El intelecto agente según Ignatio Vincentio / The Agent Intellect According to Ignatio Vincentio

Abstract

In this work we review the three principal theses that Ignatio Vincentio, a Spanish thinker of the seventeenth century, defends about the agent intellect: 1) it is the same potency as the possible intellect, only with a formal distinction and plurality of names; 2) it has three tasks: a) to illuminate phantasmata, b) to make them intelligible in act, and c) to abstract the intelligible species from them; and 3) it will remain in the separated soul performing the same task as in the present situation [(in this life) ?], but without conversion to phantasmata.