Aquinas on the Trinity

1989

We tend to expect intentionality to prove the most difficult of these notions, immateriality to belong merely to the history of ideas, understanding to be no trouble at all. In fact understanding, the fundamental notion, is the most mysterious of the three (like being, its metaphysical correlate). It is difficult to say what it is to know or understand. Aquinas starts his explanation of human knowing from sense-cognition, but, I shall argue, this implies no kinship with an evolutionary or immanentist view of intellect. Intellect, in both origin and operation, allies us rather with angels than with apes. This is no mere preference for a mediaeval explanatory 'model' or comparison. For Aquinas words are indeed names of our concepts, yet the concepts themselves, which are not just capacities to use words, refer to or are of real natures or qualities, without distortion or modification. They are intentional. So he is not just offering a 'model', but claims to see and relate how it is with understanding and so on. Critical discussion and discursive reasoning, itself tracing real causality, lead us to this vision. To this extent he does construe knowledge as a matter of seeing and not merely talking or being part of a 'way of life'. Knowing what's what is itself the highest life; hence his epistemology culminates in the hope of the beatific 'seeing'.

Minding the Modern, 2013

Medieval Philosophy and Theology, 2001

According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding. 1 And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1). 2 More precisely, the human intellect's active component, the agent intellect, produces cognition of the natures of material things by abstracting intelligible forms from phantasms and informing them on its passive component, the possible intellect, to actualize the latter's potency to understand. 3 The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomas's account of this *I wish to thank Marilyn Adams, who introduced me to Aquinas's thought in a marvelous graduate seminar at UCLA. But for the wealth of her insightful criticism, expert advice, and unstinting encouragement over the ensuing years, I am certain this article would never have come into existence. I am also indebted to Gavin Lawrence for many highly enjoyable and instructive discussions of Aquinas's Commentary on the De Anima, and to Torin Alter for extensive written comments on an earlier draft. I would like to thank Eleonore Stump for her many generous comments and suggestions, and Robert Pasnau, not only for his helpful criticisms of the penultimate draft, but also for graciously providing me related chapters from his current work on St. Thomas. Thanks also to John Carriero and Marleen Rozemond for helpful discussions. Finally, I am grateful to the University of Arizona, both the Department of Philosophy and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, for a Junior Sabbatical that supported work on this article. 1. Thomas claims only that the natures of things are the proper objects of the intellect, not that they are its only objects: he does not deny that we have intellective cognition also of the contingent states and situations of particular material things. 2. This claim applies to the exercising of concepts already acquired, as well as their initial acquisition (ST Ia 84.7). Here and throughout, I use "cognition" to translate "cognitio." As Scott MacDonald ("Theory of Knowledge" in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed., N. Kretzmann and E. Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 162) points out, translating "cognitio" with "knowledge" is misleading, given that cognitiones can, on Thomas's account, be false (see, for example, ST Ia 17.3). I discuss Aquinas's conception of cognition in section I.1. 3. This division of the intellect into an active and a passive component originates in Aristotle's cryptic remark that in the soul "there is a mind for becoming all things" and "a mind for producing all things" (DA III 5, 430a10). This passage has been subject to myriad interpretations. Aristotle's Arabic commentators read him as saying that (one or both) of these intellects are single and separate from individual human souls. In opposition to these interpretations, Aquinas holds that the agent and possible intellects are both immanent powers of each individual soul.

Medieval Perceptual Puzzles: Theories of Sense-Perception in the 13th and 14th Centuries, ed. Elena Baltuta (Brill, Investigating Medieval Philosophy Series, 2019), 2020

Among Thomas Aquinas’s 13th and 14th century critics, some of them targeted his Aristotelian view that the human intellect does not cognize individuals of a material nature. To many of his readers, Aquinas’s stance on this point seems to be indefensible for it is an obvious fact that we think about individuals. In this essay, I argue Aquinas’s view has been misunderstood, both by his critics and by many Thomists that have come to his defense. I distinguish two important aspects of Aquinas’s approach to this problem. First, I highlight the co-operative function different cognitive powers perform with respect to the unified cognitive operations of the human being. Second, I examine in detail Aquinas’s account of human sensing, perceiving, understanding, reasoning, thinking, and cognizing individuals by the co-operative cognition of their external senses, the cogitative power (vis cogitativa), and the possible intellect. I show that a proper understanding of the coordinated operations of the possible intellect and cogitative power reveals that Aquinas in fact has a complex and coherent account of how the human being—but not the possible intellect—perceives, thinks, understands, and reasons about individuals.

2007

Lumen et Vita

In his exegesis of Romans 8:15-16, Thomas Aquinas asks how it is that the Holy Spirit bears testimony in us that we are the children of God. He responds that the Spirit bears testimony “through the effect of filial love he produces in us. ” At least in some circumstances, Aquinas suggests, we can come to know God through our experience of loving him. But Aquinas, following a long tradition, teaches that we love things insofar as we know them as good (cf: I-II, q.9, a.1, corpus and ad.3). How then can love give rise to knowledge?Aquinas’s teaching in the Summa Theologica on the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom provides a key to this question. The gift of wisdom makes use of the love of charity to know God (II-II, q.45). Charity, by making us “connatural” with God, can give rise to knowledge of God. I will then consider how the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom relates to the science of theology. The gift of wisdom, however, does not offer an independent or parallel path to knowledge of God, b...

Dionysius 22 (2004): 149-78.

Meeting of Aristotelian Abstraction and Neoplatonism in Aquinas' use of the Agent Intellect as participation in the uncreated light of God's knowing.

I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s Identity Formula—the statement that the “intellect in act is the intelligible in act”—does not, as is usually supposed, express his position on how the intellect accesses extramental realities (responding to the so-called “mind-world gap”). Instead, it should be understood as a claim about the metaphysics of intellection, according to which the perfection requisite for performing the act of understanding is what could be called “intellectual-intelligible being.” In reinterpreting Aquinas’s Identity Formula, I explore the notion of being “in act” as an intellect or intelligible (intelligibile actu, intellectus actu), his curious comments about an “order” or “genus” of intelligibles, and the relationship of understanding and being-understood.