it is said that the theory of active intellect is among the most ambiguous and controversial topics of aristotle’s philosophy. this ambiguity is generally regarded as being resulted from the brevity and vagueness of aristotle’s speech in his on the soul. however; is the ambiguity of aristotle’s speech to such an extent that the active intellect attributed to him can be regarded as separate from...

intellect is a fundamental topic of concern in the peripatetic philosophy. a comparison of al-farabi’s approach to ‘intellect’ (an iranian muslim philosopher with an oriental background) with that of alexander of aphrodisias’ (a greek philosopher with an occidental background) may reveal the contrasting features of aristotelian peripatetic philosophy and the islamic philosophy. basing itself on...

Dawkins’s concept of the meme pool, essentially equivalent to Popper’s World 3, is considered as an expression in modern terms for what Averroës knew as the active intellect, an immortal entity feeding into, or even creating, the passive intellect of consciousness. A means is thus provided for reconciling a materialist Darwinian view of the universe with a conception of nonpersonal immortality....

In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to pe...

in his discourses concerning perception of universals, mullā ṣadrā has brought up various issues. on one hand, he says that in sensory and imaginative perceptions, the soul (nafs) is the originator and creator of images and then with its substantial and ontogenetic motion it achieves its higher level of perception, i.e. rational perception, unites with the rational non-material substance named ...

The article analyses and interprets the basic structure of process intellectual cognition in Thomas Aquinas. After a short chapter on sense cognition, Aquinas?s understanding active intellect is presented, that illumination phantasms abstraction intelligible species by intellect. Special attention given to difference between phantasm species. Consideration possible shows two steps, reception cr...