 In the commentary on De anima, Burley deals with the problems of the object of knowledge and the possibility of direct intellective cognition of singulars, especially in questions 5 and 6 of Book III: “utrum intellectus intelligat singulare [Does the intellect understand what is singular]?” and “utrum universale sit obiectum intellectus [Is what is universal an object of the intellect]?” (fols. 69rb–70va). In order to answer these two questions, Burley, like Averroes, begins by distinguishing three different aspects and one state of the soul which can be designated by the term ‘intellect’: the elementary thought (virtus cogitativa—which, for Burley, as for Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, is a purely sensory faculty); the active intellect; the possible intellect (which, following Averroes’s terminology, Burley calls “materialis”); and the intellect in habitu, i.e., that state of the intellect in which, thanks to the union of the active intellect with the material intellect, an intelligible species comes into being in the material intellect, generating an effective act of cognition. Since, in Burley’s view, both the active intellect and the intellect in habitu are not strictly speaking faculties of the soul, but the primary cause of understanding and a state of the soul, respectively, it is necessary for him to offer two distinct accounts depending on whether it is the elementary thought or the material intellect which is in question. In the first case, the material singular is the direct and sufficient object of the intellect, insofar as elementary thought, like common sense and imagination, is directed exclusively towards individuals, both substantial and accidental. But in the second case, it is the universal that is the direct and appropriate object of the intellect, because the intentional representation (species or intentio) produced by the singular in the soul is not formed or ‘taken in’ by the material intellect, as the only species present in the material intellect is the universal. Nevertheless, Burley acknowledges that the material intellect also has knowledge of the singular in an indirect and derivative way (indirecte et ex consequenti). Accordingly, he disagrees with those authors who, on the basis of the Aristotelian assertion that “sensation is of singulars; but understanding is of universals”, affirm that the singular cannot in any way be the object of intellective knowledge. According to Burley, what the Aristotle means is that the senses can grasp directly and appropriately only the singular, whereas the universal can be known in a direct and proper manner only by the material intellect (cf. also In De an., I, q.5: “utrum intelligere sit propria operatio animae vel totius coniuncti [Is understanding the proper activity of the soul or of the entire conjunct &lt;of body and soul&gt;?”, fol. 13va; and De potentiis animae, p. 111). What is more, were the material intellect unable to know the singular, it would be impossible for us to distinguish what is individual from what is universal. As a matter of fact, even though the species present in the material intellect is universal, and cannot by itself point to any particular individual, the material intellect can know the singular by means of intentional representations (phantasma) present in the elementary thought, since the phantasm is nothing but the intentional representation of a single individual substance obtained through the accidental properties it exhibits. Thanks to such a representation the (material) intellect can assimilate itself in the act of knowing to singular things attested to by the senses.