OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Aquinas’s Theory of Perception

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Aquinas’s Theory
of Perception
An Analytic Reconstruction

Anthony J. Lisska

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Anthony J. Lisska 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931712
ISBN 978–0–19–877790–8
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

To Professor Robert G. Turnbull,

who first convinced a then rather young philosopher not to abandon
his work with Thomas Aquinas but to rethink through the lenses of
linguistic analysis the philosophical chestnuts found plentifully in the
texts of Thomas, and who, with a most gracious philosophical soul
and a magnanimity of collegial spirit, encouraged this young
philosopher to attempt a refutation of his own reading of Aquinas on
phantasms, this book is gratefully and with deep appreciation
dedicated.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Preface

This book is the result of several years spent undertaking research and writing on the
difficult issues surrounding Thomas Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception. It
presents an attempt to ‘reconstruct’ and interpret the texts of Thomas on sense knowl-
edge. The emphasis in this inquiry, accordingly, is directed towards developing a philo-
sophical analysis of the internal and the external senses, with particular reference to
the internal sense of the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contem-
porary analytic philosophy, this study suggests a modest ‘innate’ or ‘structured’ inter-
pretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. Furthermore, this analysis sheds light
on the workings of what Aquinas calls the ‘agent intellect’ (intellectus agens) and its
corresponding cognitive process of abstraction. Inner sense and abstraction are two
concepts in general Aristotelian epistemology and philosophy of mind that require
rethinking and tough-minded analysis.
The research that results in this book began several years ago under the thoughtful
tutelage of the late Robert G. Turnbull. It has been refined over the years by many read-
ings of papers at professional meetings, papers at all three divisions of the American
Philosophical Association, and more than several publications, along with many sum-
mers and two sabbaticals spent worrying about Aquinas on perception. Research was
partly funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant.
An earlier National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar was undertaken
with the late Roderick Chisholm at Brown University.1 Robert C. Good Grants from
Denison University and the Denison Mellon Program in the Humanities enabled the
author to augment regular sabbaticals with additional time affording the possibility to
complete drafts of this book. The author acknowledges with sincere gratitude these
sources of funding, all of which were indispensable for the completion of this extended
study on Thomas Aquinas.
The author’s first attempt at providing an elucidation of the principles of intentionality
in Aquinas was written for Professor Chisholm. The analysis of phantasm and sense
datum first was read at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical
Association. Earlier attempts at unearthing the ‘logic’ of the vis cogitativa and its role in
perception were read as papers at the Central and Pacific Division Meetings of the
American Philosophical Association with variations at other conferences. The author
expresses his gratitude for invitations to contribute papers by the late Ralph McInerny
and the late Norris Clark, SJ. The author’s 2006 Presidential Address for the American
Catholic Philosophical Association discussed in some detail several issues treated in

1
  Over the last quarter of the 20th c., Professor Chisholm was known as one of the foremost contempo-
rary philosophers concerned with perception theory and the thesis of intentionality.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

viii  Preface

this monograph.2 Essays central to this topic have appeared in Analytical Thomism
(2006), Semiotica (2010), The Thomist (1973; 1976), International Philosophical
Quarterly (1976), and Thomistic Sources (forthcoming). A major paper on the Vis
Cogitativa and the perception of individuals was presented at the International
St Thomas Aquinas Society’s meeting held in conjunction with the Eastern Division
Meetings of the American Philosophical Association (1999). A sabbatical spent at the
University of Oxford enabled the author to present his work to several philosophers in
residence and to engage in productive discussions with Sir Anthony Kenny, the then
Master of Balliol College. Over the years, Sir Anthony has been warmly supportive of
this project, which overlaps in many areas with his own substantive work on Aquinas
and the philosophy of mind. The author is grateful to him for his engaging conversa-
tions in Oxford, in Granville, and more recently at his Headington retirement home,
and for his suggestions of the role of inner sense in Aquinas. The author spent part of a
Minnesota summer with a John Haldane seminar at the University of St Thomas; he
expresses his profound gratitude to Professor Haldane, of the University of St Andrews
and now of Baylor University, for stimulating conversations and astute criticisms on
several issues considered in this monograph. On several occasions, both Professors
Kenny and Haldane visited Denison University. The author has learned very much
from the astute writings of Father Fergus Kerr, the former editor of Blackfriars at
Oxford.
Over the years, Robert Turnbull, Peter Machamer, Peter McCormick, Ron Santoni,
Alan Hausman, John Boler, Joan Franks, Harry Heft, Norris Clarke, Mary Sirridge,
Alasdair MacIntyre, Kevin White, John Deely, John Rist, Henry Veatch, Jonathan
Jacobs, Douglas Rasmussen, and Ralph McInerny in the United States, Lawrence
Dewan in Canada, Anthony Kenny, Brian Davies, John Haldane, and Dorian Scaltas in
the United Kingdom, and Roger Pouviet in France have offered valuable comments
and astute criticisms. Recent conversations with two philosophers interested in
Aquinas on inner sense, James South of the Department of Philosophy at Marquette
University and Leo White of Morgan State University, have been particularly fruitful
and productive. Two younger scholars, Mark Barker and Daniel De Haan, have been
keenly interested in the topics considered in this book. In particular, the author
expresses his profound gratitude to his friends Alan Hausman and James South, both
of whom undertook the supererogatory task of reading and commenting upon earlier
drafts of this work. Professor South’s efforts are indeed noteworthy. He worked through
the entire draft manuscript with thoughtful and critical eyes, and then he and the
author undertook extensive and thorough conversations on the manuscript. Professor
South’s insights have rendered this analysis more sophisticated both philosophically

2
  ‘A Look at Inner Sense in Aquinas: A Long-Neglected Faculty Psychology’, in Michael Baur (ed.),
Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80
(2006), 1–19. In his role as president, the author selected as a general theme of this 2006 national meeting
of the ACPA ‘Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind’, with Sir Anthony Kenny and John Haldane along
with the late Kurt Pritzl serving as plenary speakers.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Preface  ix

and historically, and have assisted in removing some serious potholes and muddles
from the arguments in this book. My Denison Philosophy colleagues as well as many
Denison academic administrators have been supportive of this ongoing project.
The author received three sets of significant and thorough insights from anonymous
reviewers for Oxford University Press; the author expresses his deep gratitude for the
thoughtful analyses these reviewers offered for an earlier draft of this book. The author
also expresses sincere appreciation to Ms Eleanor Collins from Oxford University
Press for her marvellous assistance as editor with early drafts of this study, and to Ms
Sarah Barrett for her outstanding copy-editing work. Of course, any philosophical
problems and infelicities—or downright mistaken accounts—that remain rest
squarely on the shoulders of the author. As always, the author depends on the deft
proofreading eye of Marianne Lisska in order to render his writing style more direct
and perspicuous.
The constant attention and thoughtful encouragement over the last quarter of a cen-
tury that Alan Hausman and Robert Turnbull have given to the author’s work on
Aquinas and perception theory deserve special mention. The author’s first attempt to
elucidate a consistent account of Aquinas’s theory of perception came while reading
Descartes with Alan Hausman; the question kept haunting the author—how did
Aquinas really differ on perception theory from Descartes? The first extensive study of
Aquinas on phantasms took place with Robert Turnbull; his cogent remarks have
made this work more consistent and less ridden with woolly arguments. It was
Professor Turnbull who first urged the author to use analytic philosophy in order to
look at the important texts of Aquinas through a different set of lenses. That advice
indeed has made the author’s philosophical career. It is to the late Professor Robert G.
Turnbull that this study of Aquinas on perception, covering issues so dear to his own
philosophical soul, is warmly dedicated.

