 As mentioned in the previous section, the term ‘aql (intellect) is used in different ways. We have dealt with the way in which al-Fārābī uses it in the psychological context of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul. However, in his account of the different senses of the term, al-Fārābī also refers to its use in Posterior Analytics 2.19, where Aristotle uses the term νοῦς in an epistemological context when he talks about a faculty of the soul by means of which certainty about necessary, true, and universal premises is attained. In his Aphorisms al-Fārābī describes the theoretical intellect in the same terms when he says that this intellect 