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)

In the current circumstances of philosophy and religion, three of the obstacles to reasoning in common with ancient and mediaeval philosophers concern reason itself. Our predecessors in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions (including the Neoplatonists and Peripatetics) differ from what is at present frequently assumed, because for them: 1) 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. 2) In the graded series of the kinds of apprehension, diagrammatized in Plato's allegory of the Line, ways of apprehending match objects, and they are relative to one another. Reason is neither absolute nor intransitive. 3) 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 focus of this paper. My aim is to show how, with Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy, and Thomas Aquinas, in his Aristotelian commentaries and the Summa theologiae, both form and doctrines, the dependence of reason on the more powerful intellect, and the consequent difficulty of maintaining the human, leads to establishing human reason in the face of its divine superior.