Granville, OH, USA

25 March 2016
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Summary

Introduction: On Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of Perception 1

1. Setting the Problem: History and Context 8
An introductory discussion suggesting the place of Aquinas’s
Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul in Aristotelian studies in
general and the renewed interest in theories of direct realism.
2. Aquinas on Intentionality 32
A discussion of how intentionality theory is grounded in the writings of
Aquinas and how this theory has influenced nineteenth- and twentieth-
century philosophy. An analysis of the ‘Principles of Intentionality’ as
fundamental building blocks for Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
3. Aquinas and Empiricism: From Aquinas to Brentano and Beyond 64
An indication of how Aquinas’s theory of perception goes beyond the
standard Cartesian and Lockean model commonly called
‘representationalism’. Connections with the perception theories of
naturalism found in Thomas Reid and James Gibson and contemporary
discussions gleaned from Hilary Putnam and John Haldane.
4. Epistemological Dispositions: Causal Powers and the Human Person 91
An account of the significant Aristotelian distinction on ‘act and potency’
suggests how this paradigm is important in moving beyond the limits of
representationalism; an account of cognitive dispositions differing from
innate ideas and a rejection of physicalism as an adequate account of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind are developed.
5. Objects and Faculties: Teleology in Sensation 120
An analysis of the proper and common sensibles in Aquinas’s theory of
perception and a discussion of the distinction between sense organ and
sense faculty; an indication of the importance of the inner sense of the
vis cogitativa and its connection with the incidental object of sense.
6. Preconditions of Visual Awareness: Object and Medium 149
Further development in terms of the necessary conditions for sight;
a discussion of the intentional act of seeing explicating Aquinas on
sensation; an analysis of the importance of the diaphanum or medium,
and the role light plays in seeing.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

xii  Summary

7. The Necessary Conditions for Perception: A Triadic Relation 166

A discussion proposing that a triadic relation between Object,
Medium, and Faculty is an illustrative model for considering
sensation and perception in Aquinas; this schema of direct realism
transcends and moves beyond the limits of both standard direct and
representational accounts.
8. The Sensus Communis: The First of the Internal Sense Faculties 194
A discussion of the internal senses in general indicating differences in
structure from the external senses; an analysis of the difference
between ‘senses’ and ‘sensorium’. An explication of what Aquinas and
Aristotle often refer to as the ‘seat of consciousness’ and a discussion of
how this internal sense faculty of the sensus communis combines the
sensible forms received from the external senses, all along arguing
against several contemporary Aquinas scholars who suggest that a
phantasm is the object of the sensus communis. At this level, Aquinas
is for the most part similar structurally to Berkeley and Hume.
9. The Imagination and Phantasia: A Historical Muddle 219
An elucidation is offered of this moderately tricky internal sense
faculty which Aristotle sometimes refers to as the ‘phantasia’, suggesting
that Descartes in the Sixth Meditation blurs the sensus communis with
the imagination; this conceptual blur leads one down the slippery slope
of representationalism; an argument is offered indicating how several
contemporary Aquinas commentators have not developed four-square
accounts of the imagination or of phantasia.
10. The Vis Cogitativa: On Perceiving the Individual 237
A analysis of the most difficult internal sense faculty in Aquinas’s
account of sensation and perception; this faculty, through an innate
structure, provides for the awareness of the incidental object of sense,
which is the primary substance (the individual) of a natural kind in
Aquinas’s theory of reality; it is here that Aquinas, by introducing
intentiones non sensatae, enlarges his perception theory beyond what
Berkeley and Hume affirmed.
11. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 1 273
A thorough analysis of the necessary conditions for understanding the
concept of phantasm in Aquinas, suggesting that there are three
categories of similitudo, one of which is the phantasm, and offering an
extended argument indicating that a phantasm is neither a sense datum
nor always an image. There are three distinct categories of phantasm in
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Summary  xiii

12. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 2 299

A continuation of Chapter 11, indicating that there are three distinct
categories of phantasm, one corresponding to each faculty of the
internal sensorium, with special reference to the perception of
individuals through the vis cogitativa. A proposal is put forward
suggesting that the analysis of the phantasm-rich vis cogitativa is a
necessary condition for a more sophisticated analysis of the role of
abstraction with the intellectus agens than what one finds in standard
Aquinas commentaries.

Select Bibliography 329

Index 341
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Contents

Introduction: On Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of Perception 1

The Lacuna in Aristotle’s De Anima3
Phantasm and the Vis Cogitativa4
1. Setting the Problem: History and Context 8
Perception Theory and Analytic Philosophy 9
Aquinas and Teleology: A Naturalist Reconstruction 9
From Ontology to the Philosophy of Mind 10
Aquinas as Dependent upon yet Distinct from Aristotle 12
Neo-scholastic Philosophy and Recent Work in Perception Theory 15
Recent Work in Aristotelian Perception Theory 17
Appendix 1. On Reading Aquinas Given Several Versions of Aquinas Studies 19
Appendix 2. Source Material for this Reconstruction of Aquinas on Mind 23
The Sentencia Libri De Anima 25
Appendix 3. The Summa Theologiae as a Textbook 27
Appendix 4. On Dating the Sentencia Libri De Anima 29
2. Aquinas on Intentionality 32
Historical and Contemporary Antecedents 32
Intentionality in Aquinas’s Philosophy of Mind 34
‘Intentional’ is Not Identical with or Reducible to ‘Spiritual’ 39
The Principles of Intentionality in Aquinas’s Philosophy of Mind 40
Principle A. An act can only be an act of some ‘X’ or other that has a potency 41
Principle B. A potency as such can only be affected by some ‘X’ or other that
is in act 43
Principle C. A potency of any ‘X’ must be specified or properly disposed in
order to receive any given act 44
Principle D. An act remains ‘specifically’ the same but it may have different
embodiments or exemplifications in different potencies 46
Principle D-1. A knower is, by definition, any ‘X’ which has a set of dispositional
properties to acquire or to exemplify acts in a non-entitative or non-materialist
manner 47
The Act/Object Distinction 52
A Brief Interlude 55
Principle E. A form is, by definition, an act 57
Principle F. An ‘X’ is knowable only insofar as it is in act 57
Appendix. Aquinas and Contemporary Intentionality Theory 59
3. Aquinas and Empiricism: From Aquinas to Brentano and Beyond 64
Aquinas as an Empiricist 64
Reid, Gibson, and Aquinas: Epistemological Naturalism Revisited 67
Direct Realism in Aquinas 73
Aquinas and Causal Theories of Perception 75
Haldane and Putnam on Formal Cause: Connections with Aquinas 78
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

xvi  Contents

Intentionality and the Curse of Representationalism 80

The Return to Form 81
From Ontology to the Philosophy of Mind 84
Aquinas on Truth 86
Appendix. Aquinas, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and Representationalism 88
4. Epistemological Dispositions: Causal Powers and the Human Person 91
The Empedoclean Principle 91
Aquinas’s Modification of ‘Like Knows Like’ 92
On Potency and Act 95
Conceptual Dispositions 96
A Revised Set of Terms 98
Dispositions and Substantial Form 100
The Importance of Dispositions 102
On Innate Cognitive Structures 103
Against Physicalism 105
Beyond Physicalism 108
The Intensity of a Perfection 109
Perceptual Dispositions 112
The Need for the Intellectus Agens 114
Appendix. Kenny, Ryle, and Geach on Dispositional Properties 118
5. Objects and Faculties: Teleology in Sensation 120
The Priority of Object 120
Teleology and Metaphysics 121
Objects of Sensation 123
The Directly Perceivable and the Indirectly Perceivable 126
Sensation as a Generic Term 127
Non-veridical Awareness 128
The Common Sensible and the Incidental Object of Sense 131
Causality of ‘Kind’ and Causality of ‘Mode’ 134
Organ and Faculty 137
Organ as Vehicle 142
The Incidental Object of Sense and the Vis Cogitativa 143
Appendix 1. On Doing Philosophy with Thomas Aquinas 144
Appendix 2. Common Sensibles and Primary Qualities 146
6. Preconditions of Visual Awareness: Object and Medium 149
Sight and Its Object 149
Colour as Essentially Visible 152
Colour and Sight 154
The Need for a Medium 157
Appendix 1. Light and Colour: The Commentary versus the Summa Theologiae 159
A Quandary in the Summa Theologiae 161
Appendix 2. Aquinas and Atomism 164
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

Contents  xvii

7. The Necessary Conditions for Perception: A Triadic Relation 166

The Triadic Relation 166
The Intentional Awareness in Sensation 169
The Rose-Coloured Glasses Objection 171
The Causal Aspects of Aquinas’s Theory of Perception 172
Two Senses of Intentio: From the Active Power to the Cognitive Faculty 174
The Bounds of Sense 184
Direct Realism in Aquinas’s Theory of Sensation 185
Appendix 1(I). A Final Summary of Texts from the Commentary on the Soul 186
Appendix 1(II). A Final Summary of Texts from the Supplement to the Summa
Theologiae 188
Appendix 2. Externalism versus Foundationalism in Aquinas 188
8. The Sensus Communis: The First of the Internal Sense Faculties 194
Cognitive Possibility and the Internal Senses in Thomas 194
The Four Internal Senses 196
Aquinas versus Avicenna 199
The Sensus Communis 201
The Function of the Sensus Communis 202
The Sensus Communis as the Root of Sensation 205
The Object of the Sensus Communis is not the Common Sensible 206
The Power of Reflection 208
The Sensus Communis and the Phantasm 209
The Sensus Communis and the External Sensorium 212
Appendix 1. The Ventricle System and the Internal Senses in Medieval
Cognitive Theories 214
The Three Ventricles 215
The Ventricle System and Aquinas’s Cognitive Theory of Inner Sense 216
9. The Imagination and Phantasia: A Historical Muddle 219
Weinberg and Stump on Aquinas and Phantasia 220
Wolfson on the Internal Senses in Medieval Philosophy 223
John of St Thomas on Distinctions in Aquinas 224
The Mental Act of the Vis Imaginativa 227
Imagination and Early Modern Philosophy 228
Imagination as ‘the Master of Falsity’ 231
Appendix 1. Pasnau, Stump, and Shiels on Phantasia in Aristotle and Thomas 232
Appendix 2. Late Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy 234
10. The Vis Cogitativa: On Perceiving the Individual 237
The Vis Aestimativa and the Vis Cogitativa 239
The Awareness of Individuals 243
The Awareness of the Individual as of a Kind 249
Primary Substance and the Vis Cogitativa 254
Moving Beyond Empiricism: Intentiones Non Sensatae 257
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

