  Turning to Averroes’ mature view (as found in his Long Commentary on De Anima), he advances the idea not only of a shared active intellect, but of a shared material intellect, revealing, as Taylor argues, elements of al-Farabi and Themistius in his sense of the active intellect’s role in enabling the human intellect to reliably abstract from the outside world. In this sense, Averroes rejects the Avicennian sense of active intellect emanating ideas into the human mind. (Note: Taylor points to the further vestige of Themistius in Averroes’ argument that shared human discourse necessitates belief in a shared intellect.)  Along similar lines, Averroes rejects the Platonic/Neoplatonic description—found in both al-Farabi and Avicenna—of active intellect as a repository of ideas. Averroes instead focuses on active intellect as a “form for us”, in the sense, says Taylor, of “intrinsically operating within us” (Taylor 2005, 29)—though not in the sense of suggesting that there is either an active intellect or a material intellect for each person, and also while maintaining that active and material intellect are themselves completely separate intellects. For Averroes, there is for all humans one shared separate active intellect and one shared separate material intellect, with the activation of abstraction taking place in the shared active intellect and the reception of the abstracted intelligibles taking place in the shared material intellect. In using her soul’s powers correctly the human being is able to benefit from these processes of abstraction and reception, in this way moving from a state of sensation to a state of knowledge. Even with the involvement of shared separate active and material intellects, Averroes describes the process as intrinsic to the individual human soul and as active intellect becoming “form for us” (itself understood as the human’s final end) in a true conjunction or uniting of the individual human soul with the active intellect. (In fact, it is precisely this intimate relation/conjunction/unification that Averroes find lacking in al-Farabi’s (and we might add, Avicenna’s) view of active intellect as simply emanating data into the human soul; see Taylor 2005, 26-31.) As Taylor summarizes this view in Averroes: “We must use our powers of sense, imagination, cogitation and memory to form particular refined intentions, intelligibles in potency, for presentation to the agent intellect [i.e. the active intellect] for abstraction, that is, for transference to the higher level of being intelligibles in act, and for the attendant impression upon the receptive material intellect“ (Taylor 2005, 31). (For further insights on Averroes’ epistemology, see for example: Taylor 1998, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012b (Other Internet Resources); Wolfson 1958; Kogan 1985; Davidson 1992; Kaplan 1977; Twetten 1995).