Averroes and Aquinas on the Agent Intellect's Causation of the Intelligible
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...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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Published: |
Peeters
2015
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In: |
Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales
Year: 2015, Volume: 82, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-60 |
Online Access: |
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Summary: | 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 Averroean-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.\n4207 \n4207 |
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ISSN: | 1783-1717 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2143/RTPM.82.1.3080624 |