In the XVIIth century the philosophers defend two opposite versions of the agent intellect that had its beginning in the XIIIth century: the Thomism and the Scotism. In this article we study one Spanish representative author of each one of them: Francisco Palanco (Thomist) and Francisco Alonso Malpartida (Scotist). The both of them defend the existence of the agent intellect in man, its abstractive function, and both deny that in this life we can not know naturally without abstraction. But the

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... irst one maintains the real distinction between the agent and the possible intellect, whereas the second one sustains that their distinction is only formal.