Placing the Human: Establishing Reason by its Participation in Divine Intellect for Boethius and Aquinas, Res Philosophica, 93, no. 4 (October 2018):: 1-33. (original) (raw)
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Humanities Colloquium capstone lecture St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish November 16, 2017. In the current circumstances of philosophy and religion, three obstacles to reasoning in common with ancient and medieval philosophers stand in our way. Our predecessors differ from what is at present generally assumed because for them: Reason is neither the only form of thinking, knowing, like being, is said in many ways (as Aristotle put it), nor is reasoning the highest of these. In the graded series of the kinds of apprehension, first diagrammatized in Plato’s allegory of the Line, ways of apprehending match objects and they are relative to one another. Human knowing is dependent on higher forms of understanding. Although these are related so that we must touch on all of them, the last, is the subject of this lecture.
The Given and the Thought: Reflections on faith and reason, or their analogues, in Robert Crouse, Augustine and the Platonic Tradition, Aquinas and Aristotle. Concluding Seminar for Medieval Interpreters of Aristotle, 2012-13: Thomas Aquinas I offer this discussion, grounded in Robert Crouse’s treatment of faith and reason generally, and especially his treatments of this relation in Augustine and the Platonic Tradition, Aquinas and Aristotle, together with some of my own work on the character of the agent intellect in Aquinas, as the conclusion of my seminar for 2012-13. It undertook a rereading of the first forty-five questions of Summa theologiae, using my book on the subject and scholarship subsequent to its publication, much of it by me. We considered the rise to the simplicity of the first principle (1.3) from the perception of motion (1.2.3), and the subsequent emanation to and return out ever more greatly divided multiplicities by way of a series of circular logics: 1) the movement of the divine essence upon itself in the first moment of the de deo uno (1.3-1.11). In its second moment, we considered 2) the divine operations of knowing, loving, and power which return to their principium, the divine essence, by way of the knowledge happiness human and divine requires (1.13-1.26). Moving outward to the de deo trino, we considered 3) the formation of three infinite divine subsistences by the natural and necessary processions of the internal operations in the form of the opposed relations of knower and known, lover and beloved, and return from the attributes of the essence which disclose these subsistences back to the essence (the “emanation” and circumcession of the Trinity, 1.27-1.43). 4) Finally we considered multiple subsistences again formed by the relation to, as distinguished from a relation in, the essence, that is, the creation of multiple varied subsistences as together a similitude of the divine essence under the opposed relati0n of given and accepted power outside the divinity (the “emanation” of Creation 1.44-1.45); the completion of the circle back to the source from creatures ultimately takes the remainder of the three parts of the Summa. This logic requires that “the method, necessity, and accomplishment of questions 2 to 45 of the Summa theologiae is to understand God from the perspective of creatures and creatures from the perspective of God.” Seeing how this is and can be so involves the relation of faith, or gracious revelation, and the light of reason, or philosophy. Faith provides the perspective from above and philosophy the perspective from below. However, following Crouse, it is crucial that these are not relations between revealed religion and philosophy (or not primarily these relations), but matters of the structure and possibility of the philosophical sciences, including theology, themselves. Thus they become generally the question of the relation of givenness and reflexivity, or, in the Aristotelian tradition (and its Neoplatonic extensions), the question of abstraction and the agency by which it is enabled. I propose in this paper to present you with some texts the discussion of which will, I hope, advance our reflection on these most difficult matters.
Aquinas' Humanism 2020 First Take-home Examination
A. Submit an essay of approximately 3000 words on one of the following. 1. In the Platonic tradition, which for our purposes includes Aristotle and the Peripatetics, activities of knowing and ignorance are relative to the objects which they constitute or which are constituted by them, and are also relative to one another. Intellection grounds reasoning, but humans come to intellectual understanding and intuition through reasoning. In the same tradition, intellect is proper to God and reason to humans. Discuss the implications of these positions for the nature of the divine and the human, and for the difference between them and their connection. The texts of other ancient and medieval philosophers may be considered in your essay, but crucial texts of Aristotle, Boethius, and Aquinas on the intellectual foundation of reasoning, and the coordinate dependence of humans on reason as the way to the highest kinds of intelligence, must be considered in your answer. OR 2. For Aristotle human knowing begins from undefined or confused wholes, separates the elements of the whole, and completes itself by understanding the kinds and structure of the connection of what has been divided. The introduction to the Physics and Book II of the Metaphysics may be consulted to get a sense for this logic in Aristotle. Further investigation would require very difficult study of this Prior and Posterior Analytics . Thinking and theology proceed in the same way for Aquinas, but, because of the influence of Proclus on him, the moments in this process are different and the result is more completely systematic. Discuss how this procedure works in Aristotle and Aquinas in respect to the concerns of this Seminar, its assumptions and implications, and the differences between its functioning in Aquinas and Aristotle. The texts of other ancient and medieval philosophers may be considered in your essay, but crucial texts of Aristotle and Aquinas, including the structure of Thomas’ Summa theologiae, must be considered in your answer.
