Page "Empiricism" Paragraph 11
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During the middle ages Aristotle's theory of tabula rasa was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi, developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail.
For Avicenna ( Ibn Sina ), for example, the a tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and knowledge is attained through " empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts " developed through a " syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts.
" The intellect itself develops from a material intellect ( al -' aql al-hayulani ), which is a potentiality " that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect ( al -' aql al-fa ' il ), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge ".
So the immaterial " active intellect ", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur.
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