   Farabi's most detailed study of the intellect is to be found in the aptly titled “Epistle on the  Intellect,” Risâla fi’l-‘Aql.[19] He begins by showing the diverse contexts in which nominal and verbal forms of “intellect” and “intelligence” are employed. Aristotle, he points out, uses the term in his logical, ethical, psychological and metaphysical treatises. In each area, it is the intellect that is responsible for comprehending the first principles or premises of the subject, and for enabling a person to perfect his (or her) knowledge of it. For Farabi, this apparently innocuous statement must serve to commend the epistemic methodologies of Aristotle over the denaturalized, logically confined analyses of the mutakallimûn, the Muslim theologians. Yet, as emerges later in the treatise, these first principles, seemingly innate to the intellect, are engendered there by the Agent Intellect (Bouyges, 29; Hyman, 219). That universal intellect, for all its ontic priority, is the last of the four intellects that Farabi formally discusses in the treatise. It is a separate intellect, totally immaterial and external to the human intellect. Revising al-Kindi's schematization, and showing the influence of Alexander of Aphrodisias' understanding of Aristotle, Farabi posits a cognitive process in which the human intellect moves from a state of potentiality to one of actuality, acquiring in the process a discrete sum of intelligibles that it can access when desired.