Book contents
- Aristotle’s On the Soul
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Aristotle’s On the Soul
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Hylomorphic Explanation and the Scientific Status of the De Anima
- Chapter 2 Aristotle on Earlier Definitions of Soul and Their Explanatory Power: DA I.2–5
- Chapter 3 Why Nous Cannot Be a Magnitude: De Anima I.3
- Chapter 4 Souls among Forms: Harmonies and Aristotle’s Hylomorphism
- Chapter 5 Aristotle on the Soul’s Unity
- Chapter 6 Aristotle on Seed
- Chapter 7 The Gate to Reality
- Chapter 8 Aristotle on the Objects of Perception
- Chapter 9 Perceptual Attention and Reflective Awareness in the Aristotelian Tradition
- Chapter 10 Phantasia and Error
- Chapter 11 Intelligibility, Insight, and Intelligence
- Chapter 12 The Separability of Nous
- Chapter 13 Thought and Imagination
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Chapter 11 - Intelligibility, Insight, and Intelligence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2022
- Aristotle’s On the Soul
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Aristotle’s On the Soul
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Hylomorphic Explanation and the Scientific Status of the De Anima
- Chapter 2 Aristotle on Earlier Definitions of Soul and Their Explanatory Power: DA I.2–5
- Chapter 3 Why Nous Cannot Be a Magnitude: De Anima I.3
- Chapter 4 Souls among Forms: Harmonies and Aristotle’s Hylomorphism
- Chapter 5 Aristotle on the Soul’s Unity
- Chapter 6 Aristotle on Seed
- Chapter 7 The Gate to Reality
- Chapter 8 Aristotle on the Objects of Perception
- Chapter 9 Perceptual Attention and Reflective Awareness in the Aristotelian Tradition
- Chapter 10 Phantasia and Error
- Chapter 11 Intelligibility, Insight, and Intelligence
- Chapter 12 The Separability of Nous
- Chapter 13 Thought and Imagination
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Summary
Aristotle maintains that defining nous requires first defining its activity, which requires first having considered its objects, intelligible beings. This chapter is about the nature of these objects: what about them makes them intelligible? My principal proposals will be that what makes them intelligible is that they are separate or unmixed, and that because, insofar as they are intelligible, they are, in their essence, activity. I am not unaware that this makes it sound as though Aristotle takes intelligibility to consist in some kind of nous. But he himself virtually says as much, when he claims that nous is the form of its objects (lit. εἶδος εἰδῶν); besides it is a result he is committed to by the doctrines that nous is intelligible and that there is something that intelligible objects all are in common; for the alternative, as he himself says, is to suppose that nous “will have something mixed-in, which makes it intelligible just like the rest.” The challenge, then, is not to steer clear of this result, but to make sense of it. My proposal will be that the key lies in realizing that and why Aristotle thinks intelligibility is a creature of nous.
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- Aristotle's On the SoulA Critical Guide, pp. 211 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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