Thomas Aquinas's View of Avicenna's Active Intellect

The position of active intellect in peripatetic philosophy is an intricate issue. One problem round this notion is that while Aristotle himself did not say anything about active intellect his Alexandrian and Neo-platonic commentators theorized this notion. Avicenna, as an independent philosopher, who has been introduced as the representative of peripatetic philosophy while he himself has rejected this claim, has a view of active intellect, consistent with his own philosophical system, which is different from the views of commentators like Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius. Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher and Christian theologian, who has been influenced by Avicenna in his theologian-philosophic thoughts, because of his Christian-Aristotelian position on this issue, disagrees with Avicenna on some aspect of Avicenna’s active intellect theory. What the present article intends to achieve is to answer to the question whether Aquinas’s opposition has an ontological or epistemological origin.