In order to understand Avicenna's introduction of an "Agent Intellect", we need to think of intellectual cognition as a special case of a much more general phenomenon.

I examine several instances of philosophical uses of qualifiers ("insofar as", "qua"), taken from Aristotle, Avicenna, Descartes, Kant, and 20th c. action theory. In the light of these examples, I discuss several accounts of how such qualifiers work.

We may think of determiners as functions from quiddities (specifications of content) to individuals (as in “this horse”) or repeatables (as in “a horse”). Then we may construe the copula as a function that maps repeatables onto Fregean predicates.

Avicenna allows for at least one case where we can intellectually grasp a particular individual as such: Each human intellect can intellect itself as numerically this one intellect without relying on any general notion or concept.

The regress at the end of Plato's Theaetetus may be avoided by defining theoretical knowledge as true belief that results from a successful and proper exercise of a rational capacity (a dunamis meta logou).

On the social underpinnings of self-knowledge and its opposite in Marx.

Not all versions of Lichtenberg's Point affect all versions of Descartes' cogito argument.

According to Donald Baxter's Aspect Theory of Instantiation, a particular instantiates a universal when an aspect of the particular is also an aspect of the universal. According to an improved version of this account, this happens when the universal itself is an aspect of the particular. -- AJP best paper of the year 2015.

The Aristotelian doctrine of four causes naturally arises from the combination of the two distinctions (a) between things and changes, and (b) between that which potentially is a certain thing or change and what it potentially is.

Descartes uses 'conscientia' in the traditional sense, roughly meaning 'moral conscience'.