The Shlomo Pines Memorial Lecture.

The idea that knowledge of intelligible truths is produced in us by a separate, intellectual principle — the Agent Intellect — is typical of Arab-Islamic philosophy. In both the East and the West of the medieval Muslim world, philosophers contended that our grasp of intelligible items is due to the ‘conjunction’ (ittisal) of man’s mind with this separate Intellect. Albeit cast in Aristotelian language, this doctrine is unprecedented in Aristotle’s corpus and is generally acknowledged to have originated with Alexander of Aphrodisias. The present article surmises that the role of the early Arabic translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology was decisive in transmitting the doctrine of conjunction even in the Muslim West, commonly seen as falling entirely within the province of the Aristotelian tradition.