Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect

Rowson, Everett K.; Davidson, Herbert A.

doi:10.2307/1454933

Cited by 20 publications

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“…A balanced body is important insofar as it strengthens the soul and allows it to put the Imagination to work, a necessary faculty for the life of the soul (Ibn Sīnā and Rahman 1952, 31–35; McGinnis 2010, 115, 124). A weak soul can be co‐opted by fear and diverted from attending to the body's appetite and bodily desires and intellection; a soul attending to fear takes the imaginative faculty astray and gives it free rein to impose illusionary images and overpower the senses (Davidson 1992, 118). Both in the case of jaundice and fear, then, the soul is captured by these images, described by Nawfal as demonic insinuations ( waswas ).…”

Section: Topologies Of Fearmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fright and the Fraying of Community

Hauter

2023

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article addresses the psycho-spiritual intersection of geopolitics and medicine in the borderlands between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, at the margins of war. Set in a Saudi Arabian Hospital in Jeddah, it examines patients’ demand for and physicians’ attempt to secure ‘afiya (psychic, physical, and spiritual well-being) amid regional upheaval and the limits of Islamicized biomedical care. I reflect on the case of a Yemeni migrant/refugee hospitalized in Saudi Arabia for a persistent jaundice, Omar, who speaks of his looming fear that his self/soul would “break” if his request for biomedical care were to be rejected, and who longs to be in the care of a Yemeni indigenous healer. Strangely, then, his fright at the break of the soul/self exceeds the fear he felt crossing a desert military border on foot. Drawing on theories of the soul/self and the psyche, I explore how soul-fracture becomes a figure of postcolonial and wartime affliction, congealing in its evocation the end of neighborly hospitality, the fraying of community, and the breaking of a shared lineage: the abject Yemeni, exiled from their own region and the broader Muslim community.

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Section: Topologies Of Fearmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fright and the Fraying of Community

Hauter

2023

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…But if knowledge by presence entails the absorption of the knowing subject by the object of knowledge, what is that object? In Arabic philosophy, human cognition became possible when we heightened our attunement to the world's immanent patterns and connections, “natural forms appearing in matter” (Davidson 1992, 76). The relations between these natural forms suggest the presence of “active intellect” ( al‐'aql al‐faa'il ), emanating fields of movement, growth, and attraction that encompass discrete objects, animals, or people within higher unities (Davidson 1992, 85).…”

Section: Agent Intellect: the Ingenious Device Of The Cross‐and‐circlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Arabic philosophy, human cognition became possible when we heightened our attunement to the world's immanent patterns and connections, “natural forms appearing in matter” (Davidson 1992, 76). The relations between these natural forms suggest the presence of “active intellect” ( al‐'aql al‐faa'il ), emanating fields of movement, growth, and attraction that encompass discrete objects, animals, or people within higher unities (Davidson 1992, 85). And when the subject interiorizes these forms as “acquired intellect,” our intuitively prescient sense of estimation begins to evolve into a fuller, more sophisticated consciousness of reality (Davidson 1992, 92).…”

Section: Agent Intellect: the Ingenious Device Of The Cross‐and‐circlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relations between these natural forms suggest the presence of “active intellect” ( al‐'aql al‐faa'il ), emanating fields of movement, growth, and attraction that encompass discrete objects, animals, or people within higher unities (Davidson 1992, 85). And when the subject interiorizes these forms as “acquired intellect,” our intuitively prescient sense of estimation begins to evolve into a fuller, more sophisticated consciousness of reality (Davidson 1992, 92). Union with the agent intellect anticipates the sci‐fi imagery of “cyborg” consciousness distributed across high‐tech devices (Haraway 1991) and back‐to‐the‐land metaphors of ecological “assemblages” (Tsing 2015).…”

Section: Agent Intellect: the Ingenious Device Of The Cross‐and‐circlementioning

confidence: 99%

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Malicious Game

Sheldon

2023

Cult. Anthropol.

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In the late-night cafés of Amman, Jordan, Iraqi refugees have adopted a new game, called jaakaaroo, that they say is more “malicious” than familiar favorites like dominoes or backgammon. Meanwhile, they decry the cruelty, greed, and suspicion that have eroded social bonds in their home and host countries. Borrowing concepts from Arabic philosophy, I argue that the formal routines of the game act on the same faculty of estimation (al-wahm) that migrants use to read strangers’ intentions while disguising their own. When this sense of suspicion emanates from the ingenious device of the game itself, which I theorize as a form of agent intellect (al-‘aql al-faa‘il), new and troubling feelings come to be absorbed within the broader aesthetic assemblage of teahouse sociality. In these spaces, the harshness of the present becomes enfolded within nostalgic routines—a creative act of solidarity that exceeds binary tropes of hope and uncertainty.

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Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy

Baracchi

2007

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In Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy, Claudia Baracchi demonstrates the indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in Aristotle's thinking. Referring to a broad range of texts from the Aristotelian corpus, Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always informed by a set of practices and, specifically, how one's encounter with phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense is always a matter of ethos. Such a "modern" intimation is shown to be found at the heart of Greek thought. Baracchi's book opens the way for a comprehensively reconfigured approach to classical Greek philosophy.

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Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Fright and the Fraying of Community

Fright and the Fraying of Community

Malicious Game

Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy

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