Sentence examples for universal intellect from inspiring English sources

Against Avicenna's determinism, he held that God "voluntarily" created the world, and he opposed those proponents of Aristotelianism who taught that man's conceptual powers are one with the single, universal intellect.

Intellect is the sphere of real being, identified with the Platonic Forms, which are the thoughts of a universal intellect.

In this sense, the spiritual simples are primarily not the forms (as we might expect in Plato), but (in Neoplatonic spirit) the Universal Intellect and Soul.

That universal intellect, for all its ontic priority, is the last of the four intellects that Farabi formally discusses in the treatise.

For the Neoplatonist, as for Ibn Gabirol, the focus on the form is replaced (or amplified) by the focus on the Universal Intellect that contains all forms (simultaneously, in potency, as one nested in the next).

Continuing on this Platonic move away from Aristotle, Ibn Gabirol's main talk of "substance" refers, contra Aristotle, to "simple substances," by which he means the Neoplatonic Universal Intellect and Soul(s), each understood by Ibn Gabirol as a joining of spiritual matter to spiritual form, and each devoid of any of the 9 categories plaguing the "lower" corporeal (i.e. Aristotelian) substance.

These intelligible ideas are not abstracted from the imagination, as Aristotle would have it, but come from the universal Agent Intellect, transforming the purely potential and passive intellect into an acquired intellect ('aql mustafâd).[38] This is an active state of cognition, when the intellect is actively conjoined to its intelligible object.

In some aspects of Averroës's theory of a universal human Intellect combined with the Stoic-Aristotelian principle that all humans are by nature citizens of one city, he found the basis of the Germanic empire (the Holy Roman Empire), seeing it as the one polity (civilitas) for the whole human race.

In order to defend the Christian dogma of personal immortality, Philoponus broke with the common Aristotelian and Stoic interpretation of a single universal mind operative in all people and taught that each person possesses an individual intellect.

But he argues that only an intellect universal in nature can produce an understanding of universal forms.

Avicenna here describes the process of abstraction, or how the representation in the imagination of particular things becomes universal in the intellect.