Zabarella, considering the agent intellect as the divine cause of general intelligibility, could renounce innate principles and retain the Aristotelian teaching of the inductive acquisition of the first principles themselves.
But in contrast to Democritus, who had followed the deductive route of the intellect, considering the knowledge of the senses to be spurious, Epicurus, following an inductive route, assigned truth to sensation and reduced the intellect to it.
Now, logic considers things in one of two ways: in terms of first intentions, that is, as the things themselves and thus belonging to one of the ten highest kinds of being the categories; in terms of second intentions, that is, considering things as considered by the intellect and in respect to other things (DOS 459).
In his treatise on man (Liber de homine) he accounts for human action as beginning with the intellect considering the various options for action open to a person at a given moment in time.
As in his initial presentation in the Short Commentary, Averroes considers the material intellect, in the Middle Commentary, as relating directly to the imaginative faculty, or rather to the intelligible intentions to which that corporeal faculty is disposed.
He speaks of intellect's "attending to and considering the real character of a common or specific nature" (376 379), as if he has an unproblematic account of intellect's relationship to the external world.
"The intellect and resources required to pull off such a surgical attack are staggering considering the defenses Google has put in place to protect digital assets," he says.
While it is true that under the stimulus or illumination of the agent intellect the possible intellect can consider the intelligible form of the phantasms of the mind which are derived from the senses, it can also operate under the sole influence of the agent intellect.
The singular, and not the universal, is now considered the first object of the intellect by origin — which was obvious from what had been stated in the previous passages.
Burley now distinguishes a four-fold way in which something can be considered the first object of the intellect: by origin, by proportion, by intrinsic perfection, and by exclusion (primitate exclusionis) — the latter being the way a determinate object can be known by a certain faculty and by that faculty alone, excluding all others.
In my opinion, the most helpful way to think about our intellect is to consider the six qualities proposed by Prof Howard Gardner.
