Is man immortal? Here Maimonides applies to the full his capacity for mystifying his readers. In the Guide he avoids the question, except to say that “the soul that remains after death is not the soul that lives in a man when he is born”;69 the latter—the “potential intellect”—is a function of the body and dies with it; what survives is the “acquired” or “active intellect,” which existed before the body and is never a function of it.
