Passive Intellect - Interpretations

Interpretations

Later philosophers, including Averroes and St. Thomas Aquinas, have proposed mutually exclusive interpretations of Aristotle's distinction between the active and passive intellect. Other terms used are "material intellect" and "potential intellect", the point being that the active intellect works on the passive intellect to produce knowledge (acquired intellect), in the same way that actuality works on potentiality or form on matter.

Averroes held that the passive intellect, being analogous to unformed matter, is a single substance common to all minds, and that the differences between individual minds are rooted in their phantasms as the product of the differences in the history of their sense perceptions. Aquinas argues against this position in the Disputed Questions on the Soul (Quaestiones disputatae de Anima), and asserts that while the passive intellect is one specifically, numerically it is many, as each individual person has their own passive intellect.