xviii  Contents

De Principio Individuationis: A Neglected Aquinas Text 259

Seven Summary Propositions 261
Ontological Realism 263
The Sense Memory 265
Back to Aristotle’s De Anima 268
Appendix 1. Transcending the Limits of British Empiricism 269
Appendix 2. Jörg Tellkamp on Aquinas and Perception Theory 270
11. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 1 273
Direct Realism Redux 274
The Sense Data or ‘Qualia’ Position 277
The Sensus Communis and the External Sensorium 281
Aquinas’s Texts on Phantasm 283
The Image Account: Position A 285
The Image Account: Position B 286
Aquinas and the Concept of ‘Imago’ 289
The Three Categories of Similitudo 293
Appendix. The Phantasm in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy 297
12. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 2 299
Phantasms 299
Phantasm-1 300
Phantasm-2 304
Reid Redux 309
The Phantasm and the Vis Cogitativa 311
Phantasm-3 315
The Vis Cogitativa and Primary Substance 315
Phantasm-3 and the Intellectus Agens 317
Intellectus Agens as an Efficient Cause 321
Concluding Observations: Eight Summary Propositions 325
Concluding Propositions: The Mental Act of the Vis Cogitativa 326
A Final Observation 327
Appendix. The Inner Sense Theory and Contemporary Scientific Explanation 327

Select Bibliography 329

Index 341
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Introduction
On Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s
Theory of Perception

Oxford philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny once wrote the following about intentionality
theory in Aquinas: ‘One of the most elaborate, and also one of the most puzzling,
accounts of the harmony between the world and thought is Aquinas’s doctrine of the
immaterial intentional existence of forms in the mind.’1 Kenny, and his philosophical
predecessor in analytic philosophy studies of Aquinas, Peter Geach, moreover,
directed much of their attention to the intricate account of the abstraction process
found in Aquinas’s writings, especially the Summa Theologiae, I qq. 79–85. Often these
texts in the Summa are seen as the principal canon for Aquinas’s account of mental
awareness. For the most part, however, analytic philosophers have paid little attention
to the analysis of sensation and perception, and even less attention to Aquinas’s grand
exposition and commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, the Sentencia Libri De Anima
with its informed and perspicuous analysis of the internal sense faculty of the vis
cogitativa.
The principal goal of this study is to eliminate some of what Kenny called the
‘puzzling’ issues in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. In particular, this project focuses
attention on the epistemological materials propaedeutic to concept formation, for
which the process of abstraction with the agent intellect (intellectus agens) is a neces-
sary condition. This study embarks upon an analysis of the process of perception, with
special attention paid to the nature, scope, and workings of the internal senses or ‘inner
sense’. The analysis articulates the ‘logic’ of these concepts central to Aquinas’s account
of sensation and perception. Like Kenny, Geach, and John Haldane, in order to eluci-
date effectively the perception texts found in the writings of Aquinas, the techniques of
contemporary analytic philosophy have been utilized extensively. Accordingly, the
method undertaken in this analysis is rooted in how contemporary analytic philoso-
phers undertake their craft. This philosophical interpretation depends substantively
on the exceptionally lucid analyses that Haldane has provided over the last two

1
 Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas: Intentionality’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Philosophy Through Its Past
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 82.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

2  Introduction

decades on the role of analytic philosophy and the development of Aquinas’s theory of
intentionality. It may be the case that, in considering issues central to a viable contem-
porary philosophy of mind, Haldane’s category of ‘Analytical Thomism’ achieves its
best success. In discussing Aquinas’s theory of mind, Haldane writes that Aquinas
‘makes claims about the nature of the world, the process of cognition, the semantics of
natural language, and the character of truth […] all of which provide illustrations
of both ontological and epistemological realism’.2 The purpose—what Aquinas might
call the telos of this philosophical undertaking—is similar to what Kenny articulated in
his The Metaphysics of Mind: ‘an employment of the techniques of linguistic analysis
can go hand in hand with a respect for traditional, and indeed ancient, concepts and
theses in philosophy.’3 This study is a systematic, building-block integrated account of
Aquinas’s theory of perception.4
In order to direct attention to those philosophers using analytic philosophy as a
means to elucidate the philosophical concepts central to the texts of Aquinas, Haldane
introduced the term ‘Analytical Thomism’.5 The analytic method undertaken in this
study is in concert with the general direction of Haldane’s suggestions. Moreover,
the position advocated in this study is that, contrary to some contemporary Aquinas
scholars like Mark Jordan, Aquinas did develop first-rate philosophical work, and
furthermore that this keen philosophical analysis is exhibited in his Aristotelian
commentaries. Jordan once wrote: ‘In short, no single work was written by Aquinas
for the sake of setting forth a philosophy. Aquinas chose not to write philosophy.’6 This
study rejects Jordan’s theological reductionism, which will be treated in more detail in
an appendix to Chapter 1. Readers familiar with my earlier book, Aquinas’s Theory of
Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction,7 will readily recognize several familiar
streams and methods of philosophical analysis. The author’s intention is that this pres-
ent analytic monograph will be of benefit both to novices coming to the work of
Aquinas with little background in medieval philosophy and to academically trained
philosophers and also historians of psychology generally interested in medieval
theories of mind.

2
  John Haldane, ‘Mind–World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in John Haldane
and Crispin Wright (eds), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), 33.
3
  Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. ix.
4
  The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer who offered this analogy about the structure of the
argument undertaken in this book.
5
  John Haldane, ‘Analytical Thomism: A Prefatory Note’, The Monist 80(4) (1997), 485–6; also Haldane,
‘What Future Has Catholic Philosophy?’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (annual supple-
ment, Proceedings of 1997 Annual Meeting), 77–90. See also ‘Thomism and the Future of Catholic
Philosophy’, ed. Haldane, special issue, New Blackfriars 80(938) (1999).
6
 Mark Jordan, ‘Theology and Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 233. Ralph McInerny
and Leo Elders, among others, reject the Jordan interpretation.
7
  Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Introduction  3

The Lacuna in Aristotle’s De Anima

In Book II of his On the Soul, Aristotle developed in detail his analysis of the external
senses; however, he offers precious little substantive analysis of the internal senses. He
refers to the phantasia, which is often translated as ‘imagination’, but he writes little
about the nature and scope of inner sense. Aquinas’s account, on the other hand, is
far  more developed and substantial. The principal textual referent for this study
is Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul (Sentencia Libri De Anima), which
is an often neglected yet vastly important Aquinas text for the philosophy of mind.
In  commenting on Aristotle’s masterful psychological text, Aquinas develops his
own  more sophisticated theory of mind. Martha Nussbaum wrote that Aquinas’s
Commentary ‘is one of the greatest commentaries on the work’.8 Moreover, Haldane’s
recent work in the philosophy of mind travels in the same direction as the overall goals
of this inquiry. Hence, this study goes beyond the limits exhibited by several writers on
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, even important commentators like Kenny and Geach,
who remain principally with the texts in the Summa Theologiae and who consider pri-
marily the process of abstraction with the intellectus agens and concept formation with
the intellectus possibilis. This analysis goes beyond the texts of the Summa Theologiae in
directing its focus towards sensation and perception. Accordingly, this study develops
in a progressive manner, beginning with a general theory of intentionality in Aquinas,
proceeding through the external senses, and using these materials as propaedeutic for
an analysis of inner sense with special reference to the inner sense faculty of the vis
cogitativa. Within each chapter, moreover, this study assembles textual referents for
Aquinas’s claims in the philosophy of mind. In several ways this book, with its exten-
sive compilation of substantial textual references, should prove a valuable source
for scholars seeking Aquinas’s texts on various aspects of his philosophy of mind. In
considering Aquinas’s texts, one must remember what Kenny once suggested; the
scholarly output from Aquinas—referring only to those works generally agreed to be
authentic—amounts to over eight and a half million words.9 Hence, the compilation of
Aquinas texts in this volume should be useful to scholars working with the philosophy
of Aquinas; furthermore, each text is located within the vast Aquinas corpus.
In a different but connected vein, the research undertaken in the writing of this
book suggests that inner sense in Aquinas is more highly developed and cognitively
significant than normally acknowledged either by English-speaking philosophers,
especially in the twentieth century, or by neo-scholastic historians of philosophy. In
the Aristotelian Commentary, Aquinas uses the phantasia as a generic concept, fitting
under it the vis imaginativa (imagination), the vis cogitativa (particular reason), which
is called the vis aestimativa when found in brute animals, and the vis memorativa

