What we see in this passage above is the progression of the soul-intellect through the five stages of the perfection of the intellect described in Avicenna.
This last intellect arising in the great cosmic chain of being is the active intellect, described by al-Farabi here as the "eleventh existence".
Although Israeli posits a first intellect and a second intellect, Israeli describes three hypostases of intellect.
Another CS worker, Xiaojia, pointed to her own physical self-discipline and intellect in describing how her rural colleagues reacted to a shared classroom environment: I once trained with the cooks.
The intellect was described as a general (innate) propensity made up of a series of more specific (equally innate) propensities, the number of which was a function of the number of different things the intellect is able to know: "The intellective power is a general propensity with respect to all intelligibles, that is, with respect to the actual conforming to all intelligibles.
Her feminine intellect was described by Jill Campbell as a "threatening" force which her husband once reacted violently against, even though his violence was contained to him acting on it only in a dream-like state.
Even with the involvement of shared separate active and material intellects, Averroes describes the process as intrinsic to the individual human soul and as active intellect becoming "form for us" (itself understood as the human's final end) in a true conjunction or uniting of the individual human soul with the active intellect.
In one of the most intriguing and hotly debated passages of ancient philosophy, De anima Book 3, chapter 5, Aristotle introduces the notion of a kind of intellect that he describes as productive and active, and this kind of intellect, according to him, is not only separable from the body but is "alone immortal and eternal".
A long section, which describes intellect, follows this theory of the transcendent ineffability of the First Cause which precludes any proper predication.
It's feebler than Godfather 3. The academic George Levine – a man of unusually determined intellect – once wrote an article describing how he had taken three months off from university teaching to read Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus.
