Knowra Active intellect Active intellect In Aristotelian and medieval philosophy, the active intellect actualizes potential understanding by making intelligible forms available. Philosophers disagreed over whether it is a human faculty, a separate intellect, or divine.
Potential intellect : The capacity to receive intelligible forms and understand them, before those forms are actually understood. It is the capacity the active intellect brings from potentiality into understanding.
Aristotle : An ancient Greek philosopher whose works shaped logic, natural science, metaphysics, and theories of mind. His account in De Anima III.5 is the starting point for the active intellect.
Thomas Aquinas : A thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher who synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. He argued that active and possible intellects are powers of each individual human soul.
Unity of the intellect : The thesis that human beings share one numerically single intellect rather than possessing distinct intellects. This controversial consequence follows from influential interpretations of the active intellect as separate and shared.
Aristotle's intellect in De Anima III.5 : The difficult passage in Aristotle’s De Anima that distinguishes an intellect that makes things intelligible from one that receives them. Its sparse wording allows rival accounts of whether the active intellect is human, separate, or divine.
Phantasm : A sensory-based mental representation that can persist in imagination after the object is absent. Aristotelian accounts make phantasms the material from which intelligibility is abstracted.
De Anima : Aristotle’s treatise on the soul, its capacities, and its relation to living bodies. Its fifth chapter in Book III introduces the distinction that inspired later theories of active intellect.
Latin Averroism : A medieval movement that adopted interpretations of Aristotle associated with Averroes, including disputed claims about intellect. Its defense of a shared separate intellect conflicts with Aquinas’s account of individual intellectual powers.
Immortality of the soul : The doctrine that the human soul continues to exist after the body dies. Whether intellect belongs to each person or exists separately affects arguments for personal survival.
Active intellect in Islamic philosophy : The role of a separate active intellect in medieval Islamic accounts of knowledge, cosmology, and prophecy. Islamic philosophers developed competing explanations of how a cosmic intellect enables human understanding.
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