One might again detect Aristotelian ideas behind the argument: if, with Aristotle, we believe that knowledge of something is the grasp of the cause or explanation of that thing, and, again with Aristotle, that intellect knows by being identical with what it knows, then the only way intellect could grasp the One would be for intellect to be its cause. Having said that, the strikingly paradoxical way the doctrine is presented has no parallel in Aristotle, and some have wanted to see in the passage some role or influence on the part of Porphyry (see Thillet 1971) or the Pseudo-Dionysius (see D’Ancona 1993).