In his final and longest commentary on Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul Averroes made the striking, not to say bizarre, claim that all humans share one single intellect. Bizarre or not, he had good reasons for saying this.5 When both you and I understand something, we are understanding one and the same thing. If we’ve both taken a class on giraffe biology, we wouldn’t expect you to have got your head around one nature of giraffe while I have come to grasp some other nature of giraffe. Rather, we should both know about the same nature. But, in that case, what could possibly differentiate your
...more
