 The unicity controversy was a philosophical and metaphysical as well as hermeneutical debate. The metaphysical aspect is reflected in the discussion concerning the nature of the human material intellect—i.e., our potential disposition for receiving thoughts—whether it is a single substance or multiple substances, and whether it is corporeal or separate from corporeal matter. Hermeneutically, the work attempts to discern the correct interpretation of certain passages from Averroes’ Long Commentary on the De anima and, more fundamentally, of certain passages in Aristotle’s De anima. In that work, it is not quite clear what Aristotle’s own position concerning the ontological status of the human intellect is. On the one hand, the material intellect is described as our intellect, by virtue of which we think. On the other hand, some of Aristotle’s remarks seem to indicate that the material intellect is separate in its existence from the individual human being. Throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Aristotle’s interpreters debated this question, with Averroes’ discussion of it in his long commentary on the De anima the focal point of many of the later discussions. In chapter 3.5, commenting upon lines 429a21–24 in the De anima, Averroes in the long commentary stresses those aspects in Aristotle’s text which suggest that the intellect, despite possessing a certain relation to human individuals, is nonetheless a separate substance, shared by all humans. Once the long commentary on the De anima was translated into Latin, this interpretation was picked up by philosophers in the Latin west from the thirteenth century onwards, among them Elijah Del Medigo.