Please join us for this week's History of Philosophy Works-in-Progress Luncheon! This week's presenter is Professor Stephen Ogden (Department of Philosophy, Notre Dame), who will speak on "Averroes and the Problem of the Eternal Intelligibles" (see abstract below).
Each meeting consists of a presentation by a graduate student or faculty member on a project that they are working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees. Sign up here!
Abstract: In his Long Commentary on the De Anima, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) claims to solve key problems in his intellect theory by proposing that intelligibles are one and eternal in the separate Material Intellect, but many and generated with respect to individual images of particular human beings. Some historical and contemporary commentators have objected that this solution only raises further difficulties, especially regarding the eternality of the intelligibles. How can intelligibles be both temporally generated through acts of abstraction from particular images and eternally present in the separate Material Intellect? How can the Material Intellect receive what it already has? Although Averroes does not appear to offer an explicit answer, I will sketch two possible strategies for resolving this issue. On the one hand, Averroes could maintain that the intelligibles are straightforwardly and continually generated in the Material Intellect while holding that their ‘eternality’ is like that of the human species. Or, on the other hand, he could argue that every intelligible really does always exist in the Material Intellect, though there is still an eternal priority of abstraction to reception. While each strategy has strengths and liabilities, either can absolve Averroes’s theory from the charge of incoherence.