Shaped Mutually: the Human Self and the Incomprehensible God in Eriugena Anselm Aquinas Bonaventure
I begin from the difference between the levels of the Divided Line of Plato’s Republic and the Good whose simile is the sun, because, for the latter, no state of knowing or ignorance, or of subjectivity generally, is specified as corresponding to the seeing of the epikeina, not an object either for knowing or being. A long and varied history of Platonic theology in the ancient and medieval periods from Philo to Nicholas of Cusa must more or less explicitly find a correlate to what is not to be objectified and has no corresponding definite subject, but presides over and is immanent in all. The Cardinal’s consideration of learned ignorance is an explicit endeavor to confront the problem of the kind of self which apprehends the absolutely prior. Using recent French historical and philosophical analysis of the subject, and consideration of the movement of the argument of the texts involved, I attempt to add to our understanding of how the human self (or non self) and the incomprehensible God are mutually and differently shaped in the Periphyseon of Eriugena, the Proslogion of Anselm, the Summa theologiae of Aquinas, and the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of Bonaventure. In contradistinction from Augustine, Anselm matched Divine-Human physical corporeality with the silence of the ego in a quest through ignorance and contradiction for the Incomprehensible. For Aquinas’ Dionysian-Aristotelian hylomorphism, the soul is the form of the body, so that the human is, by essence, end seeking rationality. What matches is the being of the Incomprehensible as self-disclosing and self-differentiating activity enabling freedom by progressively revealing and drawing reason into itself as ever more completely inclusive reditus. Bonaventure matches the Unknowable Coincidence of opposites with mirrored theophany, objective and subjective, anticipating Cusanus.
Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of Knowledge. The First Operation of the Intellect
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.
2013
Aquinas' famous comments in his early Scriptum on the Sentences (In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3) regarding the intellect's apprehension of essence and esse have traditionally been interpreted as grounding Aquinas' doctrine on the judgment of esse. For Aquinas, it appears, what the intellect apprehends in a simple concept is essence. Since esse, for him, is not an essence, it cannot, on the received view, be the object of conceptualization. Therefore, esse is grasped by the intellect only in judgment. The claim that no genuine concept of esse is possible, however, is inconsistent with Aquinas' theory of signification. A term's signification is constituted, at least in part, in its "signing relation" with some "concept" in the mind. If, as on the traditional reading, there is no concept of esse, the term 'esse' is left without signification. To respond that the term 'esse' signs, not a concept, but the judgment in which esse is apprehended is in direct conflict with Aquinas' claim elsewhere that no term, including 'ens' and 'esse', signifies a judgment. I propose an alternative interpretation to In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3, one that allows for the possibility of a conceptual apprehension of esse. The alternative reading explains Aquinas' remarks there in light of the theoretical context of the discussion, in particular the theory of propositions and their objects. I show how and why Aquinas develops a distinctive theory of the object of the proposition, that it is concerned with "the esse of a thing" as a complex. Although this complex includes the simple act of being, as for the traditional position (contrary to its major critics), it cannot be reduced to anything simple. Despite the Sentences' affirmation of a real distinction between a thing's esse and essence, to which correspond two different operations of the intellect, it does not follow that the human intellect cannot conceive esse, just as it conceives essences, in a simple conception. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Rosa E. Vargas Della Casa, M.A. I would like to thank my advisor, David Twetten, for guiding and supporting me throughout the time it took me to complete this research and write the dissertation. Also, I would like to thank my committee members, Richard Taylor, Owen Goldin, Mark Johnson, and John O'Callaghan, for their very helpful insights, comments and suggestions. I must acknowledge as well the many people who in various ways assisted, advised, and supported my research and writing efforts over the years. Alicia Burga,
Aquinas on Sensing, Perceiving, Thinking, Understanding, and Cognizing Individuals
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.
Perception, Experience, and Practical Reason in Aquinas.pdf
Being and Thought in Aquinas, 2004
This article is the second in a pair (the first being Instinct and Custom, published in The Thomist in 2002) aimed at explaining how perception in human beings is brought to a higher level by the influence of reason, and how this modified perception in turn facilitates conceptual development.To put this in the language of Aquinas, this article studies how the operation of reason "overflows" into the vis cogitativa, thereby enabling the latter to prepare the phantasm for abstraction. According to Aquinas, this same internal sense power plays a cardinal role not only in abstraction, but in human actions and passions as well. Since he gives a much richer view of perception when discussing actions and passions, the modus operandi of this article (and its prequel) is to use the analysis of perception vis-à-vis actions and passions as a basis for understanding better how perceptual processes facilitate the development of concepts.
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).