
HoP 131 - Deborah Black on al-Farabi's Epistemology
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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The Aristotelian Theory and the Prophet's Account of Prophecy in Pho-Nabi
Frobby says that the prophet has a very strong imaginative faculty which is a faculty in the body and because of that the influence of the agent intellect can spill over or overflow into the imagination. The Prophet receives imaginatively the knowledge that his intellect acquires naturally but the imagination is a symbolic imitative faculty so in order to express what the imagination has received it has to, if you will, translate intelligibles into appropriate images and symbols. That's what religious texts show us. They show us a symbolic imaginative expression of the truths that the prophet knows through his intellect. But they should map on to the rational deduced truths that you would find and say Aristotelian philosophy.
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