Potency and act
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
bi-al-quwwah · ilā al-fiʻl · min al-quwwah ilá al-fiʻl · الاستعداد · الى الفعل · بالقوة · من القوة الى الفعل
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The couple of potency and act, doing double duty as the definition of craft and as the axis along which the intellectual ranks are ordered.
On the crafts — The definition of a craft is that it is a thing holding fast in a practical, cogitative matter [30] by means of which man brings the kinds of composites from potency (*quwwah*) to act (*fiʻl*).
The first is called the material intellect (*al-ʻaql al-hayūlī*), like the soul of children, empty [23] of all the sciences and cognitions yet prepared to receive them in potentiality and possibility.
[24] The third rank is that which is called intellect in act (*al-ʻaql bi-al-fiʻl*);
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
The pair quwwah and fiʻl, potency and act, with istiʻdād as the locus's preparedness: the rule that a locus must subsist while what was potential in it becomes actual, from which the soul's incapacity to pass away is derived.
The statement of the proof is that if there is in the essence of a thing a preparedness for a matter's coming forth from potency into act — such as the preparedness of the human being's growth from the sperm-drop, and the ripening of the fruit from the tree, or the preparedness for the appearance of the effects of the external and internal senses from the brain — then this thing, that is, the locu …
And if that thing passes away at the time of that matter's coming forth from potency into act, then the matter which was in it potentially would not be coming forth from it into act ( what is other than a sperm-drop (1) ) ( as in the sperm-drop of ) the human being: