Averroes' Doctrine of Material Intellect in the Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle

Averroes was fully aware of the fact that Aristotle’s account of intellect as propounded in De Anima was incomplete. This meant that the key facet of Aristotle’s thought was fraught with gaps. Averroes made repeated attempts in his commentaries on De Anima to fill the gaps. The problem for Averroes was this: “if human beings are enmattered entities, how will anything more than sense perception be possible?” Averroes believes that finally in his Long Commentary on De Anima he has achieved a full and coherent account of thinking and understanding that centers on a new notion of the material intellect, according to which, together with the active intellect, there is also a distinct material intellect, numerically one for all human beings. The present article explores in detail this idea of material intellect. It is shown that material intellect, for Averroes, functions as the transpersonal, non-particular and non-empirical subject required for the production and containment of universal meanings. The idea seems to aim at connecting consistently the embodied, sensible forms of human cognitive experience with the noetic, conceptual element of knowledge within a basically ontological account.