8
  Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘The Text of Aristotle’s De Anima’, in Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays
on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
9
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10–11. If one includes the works of
some doubtful authenticity, the word count exceeds 11 million words.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

4  Introduction

(sense memory). The important faculty for understanding the ‘logic’ of perception,
especially the perception of individuals, is the vis cogitativa. In the literature, however,
one finds little substantive work dealing with the vis cogitativa. One set of articles, writ-
ten in the 1940s, perspicuously pondered this absence of serious philosophical work:
‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’.10 More recently,
Dorothea Frede argued that the vis cogitativa is, for Aquinas, ‘an embarrassment’.11 The
research undertaken for this book underpins an argument that a productive analysis
of this ‘forgotten sense’, referred to as an ‘embarrassment’, offers an interpretation of
an important cognitive aspect of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind in which he suggests
a non-reductionist analysis of inner sense. In a manner akin to several versions of
Gestalt psychology, the argument put forward suggests that the vis cogitativa is a struc-
tured cognitive act that provides an awareness of the individual as an individual of a
natural kind. This analysis depends on a reconstructed interpretation of the role of
phantasm in Aquinas’s writings. Later chapters in this book demonstrate that there
exist at least three different uses of phantasm in Aquinas, with one connected structur-
ally with each of the internal sense faculties with the exception of the sensus communis.
This analysis of phantasm depends on a further explication of a much-used term in
Aquinas’s writings, similitudo—often translated as ‘likeness’. There are three distinct
uses of similitudo, and one use is further divided into the three specific uses of phan-
tasm. The following argument is that, quite the contrary, not only is this important
inner sense faculty of the vis cogitativa no longer ‘forgotten’, but without its functioning
as an important cognitive faculty in Aquinas’s theory of intentionality, his philosophy
of mind would be an embarrassment. The significance of this study lies in this recon-
struction and interpretation of the varied texts found in the writings of Aquinas. The
analysis in this book is, accordingly, made from whole cloth, and is not reducible to a
patchwork of disconnected philosophical texts.

Phantasm and the Vis Cogitativa

A principal goal of this treatise is to offer an analysis of the role of phantasm in the
vis cogitativa. In the Posterior Analytics, when considering concept formation with
his famous ‘army in retreat’ metaphor, Aristotle suggests that out of aisthesis (sense
perception) comes memoria-mneme (repeated sense perception), and from the lat-
ter comes emperia (experience—the ‘experience’ of a veteran when compared to a
rookie). The vis cogitativa is the faculty by which human perceivers are aware of
individuals as individuals of a natural kind; this awareness is then stored in the
sense memory (vis memorativa). The intellectus agens next ‘abstracts’ the species

10
 Julien Peghaire, ‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’, Modern
Schoolman 20 (1942–3), 123–40, 210–29.
11
  Dorothea Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, in Dominik Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of
Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 170.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Introduction  5

intelligibilis from the phantasms found in the sense memory. The argument developed
in this book is that a reconstructed account of the vis cogitativa sheds great light on
the abstractive process as dependent on memory, which Aristotle suggests with the
illusive analogy of the army in retreat. Aquinas himself considers these same issues
in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics. The results of the arguments in this
book on inner sense connect nicely with the previous work of Kenny and Geach on
intellectual abstraction.
This monograph provides a contemporary explicatio textus discussing the ‘logic’
of the texts central to Aquinas’s account of perception. In addition to the principal
­arguments, following most chapters, the book includes appendices and at the end a
well-­developed subject and name index. The book itself contains an important cache
of Aquinas texts, probably one of the better collections available in print today. Most of
the translations from Aquinas’s writings that appear in this study are modifications
of existing English translations or passages specially translated by the author for this
book. The commonly used translation of Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the
Soul, by Foster and Humphries, appeared over fifty years ago; it was republished under
the auspices of the late Ralph McInerny at the University of Notre Dame through his
Dumb Ox imprint. However, this earlier translation was not from the critical Leonine
text, but was based on the 1925 Pirotta edition. The Leonine edition of the Commentary
on the Soul, edited by the French Dominican R.-A. Gauthier, appeared in 1984, nearly
a century after the Leonine translation venture was undertaken. The 1984 Leonine edi-
tion used a different editorial format dividing the texts. McInerny’s Dumb Ox edition
contains a very useful concordance on the Pirotta and Leonine editions.12 A new
English translation of this Leonine Latin edition prepared and arranged by Robert
Pasnau was published in 1999.13 Pasnau argues that the texts in the Prima Pars of the
Summa Theologiae are more approachable source materials in Aquinas for under-
standing perception theory than texts in the Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul.
The thrust of the argument in this book disputes that judgement. Pasnau seems less
concerned about inner sense than the author of this study. Pasnau is also less interested
in the physiological aspects of Aristotle‘s theory and the comments of Aquinas, which
he claims dominate the texts in the Commentary.14 In this present book, however, the
argument will be articulated and the case defended proposing that the Commentary
offers the stronger argument for a complete theory of perception, considering both
external and inner sense faculties, than what we find in the more limited analysis
of perception issues in the Summa Theologiae. The texts in the Summa Theologiae,
moreover, will be augmented by substantive textual references to the Summa Contra

12
  Cf. Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 251–70.
13
  Robert Pasnau (translator), Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). I reviewed Professor Pasnau’s translation in The Medieval Review
(Apr. 2000).
14
 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: Commentary, 10–13.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

6  Introduction

Gentiles, De Veritate, and Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima, among other writings

of Aquinas.15
In addition to Kenny and Haldane, in the general area of Aquinas studies with special
reference to the philosophy of mind, the late Norman Kretzmann, along with his former
student Pasnau, started several critical projects translating and writing commentary
on medieval texts that are slowly finding their way into mainstream philosophical aca-
demia. Kretzmann and another former student, Eleonore Stump, edited the Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas,16 which exhibits a largely analytic perspective in its essays on
Aquinas. Pasnau’s Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature17 adds a fresh while not always
widely accepted perspective to analytic studies in Thomas’s philosophy of mind.18
Stump’s Aquinas,19 published in the Routledge ‘Arguments of the Philosophers’ series,
adds substantive analyses on Aquinas’s theory of mind. Kenny’s recent essay ‘Cognitive
Scientism’ continues his discussion of contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind
that are connected with the medieval tradition.20 The recent festschrift for Kenny21
contains, among other important philosophy essays, Haldane’s recent account of
Kenny’s interpretations of Aquinas on mind.22 Fergus Kerr wrote that Kenny’s Aquinas
on Mind has become ‘the classical interpretation in the Anglophone academy of
[Aquinas’s] philosophical psychology’.23 In her Aquinas, Stump disagrees with the
analysis put forward by Kenny.24
Within the confines of this study, a considerable number of Aquinas scholars, both
within and beyond the analytic tradition, who have offered substantive accounts of
Aquinas on mind are subject to critical analysis and substantive commentary. The
argument proposed here is that none of this select group of philosophers has quite got

15
  Many of the texts from the Commentary are based on the Foster–Humphries translation. Likewise,
many of the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles texts are modifications of the early 20th-c.
Shapecoat translations. In many cases, I have modified or retranslated these texts.
16
  Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
17
 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The
author, as a member of the 2003 Program Committee for the Central Division of the American
Philosophical Association, set up a successful ‘Author Meets the Critics’ panel, with Anthony Kenny and
Mary Sirridge serving as analytic critics of Pasnau’s book.
18
  Pasnau is the editor of the Aquinas Project, under the auspices of the Hackett Publishing Company.
He also translated and edited a monograph on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind dealing with these issues
in  the Summa Theologiae—Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89)
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002); see also his Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987). In this latter work, Pasnau appears to question the direct realism
claims in Thomas that will be articulated later in this present study.
19
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003, 2005).
20
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Cognitive Scientism’, in Kenny (ed.), From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical
Essays in Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 149–62.
21
  John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony
Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
22
  John Haldane, ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’, in Cottingham and Hacker, Mind,
Method, and Morality, 119–39.
23
  Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘Thomistica III’, New Blackfriars 85(1000) (2004), 628.
24
 Stump, Aquinas, 531, n. 107.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Introduction  7

it right in providing an explicatio textus of inner sense in Thomas. To offer a substantive

yet critical analysis of Aquinas’s significant account of inner sense under the general
rubric of sensation and perception is the teleological principle on which this study
has been undertaken. For example, in his Medieval Philosophy, Kenny is perplexed by
the vis cogitativa: ‘Aquinas does not succeed in making clear what he regards as the
equivalent human capacity.’25 The goal of this inquiry is to exhibit intellectual sympa-
thy along with a determination to render as lucid as possible an account of Aquinas
on perception, with special emphasis on inner sense. Where possible, the author
adopts a willingness to ascertain and explain the philosophical relevance of Aquinas’s
integrative work on mind without ‘cheerleading’ or ‘score-keeping’. The result of this
analysis offers a coherent yet complex and a sophisticated yet not obscure narrative
that is philosophically significant for contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.
This book offers an explicatio textus of the numerous aspects of Aquinas’s view,
and traces the intricate relations between those aspects. In the end, this analysis is,
as  noted above,  one of whole cloth and not an isolated set of scattered texts and
disconnected commentary.
The analysis put forward in this book should be of interest to historians of philoso-
phy, persons working in the general area of Aristotelian and Aquinian studies in the
philosophy of mind, philosophers concerned about the nature of intentionality theory,
and persons familiar with the history of psychology. In addition, this book might serve
as educational material for those philosophers committed to teaching the history of
philosophy from the vantage point of analytic philosophy. If one is to teach the history
of philosophy, one must teach it well. And to teach it well demands that it be under-
stood correctly. This book attempts to provide background material, textual reference,
conceptual elucidation, and connections with contemporary philosophy in sufficiently
robust detail. Hence, this study should assist those philosophers interested in medieval
philosophy but trained in analytic philosophy to make better conceptual sense of
Aquinas on matters pertaining to sensation and perception. O Quam Spes!

  Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 235.

25
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

1
Setting the Problem
History and Context

The beginnings of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century with the writings
of Russell and Moore focused attention on questions concerning perception theory.
These epistemological issues in turn became dominant in much twentieth-century
Anglo-American philosophy. Given the continuing interest in this set of topics, it is
not surprising that analytic philosophers often used the tools and techniques of the
discipline in order to elucidate conceptually the texts on perception found in the writings
of philosophers central to the history of philosophy. Analytic philosophers writing about
sensation and perception have frequently discussed these issues in the texts of Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, and Kant, among others prominent in the history of Western
philosophy since the seventeenth century.
The same cannot be said, however, about textual and structural discussions of
medieval philosophers. Until recently, few analytic philosophers treated in detail
the issues of sensation and perception as elaborated by their medieval counterparts.
Moreover, such treatment, when it did occur, frequently utilized models drawn from
early modern philosophy that were then in turn foisted upon the writings of the
medievals. In opposition to this general ‘Whiggish’ trend in history of philosophy
writings found in recent analytic philosophy, this book attempts to deal analytically
with the epistemology and philosophy of mind of sensation and perception as dis-
cussed by one significant medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1226–74).1 This
approach in undertaking philosophical analysis is similar in structure to what Haldane
has termed ‘Analytical Thomism’.
The term ‘philosophy of mind’ is a category convention of recent philosophical
analysis. Ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophers discussed more than several
issues central to what today is referred to as the philosophy of mind, especially inten-
tionality theory and the structure of various mental acts like memory, imagining, and

1
  The exact year of Thomas’s birth has been contested for centuries. This monograph is in agreement
with Simon Tugwell in asserting that sufficient evidence now exists indicating that 1226 is the correct year.
Some documents state that Thomas was 48 when he died in 1274: Simon Tugwell, ‘Introduction’, in Albert
and Thomas: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 1–129. Torrell argues that 1225 is the
appropriate year of Thomas’s birth: Jean-Pierre Torrell, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His
Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  9

knowing. These inquiries, however, pertained to studies of the natural philosophy of

anima or soul, with Aristotle’s De Anima serving as the principal text for such philo-
sophical work. In considering the history of what contemporary philosophers call the
philosophy of mind, Haldane once wrote that the ‘classic text on the subject’ was
Aristotle’s De Anima; ‘it is barely an exaggeration to say that medieval and renaissance
philosophy of mind consists of commentaries and reflections on that work.’2 This present
study focuses attention on one such substantive commentary, that of Thomas Aquinas.

Perception Theory and Analytic Philosophy

Setting the stage for this study on Aquinas and perception theory requires a discussion
both of the analytic tradition and of the development of classical neo-Thomism. It is in
the realm of analytic philosophy where significant recent creative and constructive
work in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind has arisen.3
This study on Aquinas follows in the wake of renewed interest in Aristotelian
­philosophy of mind—a study of merely historical interest when foundationalist epis-
temology dominated discussions in English-speaking philosophy. Moreover, as Kenny
noted, unless a person merely lists what a philosopher has said, in doing the history
of philosophy one cannot help but philosophize. Ted Honderich commented on the
importance of scholarship in the history of philosophy:
Philosophy has a peculiarly close relation with its own traditions. The problems and arguments
of the great thinkers of the past are a permanently present element in the contemporary debate.
At any time a significant portion of the best work in philosophy is historical, enriching the
current practice of philosophy with ideas arrived at by thinking through and reassessing the
work of one of the great philosophers in the near or distant past.4

It is in the spirit of Kenny’s observation and Honderich’s assertion that this book on
Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception has been undertaken. The arguments
developed in the following chapters attempt to shed light from the perspective of ana-
lytic philosophy on those issues in sensation and perception discussed by Aquinas but
so far mainly neglected in studies in the history of philosophy.

Aquinas and Teleology: A Naturalist Reconstruction

When initially reading Aquinas on the philosophy of mind, one is almost overwhelmed
with the teleology running through the discussion. Propositions like ‘The knowing

2
  John Haldane, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.),
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 333.
3
  John Haldane, ‘The Metaphysics of Intellect(ion)’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 38–55.
4
  Ted Honderich, ‘Introduction’, in Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat (eds), Philosophy As It Was
(New York: Penguin, 1984), 3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

10  Setting the Problem

faculty is made for the act of knowing, which in turn is made for the object of knowing’
evoke a quandary. A first response is often ‘How quaint!’ quickly followed by a dismissal,
especially by philosophers who cut their philosophical teeth on modern issues in the
philosophy of mind and who have a deep distrust of any suggestion of teleology.
Historians of philosophy need to offer Aquinas a little breathing room on this
kind of talk. Aquinas is, one might argue, a type of ‘naturalist epistemologist’ who
would be comfortable theoretically with the position that through evolution, homines
sapiententes (rational animals) adapted to the environment so that these complex
knowing organisms could develop and relate cognitively to the external world in the
best possible manner. Twentieth-century psychologist James Gibson articulated a
similar theory, often referred to as an ‘ecological perspective to perception theory’.5
Aquinas would fit into this category of contemporary cognitive theorists speculating
on why human knowers developed in certain ways. Of course, like Augustine with
his evolutionary theory of Rationes Seminales, Aquinas had God hovering in the
background. Nonetheless, Aquinas would in principle agree with the theoretical
position affirming that a human’s knowing capacities have adapted to the objects in
the external world. It follows that neither the criterial question nor the foundational-
ist issue pursued by modern philosophers is paramount in Aquinas’s discussion.
Aquinas assumes that human persons acquire knowledge; his question, like Gibson’s,
is: how is this awareness or knowing situation possible? How can this human phe-
nomenal experience be explained? Haldane suggests that what Aquinas undertakes
in developing his philosophy of mind is to ‘explain’ how knowledge is possible and
not to ‘justify’ the knowing process. The general thrust of this book is in agreement
with Haldane’s suggestions.6

From Ontology to the Philosophy of Mind

In beginning this analysis, distinctions between epistemology and the philosophy of
mind require discussion. Epistemology or theory of knowledge often is seen as rooted
in Plato’s Theatetus and developed forward through the canon of Western philosophy;
the philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology, on the other hand, is found in
philosophical works principally of analytic philosophers following the Second World
War. Epistemology traditionally is the study of the nature and conditions of knowl-
edge, especially the justification for knowledge claims and the discussion of means or
modes of arriving at true propositions. While seeds of the philosophy-of-mind studies
5
  The author credits his understanding of Gibson’s ecological perception theory to conversations with
his Denison colleague Harry Heft, who knows the work of Gibson as well as any person around. Heft’s
published work develops several Aristotelian themes common with Gibson’s analysis. Cf. James Gibson,
‘The Perceiving of Hidden Surfaces’, in Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (eds), Studies in
Perception (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 422–34. Both Edward Mahoney and James Ross
appreciated this structural similarity.
6
  James South kindly reminded the author that Gilson in his discussion of Thomist Realism holds a
similar position.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  11

are found in Brentano and Husserl, nonetheless contemporary philosophy of mind is

