8 - Intelligence

Summary

This chapter asks what it is about “intelligence” (nous) that, in Aristotle’s view, makes “understanding” or “insight” (noēsis) its proprietary work. It argues that the answer lies in the peculiar clarity and distinctness of that activity. This clarity and distinctness, it argues, make intelligence the very “form” or “measure” of its objects – what they all “have in common,” what “makes” them intelligible, what their intelligibility consists in.