Thomas Aquinas on Bridging the Gap Between Mind and Reality

Broadly construed, the central project of this paper is to provide an overview of Thomas Aquinas's theory of mind. More specifically, this project will be two-parted. First, I will provide brief overview of Aquinas's metaphysics—particularly those aspects that are relevant and necessary to explain his theory of mind. Second, I will outline and explain Aquinas's theory of mind, in detail. This will primarily consist of (i) explaining how his theory of mind is couched within his metaphysics and (ii) providing a coherent framework that captures the mechanistic features of his theory of mind.

2015

The aim of this paper is to make an analysis of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of knowledge. The approach will be one based mostly on textual analysis. For the medieval thinker all human knowledge starts from the senses where the properties of extra mental objects are received in a natural or in an intentional way. Afterwards, the sensory data is being sorted by common sense, one of the four internal senses. In this paper I shall emphasize the operations of cogitative power because I think that it is in virtue of it that we have the ability to know the singulars. The first operation of the intellect ends up with the work of the agent and possible intellect and with the forming of the mental word.

2021

Did we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too—along with Kant—had made the “turn to the subject”; as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it; as if St. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is intelligible not only when we think of it, but because we think of it. After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. Could I explain those reasons, could I pinpoint the problem leading Kant to think in those terms? Could I show Aquinas facing the same problem and clearly taking a different direction in his proposed solution? That is what I have tried to do in this book. This book provides an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views, whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the intelligible object but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of this object. This is because for Aquinas the universal as nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. In this four-chapter book, Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal as nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4).

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.

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.

Transylvanian Review, 2014

Review of Metaphysics, 2017

Aquinas criticizes Averroes’ monopsychism for failing to offer a satisfactory explanation for the obvious fact that “this human being thinks (hic homo intelligit).” However, it also poses great challenges to Aquinas himself to show how an individual person as a material compound can be the subject of thinking, which is supposed to be unmixed with the matter. This essay aims to address these challenges by reconstructing three ontological reasons Aquinas could have offered to demonstrate the compatibility of immateriality and individuality of thinking: the conception of individuality in terms of imparticipability, the complicated status of intelligible species, and the ontological priority of the soul to the body. It argues that the intellective soul as the substantial form of human beings is the ultimate principle of thinking, both for its immateriality and for its individuality.

Verbum, 2004

In several places throughout his corpus, Thomas Aquinas speaks of the agent intellect as a certain “participation in divine light.” This places Aquinas within a long debate between epistemological theories of knowledge as divine illumination versus empirical theories of abstraction. Aquinas seeks to appreciate and appropriate what Augustine brings to the discussion, with his theory of divine illumination, while still remaining faithful to the more empiricist doctrine of abstraction proposed by Aristotle and his followers. Also central to this debate are the contributions of the Arabic philosophers, especially Avicenna, who, like Augustine, seeks to maintain a connection between the human intellect and a separate agent intellect. Aquinas shows himself to be an appreciative and receptive synthesizer as well as a penetrating and innovative critic of all of these traditions. In developing his own doctrine of the agent intellect, Aquinas not only finds a reasonable balance between Augustinian illumination and Aristotelian abstraction, but he also engages the theory of Avicenna on the separation of the Agent Intellect, showing both its merits and its downfalls. All of this is framed in light of Aquinas’s own understanding of participation, which he defines in a commentary on Boethius, among other places. I will show how Aquinas thus develops a coherent theory of the agent intellect as “participation in divine light” that does justice to both its empirical/abstractive operation and to its quasi-divine or participatory operation, thus maintaining a middle-ground between the two sides of a long medieval controversy over whether knowledge comes, so to speak, “from above” or “from below.”

This essay explores some of the central aspects of Aquinas's account of mental representation, focusing in particular on his views about the intentionality of concepts (or intelligible species). It begins by demonstrating the need for a new interpretation of his account, showing in particular that the standard interpretations all face insurmountable textual difficulties. It then develops the needed alternative and explains how it avoids the sorts of problems plaguing the standard interpretations. Finally, it draws out the implications of this interpretation with the aim of correcting some persistent misunderstandings of the connection between Aquinas's views and those developed by contemporary philosophers of mind.