However, in the rest of the corpus, the phrases “πρῶτον αἴτιον” or “πρώτη αἰτία” undeniably refer to the prime mover.

Some scrupulous readers have raised doubts about this identification of the active intellect with the prime mover. In his own De anima, Alexander claims:įurthermore, if such an intellect is the First cause, which is the cause and principle of being for all the rest, it will also be active in the sense that it itself is the cause of being for all the things that are thought. It also explains why the development of human intellect has been described without direct reference to active intellect, since substances do not aim directly at the First cause, but their aiming at it is mediated by their desire for their own good.Īlexander of Aphrodisias is known for his identification of the “active” (ποιητικόν) intellect in De anima III 5 with the prime mover in Metaphysics Λ. It accounts for the multiplicity of expressions with which Alexander describes the causality of the active intellect in his De anima. This reading agrees with Alexander’s usual position about the prime mover’s causality.

cause of the actualization of human thought: once (i) when it offers thought occasions for thinking through objects, and again (ii) when it actualizes mediately the human intellect itself in its development. The active intellect is twice “cause of the intellection”, i.e. I argue that the active intellect acts as a final cause, both for human intellect and for its ordinary objects of thought. However, Alexander’s claim raises an issue: why would this divine intellect come in the middle of a study of soul in general and of human intellection in particular? As Paul Moraux asks in his pioneering work on Alexander’s conception of the intellect, is the active intellect a “useless addition”? In this paper, I try to answer this question by challenging a solution according to which the active intellect would intervene directly with the material intellect to trigger its ordinary working. In his own De anima, Alexander of Aphrodisias famously identifies the “active” ( poietikon) intellect with the prime mover in Metaphysics Λ.

Ockham agent intellect