Averroes and the Problem of the Eternal Intelligibles

abstract: Averroes argues for a single, eternal intellect that all humans share. But if that intellect contains all the intelligibles eternally in act, how can it receive from human images what it already has ? How can temporal acts of abstraction generate supposedly eternal intelligibles? I sketch two solutions : (i) a new reading, which holds that intelligibles are generated and corrupted in the separate intellect ; and (ii) another reading that holds (more traditionally) that the intelligibles exist eternally, yet depend perpetually on abstraction. Though I argue for (i), both interpretations resolve the problems and are clarified by Averroes’s notion of intermediate eternality, revealing an important connection between his psychology and cosmology.