  In thinking about the Islamic philosophical context to Maimonides’ epistemology, we can talk broadly of the influence on his thought of Islamic Neoplatonized Aristotelian theories of Active Intellect: Human knowledge-formation relies on the activity of this lowest of the separate intellects. It is important, though, to keep in mind some important Islamic philosophical points of difference in considering Maimonides’ context: Starting with al-Farabi and Avicenna, both envision Active Intellect as a key reality outside of God and outside of the human mind which plays a key role in the human process of knowledge-formation. Following Taylor, however (see Taylor 2012), we might note that while Avicenna sees the ideas contained within Active Intellect as the source for the human intellect’s own ideas, al-Farabi sees the Active Intellect as merely preparing a person’s mind to abstract ideas from her sensory encounter with the material world—an idea, as Taylor points out, found too in Themistius’ Paraphrase of the De Anima in which he speaks of a “separate agent intellect which contains all the forms [and which] comes to be in the human agent intellect empowering and guiding its action” (Taylor 2012b, Other Internet Resources). Summarizing this divide between al-Farabi and Avicena in another way, we might note that while al-Farabi upholds a doctrine of abstraction by which the human mind receives content from the outside world, Avicenna instead treats the mind as receiving representations of the intelligibles from the Active Intellect. Taylor—citing Burnyeat 2008—reminds us (Taylor 2012b, Other Internet Resources) that there is actually no doctrine of abstraction in Aristotle; that said, we may nonetheless speak of al-Farabi’s more Aristotelian (because more sensory and world-reliant) approach to knowledge as opposed to Avicenna’s more Platonic/Neoplatonic approach according to which humans receive ideas from “on high” so to speak (in the case of Plato from the realm of forms, in the case of Plotinus from the universal intellect, and in the case of Avicenna from the active intellect). Taylor also emphasizes the representationalist aspect of Avicenna’s view: it is not the active intellect’s intelligibles that enter into the human mind, but rather representations of those intelligibles (Taylor 2012b, Other Internet Resources).