Aquino a sus principales representantes, que lo considera una facultad puramente (...) humana. Esta última interpretación ha sido históricamente la más sostenida; sin embargo, en tiempos recientes ha habido un resurgimiento de interpretaciones del intelecto agente como “divino”. Lo que queremos mostrar en este texto es que este resurgimiento se debe, más que a una reinterpretación del intelecto agente, a una comprensión diferente de la divinidad en la filosofía aristotélica, con características inmanentes y más próximas al intelecto humano. (shrink)

In this work we study the suggestive position of some authors who constitute an exception in the history of the philosophy in respect to the interpretation of the agent intellect, the great Aristotle´s discovery: Francisco Canals, Leonardo Polo and his disciples, because these authors put the agent intellect at the level of “ actus essendi hominis ”.

This article faces the classic problem of the interpretation of what Aristotle calls in de An. III, 5 “the intellect that produces all things”, which is commonly named agent intellect. Historically, there have been two approaches: one that goes back to Alexander of Aphrodisias, who associates the agent intellect with the unmoved mover and the divinity, and another one, associated with Theophrastus but whose major representatives are Philoponus and St. Thomas of Aquinas, who consider that (...) agent intellect is an exclusively human faculty. This last interpretation has been the most accepted historically. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a resurgence of interpretations of the agent intellect as divine (Caston, Frede, Burnyeat, and others). What we want to demonstrate in this article is that this revival, more than responding to a reinterpretation of the agent intellect, is due to a different understanding of the divinity in Aristotle’s philosophy, which supposes immanent characteristics closer to the human intellect. (shrink)

Aquinas puts forward two different, and conflicting, interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect. In his earlier interpretation of Themistius, Aquinas understands him to hold the position that both the possible and agent intellect are separate and incorruptible, existing apart from individual human souls but shared in by individual souls in the process of knowing. In De unitate intellectus contra averroistas, however, Aquinas radically departs from this reading, hailing Themistius as a genuine interpreter of the Peripatetic position, (...) while decrying Averroes’s perversion of both Themistius and Aristotle. This paper examines these competing interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect in his Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, focusing on two issues central to its interpretation: the nature of intellect insofar as it is separate, impassive, and unmixed, and whether the productive intellect is one or many. (shrink)