abstract: Averroes argues for a single, eternal intellect that all humans share. But if that intellect contains all the intelligibles eternally in act, how can it receive from human images what it already has ? How can temporal acts of abstraction generate supposedly eternal intelligibles? I sketch two solutions : (i) a new reading, which holds that intelligibles are generated and corrupted in the separate intellect ; and (ii) another reading that holds (more traditionally) that the intelligibles exist eternally, yet depend perpetually on abstraction. Though I argue for (i), both interpretations resolve the problems and are clarified by Averroes’s notion of intermediate eternality, revealing an important connection between his psychology and cosmology.
Stephen R. Ogden (Thu,) studied this question.
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