often seen as beginning with the work of Wittgenstein and Ryle. The philosophy of
mind, then, is a descriptive and argumentative account of the nature of mental acts,
mental states, and processes revolving around the questions of the nature of mind
itself. Kenny, like Haldane, once suggested that Aristotle’s De Anima became the medi-
eval textbook for studies in the philosophy of mind and Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics
served this role for medieval epistemology. While the distinction is not always clear in
medieval texts, nonetheless there are significant differences in the presentation of
mind issues that will assist in maintaining this contemporary division of philosophical
discussions. In the end, the positions developed by Aquinas rooted in Aristotle’s De
Anima will illustrate a version of medieval cognitive psychology conjoined with a
­version of epistemic naturalism.
In developing the ‘logic’ of Aquinas’s position in the philosophy of mind, one must
begin with his account of the fundamental and foundational category in his
metaphysics, which is a primary substance. For Aquinas, the philosophy of mind
presupposes an ontology of primary substances, which are individuals of a natural
kind. Appropriating a realist insight gleaned from Haldane’s writing about Aristotle
and Aquinas, this analysis adopts the position that there is ‘no epistemology without
ontology’.7 Furthermore, Haldane argues correctly that one first needs to account for a
theory of the person, which person has the dispositional properties—what Aquinas
often refers to as ‘powers’—to have cognitions and undertake actions. The theme of a
holistic account of the human person as agent and knower is central in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind. Aquinas’s ontology is a world of individuals—a world,
nonetheless, of individuals grouped as members of natural kinds. In several significant
ways, the twentieth-century discussions of Kripke and the earlier Putnam on natural
kind theory are illustrative of several issues that perplexed Aquinas regarding how to
categorize the world of individuals. Whatever Aquinas is as a metaphysician, he is
neither a Process philosopher nor a Platonist nor a philosopher rooted in the radical
empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and the early twentieth-century empiricists.
Thomas’s metaphilosophy works within the context of both an ontological realism and
an epistemological realism, which assumes an ontology of individuals belonging to
natural kinds. Accordingly, he argues that it is possible to have both a perceptual and a
conceptual awareness of these individuals. At root, this is the ontological foundation
stone on which Aquinas constructs his philosophy of mind.
Aquinas’s point, given this metaphysical theory, is how it is possible that these
individual primary substances are known. In other words, what kind of intentionality
theory must one construct in order to explain how humans are able to be aware of these
individuals of a natural kind? In an elementary sense, Aquinas constructs a ‘pipeline’

7
  With this ontological thrust, Haldane is in agreement with Chisholm’s analysis of intentionality and
in opposition to philosophers rejecting the ontological role for intentionality theory. See John Haldane,
‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, in David S. Oderberg (ed.), Form and Matter: Themes in
Contemporary Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 54.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

12  Setting the Problem

position on the philosophy of mind, with all the important objects of awareness
coming through the various mental acts of the faculties of the external and internal
senses leading up to the formation of a species intelligibilis through the ingenious
abstractive activity of the intellectus agens and then known as a general concept by the
intellectus possibilis. It is the first stages of this pipeline theory—the theory of sensation
and perception—that demand the attention of the philosophical narrative in this book.
In discussing Aquinas’s theory of mind, Haldane8 writes that Aquinas ‘makes claims
about the nature of the world, the process of cognition, the semantics of natural lan-
guage, and the character of truth’, all of which provide illustrations of both ontological
and epistemological realism.9

Aquinas as Dependent upon yet Distinct from Aristotle

The relation of the work of Aquinas to his important Greek forebear, Aristotle, is a
topic of some dispute. A resolution of this arduous investigation is beyond the limits
of this study. Nonetheless, this analysis argues that Aquinas, in his account of inner
sense in his Commentary on the De Anima, in at least one important way, differs from
Aristotle’s own analysis in De Anima.10 In discussing phantasia, Aristotle appears to
use this term as a generic concept covering any mental act of inner sense. Aristotle, in
this conceptually muddy account, does not articulate any differentiated or separable
faculties of inner sense. Aquinas, on the other hand, in both the Commentary and the
Summa Theologiae, renders a threefold set of internal sense faculties; one also finds
this multiplicity of faculties in the Summa Contra Gentiles, especially Book 2. Aquinas
uses phantasia in his Commentary as a generic term covering three distinct faculties
of inner sense: imagination: (vis imaginativa); vis cogitativa; and sense memory (vis
memorativa). In discussing the faculties of inner sense, Aquinas does not refer only to
what modern and contemporary philosophers call ‘introspection’. Rather, this is the
complex of internal sense powers or faculties that Aquinas deemed necessary in order
to explain sensation and perception.

8
  This philosophical interpretation depends substantively on Haldane’s work on the role of analytic
philosophy and the development of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality. It may be the case that in consider-
ing issues central to a viable contemporary philosophy of mind, Haldane’s category of ‘Analytical Thomism’
achieves its best success. Haldane’s analysis suggests a connection once articulated by A. E. Taylor. Writing
in the preface to the 7th edn of his classic text Elements of Metaphysics, Professor Taylor wrote about the
‘shifting of perspective’ in the study of metaphysics. ‘The fundamental questions, no doubt, remain the
same from one age to another. . . . But the point of view from which the problems are attacked varies with
the age’: ‘Preface to the Seventh Edition’, Elements of Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1924), p. xi. That this
analytic structure differs from classical Neo-Thomism and strictly historical studies in the philosophy of
Aquinas will become apparent as this monograph unfolds.
9
  John Haldane, ‘Mind-World Identity and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in John Haldane and Crispin
Wright (eds), Reality, Representation and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33.
10
  Later in this book, the faculty of phantasia will be analysed; however, it is useful at the very beginning
to indicate which interpretive highway Aquinas followed. The imagination is to the sensus communis as the
sense memory is to the vis cogitativa. In animals, the vis aestimativa corresponds to the vis cogitativa in
human cognitive agents.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  13

There are significant differences in the various medieval accounts of inner sense
derived from Aristotle. The path-finding research undertaken by Wolfson unearthed
how Aristotelian philosophers in the Middle Ages discussed the faculties of inner
sense is noteworthy. For example, Wolfson indicated four different ways in which
Albertus Magnus alone classified the internal sense faculties.11 It almost appears as if
each Arabian, Jewish, and Christian philosopher had his own take on how to grapple
with inner sense. Often faculties, for example, get multiplied, and the functions of the
faculties of inner sense embark on different mental acts.12
In summary, this discussion on the relation of Aristotle’s work to the philosophy of
Aquinas is in general agreement with MacIntyre, who in Dependent Rational Animals
wrote: ‘I remain in general convinced by those commentators who have stressed the
extent to which Aquinas in his philosophical enquiries was not just an Aristotelian, but
often a keenly perceptive interpreter as well as an adapter of Aristotle.’13 Furthermore,
in his Introduction to his translation of the Commentary, Pasnau writes the following
about the importance of Aquinas’s Aristotelian commentaries:
Scholastic philosophy in general and Aquinas’s work in particular have not always been
accorded the respect that they now receive. But there has never been doubt about the value of
Aquinas’s Aristotelian commentaries. (The Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola is
said to have remarked that ‘without Thomas, Aristotle would be mute’.) Aquinas brings to his
commentaries a thorough familiarity with the Aristotelian corpus, a deep appreciation and
understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy, and, of course, an acute philosophical mind. But
beyond making a contribution to our understanding of Aristotle, the commentaries contain
some of Aquinas’s most sustained reflections on central philosophical topics.14

The arguments below will suggest how Aquinas was a ‘keenly perceptive interpreter as
well as an adapter of Aristotle’. Both the ontological realism and the epistemological
realism articulated by Thomas will be discussed in some detail. This indicates a realism
that is opposed both to a representational philosophy of mind and to a foundationalist
epistemology as well as a rejection of Kantian transcendental idealism.
This study is not part of the Transcendental Thomist stream in twentieth-century
neo-scholasticism; nonetheless, a careful analysis of the relevant texts suggests that
viewing the vis cogitativa through a non-empiricist lens is the most fruitful approach.

11
  Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’,
Harvard Theological Review 28(2) (1935), 116–18. Wolfson’s article is a classic historical analysis of the
development of the various positions medieval philosophers affirmed in discussing the function of
the internal senses.
12
  One must mention the historical work undertaken in medieval psychology by Simon Kemp. Wolfson’s
and Kemp’s works on Averroes have been revisited recently by Taylor’s analysis of Averroes’s treatment of
Aristotle’s De Anima: Richard Taylor, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba: Long Commentary on the De Anima
of Aristotle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
13
  Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London:
Duckworth, 1999), p. xi.
14
  Robert Pasnau, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. xii–xiii.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

