Intellectus agens and intellectus possibilis

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The intellectus agens (active intellect) has been a central concept in the epistemology of scholasticism since the reception of Aristotle in the Middle Ages . It is called the "active reason" which is opposed to the merely "possible reason" ( intellectus possibilis ) or the "passive reason" ( intellectus passivus ). Basically , this distinction is already familiar in Greek antiquity , where the passive intellect is called nous dynamei or nous pathetikos . Above all, Aristotle thematized the related problem in his book On the Soul (Book III, Chapters 4 and 5).

The background of the distinction is the act and potency doctrine. Thus for Thomas Aquinas the intellectus possibilis is the mere faculty , whereby the intellect is fundamentally related to everything that is, while with him the concept of the intellectus agens expresses the aspect of activity through which the faculty of knowing in the act is transferred. This activity takes place in the act of human abstraction . The senses first provide the image of the object ( phantasma ), which already contains the “ingredients” of the inner senses - common sense, memory, ability to grasp shape ( vis cogitativa ). The abstraction of the “whatness” ( quidditas ) from the phantasma now takes place in two steps. First, a “perceptual image” ( species sensibilis ) is abstracted from the common sense ( sensus communis ) , from which the “essence” of the object ( species intelligibilis ) is then extracted by the intellectus agens in a deepening act of abstraction .

The scholastic Alexander von Hales did not see the active intellect as heavenly, but localized it like the passive intellect and, as Thomas Aquinas did, in the human soul.

literature

  • Ludger Oeing-Hanhoff , Intellectus agens / intellectus possibilis , in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 4 (1976), 432-435.
  • Friedemann Buddensieck: Nous , in: Christoph Horn / Christof Rapp (Hrsg.): Dictionary of ancient philosophy . CH Beck, Munich 2002, 297b-301b, especially 300b-301a.
  • Christian Jung: The double nature of the human intellect in Aristotle . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4407-6
  • Notger Slenczka : Anthropologie , in: Volker Leppin (Ed.): Thomas Handbuch. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2016, (347-362) 354 f.
  • HA Davidson: Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their cosmologies, theories of the active intellect, and theories of human intellect. New York / Oxford 1992.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gotthard Strohmaier : Avicenna. Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-41946-1 , p. 146 f.