ABSTRACT
The original misreading of Averroes by Latin philosophers—with the special mention of Thomas of Aquinas and his De unitate intellectus —consisted of treating the concept of the unity of the intellect as if there is only one, universal, actually thinking subject, somehow dominating every individual act of cognition. For Averroes, the material intellect—separated and transcendent—is not the actual thinking subject, but “a pure and absolute potentiality”. Averroes appears at the crucial point of Dante Alighieri’s treatise De Monarchia, in which the Florentine poet establishes universal humanity as an ultimate subject of politics. According to Claude Lefort, Dante was the first to understand the term humanitas as both the dignity proper to the human being and the human race taken in its widest sense. Images as mediating objects bring the aesthetic and political aspect of the common together.
