An Unexpected Averroist: Thomas Aquinas's Debt to Rushdian Noetics

Federico Minzoni, Master Graduate in Philosophical Sciences, Università di Bologna

Ibn Rušd's and Thomas Aquinas' theories of the intellect are usually considered as contrasting
noetical models, arising from two opposite readings of Arist. de An. Γ 4-5: the first one, at least as
put forth in the Long Commentary on the De anima, takes the material intellect to be an immaterial
and separate substance unique in number for the whole human species; the second, defended by
Aquinas throughout his entire philosophic carreer (from his Commentary on the Sentences to the
Summa theologiae), though still assuming the potential intellect to be an immaterial substance,
multiplies it by the number of human individuals, inextricably tying it to the soul, form of the
human body, of which it is part.
The aim of this paper is to show that Aquinas's psychology and noetics, though always openly –
and sometimes polemically – anti-averroistic, take their start in the Commentary on the Sentences
with a close and sympathetic reading of Ibn Rušd's Long Commentary on the De anima and are
always rushdian in their nature.
This view rests on two facts: to begin with, Aquinas learns from Ibn Rušd's long commentaries
the very forms of aristotelian ad litteram commentary and, in his Commentary on the Sentences, he
strongly relies on the Long Commentary on the De anima's account of the views held by the
previous peripatetic commentators concerning the intellect (not only Alexander of Aphrodisias,
Theophrastus apud Themistius and Themistius, but even Ibn Bājjah); in second place, in his effort
of reading Aristotle through truly aristotelian lenses, thoroughly dismissing any neoplatonic
compromise, Aquinas continues a tradition of strictly peripatetic aristotelian commentary, embodied
in the imperial age by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, that he could only have known
through Ibn Rušd, who revived it in anti-avicennian function.
Ibn Rušd's and Aquinas' psychologies are closely related because they are both awarely
aristotelian. At their theoretical core rests the assumption that the intellect is, in a way or another,
form of the human body: in Aquinas the agent and potential intellects are form of the body because
they are part of the individual human soul; in Ibn Rušd the separate material and agent intellects are
form of the human body in the moment of thought because, were it not so, individual men wouldn't
be capable of thinking. This hylomorphic philosophy of mind, deeply aristotelian in its inspiration,
clearly differentiates both Ibn Rušd's and Aquinas' noetics from the more neoplatonically oriented
theories of Ibn Sīnā and of the eclectic latin aristotelians of the first half of the XIII th century (e.g.
John Blund and Peter of Spain), who take the intellectual soul to be not only the form of an
individual, but rather an individual itself.
Notwithstanding Aquinas' self-professed anti-averroistic bias, it is my contention in this paper
that his aristotelian philosophy of mind is aristotelian just inasmuch as it is rushdian.