文档介绍：Phronesis 148_348-373II 11/16/04 3:23 PM Page 348
The Unity of Intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima
LLOYD P. GERSON
ABSTRACT
The perennial problem in interpreting De Anima has produced two drastic
solutions, one ancient and one contemporary. According to the first, Aristotle in
identifies the ‘agent intellect’ with the divine intellect. Thus, everything Aristotle
has to say about the human intellect is contained mainly in , though Aristotle
returns to its treatment in . In contrast to this ancient interpretation, a more
recent view holds that the divine intellect is not the subject of and that
throughout the work Aristotle is analyzing the nature of the human intellect. But
this view contends that the properties Aristotle deduces for this intellect, proper-
ties that have encouraged the view that Aristotle must be speaking about a divine
intellect, are in fact to be discounted or interpreted in such a way that they do
not indicate the immortality and immateriality of the human intellect. In this arti-
cle I argue that close attention to the text and the sequence of argument supports
the conclusion that Aristotle is speaking throughout De Anima of a unified human
intellect, possessed of the properties Aristotle explicitly attributes to it. This intel-
lect functions differently when it is and when it is not separate from the hylo-
posite. I argue further that it is Aristotle’s view that if we were not
ideally or essentially intellects, we could not engage in the diverse cognitive
activities of posite.
Desperately difficult texts inevitably elicit desperate hermeneutical mea-
sures. Aristotle’s De Anima, book three, chapter five, is evidently one such
text. At least since the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias, scholars have
pelled to draw some remarkable conclusions regarding Aristotle’s
brief remarks in this passage regarding intellect. One such claim is that
in chapter five, Aristotle introduces a second