L'esprit d'Aristotle’s

My title is ambiguous and I intend it in

both senses. ‘Aristotle’s intellect’ may

mean the intellect Aristotle speaks of as

God in Metaphysics Λ and as the Active Intellect in

De Anima III 5. It may also mean the intellect that

is active in Aristotle himself when he discourses

on these lofty themes. My claim will be that both

senses lead to the same reference. When we read

Metaphysics Λ and De Anima III 5, we encounter

God, the Active Intellect, explaining itself. Or so

Aristotle would have us believe: when his intellect

is actively explaining itself, that is his Deity

explaining itself.1

10 M. F. Burnyeat

This is of course a contentious interpretation,

but it fits well with another contentious claim, as

follows. One of the lessons we can gain from the

history of philosophy is that psychological states

are not given to us as part of the natural order. To

a considerable extent, what they are is how they

are conceived at this time in history or that. And

how they are conceived is not a recording of something

antecedently fixed by nature, but a response

to a theoretical or - at least as often - a practical

problem. Much of what current philosophy of

mind so condescendingly calls ‘folk psychology’

is the precipitate of past philosophies or religious

movements. The very concept of the mind and the

mental, as now understood, can be seen coming

to birth in the second of Descartes’ Meditations.

1.

The earliest testimony on what ‘mental’ meant

before Descartes is simultaneously the first extant

occurrence of the word itself. In his Literal Commentary

on Genesis, having set out to distinguish

tria genera visionum, three kinds of ‘vision’, Augustine

lists and explains first the corporale genus of

vision, second the spirituale, and then says he will

call the third kind ‘intellectuale ab intellectu’. So

far, nothing out of the ordinary. But suddenly he

introduces an alternative way of naming the third

...