THOMAS AQUINAS’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. <br />THE FIRST OPERATION OF THE INTELLECT
Keywords:
Thomas Aquinas, agent and possible intellect, cogitative power, intelligible species, sensation, sensible species, singularAbstract
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.
References
Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org
George Klubetranz, Discursive Power sources and the Doctrine of Vis Cogitativa According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Messenger Press, Carthagena, Ohio, 1952
Henrik Lagerlund, Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/representation-medieval
Robet Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, Cambridge University Press, 2004
Eleanor Stump, Aquinas, Routledge, 2007