14  Setting the Problem

This book introduces and develops a sustained argument on inner sense in Thomas,
which will substantiate this claim of a modest non-empirical or modest rationalist
structure. Part of the thrust of this study of Aquinas on sensation and perception offers
a modified non-reductionist approach to empiricism for a consistent interpretation of
Aquinas’s internal sense faculty of the vis cogitativa. This is at best a modest suggestion.
Nonetheless, lest problems of textual criticism and interpretation as well as historical
analysis arise, it is important to disassociate this study from what some philosophers
might understand as the relation between Aquinas studies and Kant studies, or Aquinas
as having too close an affinity with Cartesian innate idea methodology.
This study is neither a part of nor takes sides in the ongoing historical squabble
in neo-scholasticism over the role Kant plays in providing a proper interpretation of
Aquinas’s ontology and philosophy of mind. This study argues that fundamental onto-
logical issues differ between Aquinas and Kant. It is instructive to note what McCool
wrote: ‘from the early years of the century, Kantian idealism and the usefulness
of  Kant’s Transcendental Method had become another apple of discord in the
­Neo-Thomist movement.’15 On the one hand, Gilson argued that Kant’s method leads
directly to idealism, and this is opposed to the metaphysical realism found in Aristotle
and Aquinas. In fact, McCool noted that Gilson once argued that any reading of
Aquinas through Kantian lenses came either from ‘historical ignorance’ or ‘intellectual
confusion’. On the other hand, the Transcendental Thomists adopted what McCool
suggested was a ‘more optimistic view’ of reconciling Kant and Thomas. The
Transcendental Thomists argue that taking Kant’s method farther than the Critique of
Pure Reason leads one to a realist ontology consistent with the writings of Aquinas.
Kenny noted that the Jesuits—Marechal, Hoenen, and Lonergan—would fall under
the umbrella of the Transcendental Thomists.16 This present study disassociates itself
from this metaphysical/transcendental umbrella.
This brief historical note is intended to avoid possible misinterpretations over the
nature of this present study. It also reaffirms the position that serious students of
scholastic philosophy in the twentieth century put forward widely divergent interpre-
tations of the texts of Aquinas. There is (contrary to several contemporary Thomists)
no monolithic scholasticism in general or in Aquinas Thomistic studies in particular.
As McCool rightly suggests, by the middle of the twentieth century, ‘the Neo-Thomist
movement, understood as the quest for a single, rigidly unitary, philosophical system,
came to an end.’17 And, to be sure, that is as it should be. These discussions suggest the
import of Thomas O’Meara’s claim that ‘there has never been one Thomism’,18 and

15
  Gerald A. McCool, ‘Is Thomas’ Way of Philosophising Still Viable Today?’, Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Supplement, 64 (1990), 6.
16
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas Medalist’s Address’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 25.
17
  McCool, ‘Is Thomas’ Way of Philosophising Still Viable Today?’, 7.
18
  Thomas F. O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, Theologian (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1997), 155.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  15

MacIntyre’s assertion that there are ‘too many Thomisms’.19 Kerr contends that the
‘reception of Aquinas’s work has been contentious from the beginning’.20 It follows that
an ‘orthodox’ reading of Aquinas, especially on the philosophy of mind, is fraught with
historical and theoretical difficulties. Furthermore, as Boland argued, the many art-
icles in the Summa Theologiae should be read as a dialogical inquiry rather than as an
authoritarian, monological treatise. ‘Each article . . . [is] a short, formalized dialogue:
space is given to a range of voices, there is an appeal to one or more authorities, there is
time for the teacher to present his own understanding, as well as responding to the
earlier speakers in the dialogue.’21 This book introduces Aquinas as a significant player
in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind largely in accord with the positions
articulated by many contemporary Analytical Thomists.

Neo-scholastic Philosophy and Recent

Work in Perception Theory
Given the emphasis on the philosophy and theology of Aquinas by the neo-scholastic
movement during the last part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth
­centuries, certainly one might wonder whether Aquinas’s position on sensation and
perception had not been discussed sufficiently. Certainly much has been written about
the philosophical and theological system of Aquinas. Nonetheless, there is little exist-
ing analysis in detail of his theory of sensation and perception. Much neo-scholastic
writing dealt principally with Aquinas’s ontology. When epistemological issues were
discussed, much effort went into rendering Aquinas’s account significant in light of
the critical problems raised by Kant together with the sceptical problems posed by
Descartes and several empiricists. Moreover, for the most part, epistemological
accounts in neo-scholasticism were directed towards explaining the formation of the
species intelligibilis by abstraction using the intellectus agens and concept formation
and concept awareness with the intellectus possibilis. Like poor cousins, sensation and
perception theories seemingly were treated only as incidental material propaedeutic to
the analysis of intellect. Little conceptual analysis on sense knowledge is found in these
writings. In fact, Aquinas himself suggests this focus in the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae. In addition, at the moment, a book-length monograph utilizing the tech-
niques of analytic philosophy solely on Aquinas’s texts dealing with sensation and
perception does not exist. This study intends to fill this lacuna by providing an analysis
using the methods appropriate to the structural history of analytic philosophy. The
closest book undertaking this analytic project is Pasnau’s Thomas Aquinas on Human

19
  Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press), 58.
20
  Fergus Kerr, ‘Varieties of Interpreting Aquinas’, in Kerr (ed.), Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties
of Interpretation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 27.
21
  Vivian Boland, OP, ‘Kenny on Aquinas on Being’, New Blackfriars 84(991) (2003), 389.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

16  Setting the Problem

Nature. Yet Pasnau, while treating the external senses in some detail, spends less time
with the ‘internal sensorium’ of Thomas’s theory. Likewise, Stump’s treatise spends lit-
tle time on perception issues.22 Brian Davies’s well-received The Thought of Thomas
Aquinas is at best cursory on the issues in the philosophy of mind.23 Kerr’s two recently
published books on Aquinas, while covering many issues central to the thought of
Aquinas mostly from a philosophical perspective, nonetheless render precious little
content regarding sensation and perception.24
This book differs, therefore, from the general pattern exhibited in Aquinas research
and scholarship by rendering a thorough and conceptually coherent account of Aquinas’s
exposition of sensation and perception as found in his Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On the
Soul’. In addition, Aquinas’s position on the necessary conditions of his thesis of inten-
tionality is spelled out more completely in this Aristotelian commentary. In general,
one can make this claim without taking sides in the long-standing debate—more
common at mid-twentieth century than at present—over whether the ‘real’ Aquinas
is to be found in the Aristotelian Commentaries or in the two Summae: the Summa
Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles.25 The most that this book suggests on
this debate is that on the specific question pertaining to a coherent analysis of the
necessary conditions for his exposition of sensation and perception, Aquinas pro-
vides a more fully developed and sophisticated account in his Commentary on
Aristotle’s ‘On the Soul’ than can be discovered in either the Summa Theologiae or
the  Summa Contra Gentiles. This present study, therefore, will pay close attention
to the development of his theory of sensation and perception as elucidated in the
Aristotelian commentary. In the manner of an explicatio textus, the following chapters
often will follow the ‘logic’ of Aquinas’s narrative as presented in the Commentary
On Aristotle’s ‘On The Soul’.
Because matters pertaining to perception theory did not affect theology directly (or
so Aquinas thought), in the Summa Theologiae one should not expect a thoroughly
developed monograph on sensation and perception. Nonetheless, his extensive com-
mentary on Aristotle’s account of the soul fills whatever lacuna remains in the Summa
Theologiae. This is a principal reason why the Commentary on the Soul serves as the
primary text for this study and analysis. While the Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima,
De Veritate, and the Summa Contra Gentiles also consider several of these issues, with
several texts from these three works among others being incorporated into the fabric
of this study, nonetheless the Commentary offers a more structured development of the
issues central to sensation and perception. Stump argued that Aquinas’s account of

22
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), chs 7 and 8.
23
  Brian Davies, OP, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
24
  Fergus Kerr, OP, After Aquinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Kerr, Contemplating Aquinas.
25
  Mid-20th-c. scholastic philosophers like Ramirez, De Koninck, and Oesterle held the former position,
while Gilson and Pegis, with Owens more nuanced, among others, adhered to the latter interpretation. See
Vernon Bourke, ‘Thomas Aquinas, St.’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York:
Macmillan, 1967), vol. 13, 106; this is a somewhat dated but still useful general account.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  17

mind and mental acts illustrate a ‘scattered development’ but one that is nonetheless
a  ‘systematically unified theory’.26 This unity depends upon the ontological theory
on which the theories of mind and of knowledge rest. Regarding many issues in the
philosophy of mind, this is a correct account; in the Commentary, however, Aquinas
proceeds in a structured manner and provides a unified analysis of sensation and per-
ception. This is another reason that this specific study devotes so much time to the
Commentary rather than to the other scattered works.

