The Unity of the Intellect I

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a review up of a new book on Averroes' thought, especially on the critical question of the unity of the intellect.

The book is by Stephen R. Ogden, of Notre Dame' s philosophy faculty.

The review is the work of Kendall A. Fisher, of Gonzaga University.

Averroes on Intellect: From Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’ Critique | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame (nd.edu)

Averroes is the philosopher known in the Arab speaking world as Ibn Rushd. One of the propositions for which he is well known among scholars in the history of philosophy is, as I mentioned above, that of the unity of the intellect. This is the proposition (which Averroes attributed to Aristotle) that all human beings share a single eternal intellect. Further, this single intellect is separate from our material selves.

It is an exegetically tricky question whether Averroes was right to read Aristotle that way. But it hardly matters: Averroes was neither the first nor the last to use the pose of a commentator upon an agreed august authority to advance his own views.

The Averroes/Aristotle argument for only One Human Mind proved to be so powerful that it introduced the issue of "double truth" when the Latin speaking world acquired some of the pertinent texts, as the Spanish Conquistadors were capturing formerly Moorish cities with solid libraries.

It was shocking that this soul-like thing, the Aristotelean Mind, could be attributed to the whole of mankind. How is God supposed to condemn some of us and save a remnant of us, after all, if we are all One? So the "Latin Averroists" apparently started saying that the truth according to reason is not the same as the truth according to faith -- that they have the faith and so reject the inference of the unity of the intellect, but they don't have any good REASON to reject it and don't think anyone else does either.

One of Thomas Aquinas' chief roles in the development of the theology of the western church was as the guy who answered Averroes. He gave exegetical arguments that Aristotle didn't mean what Averroes had him meaning, and philosophical arguments that anyone who DOES mean that is in error. This became canonical and allowed the Church the confidence to crack down on the whole doubleness-of-truth thing.

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