Jonathan Buttaci

Alexander of Aphrodisias offers a theory of the human intellect that relies on an external agent intellect; this much is uncontroversial. Rather than asking about the identity of that agent intellect, my project focuses on Alexander’s account of its functional role in human knowing, especially in our coming to know. Accordingly, I ask not what the agent intellect is but rather what it does. It is sometimes said that, for Alexander, “the office of the νοῦς ποιητικός is the development of material νοῦς into νοῦς as ἕξις, the actualization, that is, of our native ability to think into the developed skill of intelligent thought” (Kosman 1992, citing Kahn 1981). I propose, by contrast, that Alexander sees the agent intellect as principally shaping intellectual activities by which intellectual states (hexeis) come to be. I argue that learning should not be understood merely as an inactive reception of form but as the activation of an intellectual capacity according to a given intelligible form, so that the capacity comes to be shaped in a determinate way by means of its activities being shaped in that way. For Aristotle and Alexander alike, the determination of the receptive intellectual capacity is accomplished by means of  engaging in like activities. Those activities, in turn, receive their determinate shape by the agent intellect; precisely what that means, however, is likely where Alexander goes beyond what little Aristotle says about this. I hope that this project will shed some light on Alexander’s account of agent intellect by adopting a fresh interpretive method, by looking first at its functional role in the development of nous-as-hexis, with special attention to the place of energeia in that account.

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America