Intellectual Knowledge, Active Intellect, and Intellectual Memory in Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Nafs and Its Aristotelian Background

This article aims at providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s theory of human
intellection. The main problem about this theory concerns the way in which it is presented
in two famous chapters of Avicenna’s Kitab al-Nafs (Book of the Soul), that is, chapter II,
2, where Avicenna provides a general account of his theory of abstraction (tagrıd), and
chapter V, 5 where, in order to outline the process leading to the first acquisition of a
material form, Avicenna combines the abstractive paradigm with an emanatist model, in
which the presence of the Active Intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘‘al) seems to be crucial. The claim I
defend in this article is that abstraction and emanation, far from being incompatible, are
Avicenna’s answer to two problems that Aristotle’s account of human intellection has left
unsolved, i.e. the epistemological problem concerning the first acquisition of universal
forms, and the ontological problem of the place in which they are stored. The cornerstone
of Avicenna’s theory of human intellection, which guarantees its fundamental unity, is the
Active Intellect to which Avicenna assigns two different, but complementary roles: at the
epistemological level, the Active Intellect is the source of intelligibility of any intellectual
form in the sublunar realm, since it provides the condition of possibility for the human
intellect’s potentiality to conceive intellectual forms; whereas, at the ontological level, the
Active Intellect is the collector of intellectual forms, because Avicenna’s denial of intellectual
memory requires a depository of the intellectual forms already acquired in order to avoid
supposing that a new process of acquisition is initiated for every subsequent recovery of
an intellectual form.