In the view of Averroës, who was not only a philosopher but also a jurist and a doctor, Aristotle's philosophy represented simply the perfection of human knowledge; and to the West, he himself was to become the preeminent commentator.
Mankind as a whole has not reached this level, but it will one day, since "nature refuses" to allow all true (and finite) possibilities not to be eventually realized (given an eternal universe).[61] While this statement is not repeated in his other two commentaries on De anima, Averroes' belief in the attainment of personal perfection through knowledge of the Agent Intellect remained constant.
"They [the followers of Alexander] maintain that the material intellect is capable of immortality and subsistence when it reaches that level of perfection where the objects of knowledge that it apprehends are themselves intellects, in particular the Agent Intellect…[material intellect] is immortal when it is united with the Agent Intellect" (Wars, I.8, p. 170).
Moral perfection, in turn, is cultivated through the perpetual pursuit and acquisition of knowledge of the perfection of others, the universe, and God.
Its embodiment facilitates its acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of its intellect but also acts as a cage of restraint.
There are countless stations of knowledge and spiritual perfection, and each bestows specific character traits and points of view.
You had only to study the previous two centuries of Florentine drawing, from the rocky pillars of Masaccio to the twisting perfection of Michelangelo, to see how knowledge grew through a contest in observation.
According to Ibn Tibbon, the final human perfection is knowledge and understanding of God, without qualification.
They are not the prophets, descending with wisdom to rule the people, but separate intelligences, which descend to help the human intellect reach its final perfection: knowledge of and conjunction with God.
Knowledge of the perfection of others, of the perfection of the universe, and of God, the perfect being, is inherently pleasurable and concomitantly contributes to the proper order of one's character by generating love in conformity with wisdom.
Heraclides also assigns to Pythagoras a definition of happiness as "the knowledge of the perfection of the numbers of the soul" (Fr. 44 Wehrli), in which again the Platonic account of the numerical structure of the soul in the Timaeus appears to be fathered on Pythagoras.
