Aquinas and the Arabs: Aquinas’s First Critical Encounter with the Doctrine of Averroes on the Intellect, In 2 Sent. d. 17, q. 2, a. 1

In this article I first provide an analysis of Aquinas's accounts of his philosophical predecessors and of their reasoning for their positions together with his critical rejection of their views asserting in various ways that human intellect or intellective soul is one for all human beings. This makes clear his own impressive depth of understanding of his sources as well as his sophisticated critical insights into arguments relevant to the formation of his own quite distinct doctrine. I also indicate important limitations of his understanding of the philosophical teachings of his chief source, Averroes, of which Aquinas was unaware. Further, consideration of those teachings goes far toward saving Averroes from definitive refutation by Aquinas. In the second section focus is on Aquinas's exposition of his own teaching on the nature of the intellect or intellective soul with an analysis of the arguments and presuppositions underlying his novel account of the multiplicity of individual human intellects and of the multiplication of sets of intelligible species in individual intellects. The article concludes with a summary and some remarks about Aquinas's natural and supernatural epistemologies.

ISBN:978-2-7116-2461-4

Publication year:2013