Recent Work in Aristotelian Perception Theory

This discussion on Aquinas is connected with the general resurgence of interest
among analytic philosophers in Aristotelian theories of intentionality. General
worries in the philosophy of mind have been associated with discussions of inten-
tionality theory. The last fifteen years have witnessed much interest in Aristotle.
Names like Sorabji, Burnyeat, Putnam, and Nussbaum, and now a newer generation
including Miller, Shields and Caston, are among those unearthing what insights
Aristotle offers in the general area of sensation and perception conjoined with inten-
tionality theory. The discussions of Aquinas’s theory follow on the coat-tails of these
Aristotelian discussions.27
In beginning this metaphilosophical discussion, Haldane suggests that there is a
different architectonic of proceeding in the philosophy of mind as elucidated in the
texts of Aristotle and Aquinas from what one finds in most modern philosophy: ‘Our
knowledge of the external world is the starting point for philosophical reflection, the
task of which is not to justify this knowledge but to explain it; to give an account of
the scope of cognition, its genesis and its operations.’28 Haldane reflects on this issue
regarding how Aquinas’s metaphilosophy differs radically from the Cartesian starting
point:
[One] will not begin to see merit in [Aquinas’s position] unless one also adopts a non-Cartesian
standpoint on the issue of knowledge. For Aquinas, and the Thomism I subscribe to, the idea
that we begin with the burden of skepticism and must forever be justifying ourselves is a mis-
conception based on a quite false assumption about the nature of knowledge. Thought begins
in the world and then has the task of enquiring into the metaphysical conditions of its own
possibility. The question for epistemology is not whether we know anything but rather, given
what we do know, how does cognition work?29

26
 Stump, Aquinas, 21; one might argue that several philosophical positions in Aquinas’s writings appear
‘scattered’. This is probably because Aquinas both wrote and dictated quickly.
27
  As noted earlier, Kenny, Haldane, Stump, and Pasnau, along with O’Callaghan and Martin, have been
particularly effective in approaching Aquinas on mind within analytic philosophy.
28
 John Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, in Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 75 (1999), 38; also see Joseph Owens, ‘The Primacy of the External in Thomistic
Noetics’, Église et théologie 5 (1974), 155–69.
29
  John Haldane, ‘A Thomist Metaphysics’, in Richard M. Gale (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 104.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

18  Setting the Problem

Haldane accordingly spells out the differences between metaphilosophy adopted by

Aquinas and Descartes and that of much modern and contemporary philosophy—a
difference that is important in understanding Aquinas’s approach to issues in the
philosophy of mind, especially inner sense.
This book adopts the working paradigm suggested by Haldane and also found in the
writings of Joseph Owens. The emphasis is on articulating the way Aquinas ‘explains’
how cognition might take place. Aquinas is concerned with explaining ‘the possibility
of knowing’. Of course, this study is not a mere rendition of facts and texts about
Aquinas’s discussions on the matters of sensation and perception. Given the present
state of affairs in working with the texts of Aquinas on these matters, however, even
that activity alone would be a useful scholarly endeavour. This study belongs to that
field of historical studies in philosophy once commonly known as ‘the structural his-
tory of philosophy’. At mid-century, Henry Veatch, Gustav Bergmann, and Herbert
Hochberg, among others, articulated this method or procedure for approaching philo-
sophical issues in the major figures of Western philosophy. According to Veatch, the
structural history of philosophy suggests that philosophical insights and theories as
put forward by philosophers often involve structural implications and requirements.
Bergmann himself wrote about this way of approaching the history of philosophy:
‘What I am speaking about is structural history which, in a sense, is neither factual nor
causal. Rather it is a comparative analysis of ideas in their logical interdependence.’30
At times, as he suggested, philosophers themselves are not aware of these presupposi-
tions and entailments. Moreover, Bergmann wrote that these issues are not stated
clearly in the written record of the history of philosophy. Hence, the structural history
of philosophy demands analysis and interpretation. It has its roots in Broad’s proposal
regarding the differences between speculative philosophy and critical philosophy. In
his Scientific Thought, Broad offered the following account of critical philosophy: ‘I call
Critical Philosophy: the analysis and definition of our fundamental concepts and the
clear statement and resolute criticism of our fundamental beliefs.’31 The methods com-
mon to the practice of analytic philosophy are used in elucidating the principal issues
in the history of philosophy. The explicatio textus undertaken in this study of Aquinas
on perception follows the general principles for doing structural history of philosophy.32
While not referring to or explicating this philosophical method directly, nonetheless
many analytic philosophers who undertake substantive work in the history of philosophy
have developed their philosophical sensibilities on Bergmann’s method. In particular,
Bergmann wished to distinguish his approach from what he referred to as the ‘scholarly’
undertaking of tracing historical causes, rooting out substantive texts, and so forth.
Bergmann never denied that this historical approach is important work; but he did

30
  Gustav Bergmann, The Philosophy of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 9.
31
  C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927), 11–22.
32
  Henry B. Veatch, For an Ontology of Morals (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 4.
Contemporary historians of philosophy in the analytic tradition are mostly silent about this modus operandi,
but it is a useful paradigm from which to approach serious work in the history of philosophy.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  19

wish to distinguish this historical approach from what he considered to be a necessary

condition for analytic philosophers in approaching the texts of the great figures in the
philosophical tradition.
Chapter 2 begins the analysis of Aquinas on sensation and perception. The first topic
is how Aquinas incorporates the principles of what contemporary philosophers refer
to as an intentionality theory into his epistemology and philosophy of mind. The con-
temporary thrust of Aquinas on the philosophy of mind becomes more apparent in
considering his theory in the light of an intentionality theory. The differences in con-
temporary intentionality theory from what Aquinas proposed with his account of esse
intentionale need elucidation beyond what one normally finds in such discussions of
medieval philosophy of mind. The importance of Franz Brentano is, of course, legend-
ary in discussions of intentionality, but there are differences between Aquinas and
Brentano that cry out for analysis and discussion. As this next chapter unfolds, Aquinas
will be introduced as a significant player in contemporary analytic philosophy of
mind—a position often articulated in the writings of Kenny, Haldane, Stump, Pasnau,
and Christopher Martin, among others.

appendix 1
On Reading Aquinas Given Several Versions
of Aquinas Studies
In considering contemporary work undertaken in Aquinas’s philosophy and theology, one
might delineate eight different principal approaches and subsets. There are, first of all, the
classical Neo-Thomists. Much of this work arose following the impetus for the nineteenth-
century revival of scholastic Thomism engendered by Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, the
encyclical seen historically as the bellwether in the modern period for the rebirth of serious
Aquinas studies. This group of classical Thomists may again be divided into at least three
subcategories. The first subcategory comprises Neo-Thomists belonging to what has been
called the Aristotelico-Thomistic tradition; for the most part, these Thomist philosophers
received their academic training in the important schools of neo-scholasticism both in North
America and in Western Europe where many undertook their formative work rooted in
classical scholasticism as this philosophical school developed through the first two thirds of
the twentieth century. These philosophers usually assume that significant philosophical
insights are found in the metaphysical realism of Aquinas, and that these insights need to be
explicated and considered afresh by students of traditional metaphysics.33 The second group
are the Thomists who in the early twentieth century incorporated Kantian insights into their
reading of Aquinas; this group, following the insights of the Louvain Jesuit Joseph Marechal,

33
  In this group of philosophers would be Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Anton Pegis, Joseph Owens,
Ralph McInerny, John Wippel, Mary Clark, Benedict Ashley, William Wallace, and the legion of students
trained in both North American and European institutes of traditional scholasticism. Most philosophers
who identify themselves as ‘Neo-Thomists’ fit into this category.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

20  Setting the Problem

are usually referred to as proponents of Transcendental Thomism.34 A third group, following

the historical method adopted by Etienne Gilson, among others, has argued that Aquinas’s
philosophy is not only rooted in the concept of ‘existence’ (esse) but also dependent conceptually
and ontologically on what one might call the Exodus tradition of ‘I Am Who Am’; this
position begins its philosophical work from the top down, as it were, with God as the first
‘act of existence’.
The second major category of Aquinas scholars are philosophers deeply immersed in the
analytic tradition of Anglo-American philosophy for whom Haldane coined the term
‘Analytical Thomism’, thus distinguishing this group from the classical Thomists. In contrast
to the more traditional Neo-Thomists, this group of philosophers, for the most part, discovered
the philosophical texts and the corresponding insights of St Thomas after studying analytic
philosophy, principally at secular philosophy departments both in England and in the United
States and Canada.35 One might also note, following Kerr’s insights, that the earlier Analytical
Thomists ‘from about 1957 onwards’ might better be called the ‘Wittgensteinian Thomists’,
and those later philosophers ‘from about 1994’ such as Haldane, Kretzmann, Stump, and
Davies, could be called ‘Analytical Thomists’.36 Analytical Thomists for the most part take
Aquinas seriously as a philosopher, and are not engaged in what they perceive as the
somewhat tiresome debate over whether he was a theologian who merely happened to utter
a few significant philosophical claims or instead was one of the great philosophers of the
Western tradition.37
A third significant group contains mostly theologians following the postmodern insights of
recent Continental philosophy; these theologians have developed what is called ‘Radical
Orthodoxy’, and some have proposed a rereading of Aquinas’s texts in order to support their
positions. These postmodernists suggest a re-evaluation of the concepts of rationality and truth
in Thomas, which they consider compatible with several postmodernist themes. Pickstock and
Milbank’s Aquinas on Truth illustrates this form of analysis.38 Analytical Thomists like Kenny
have little patience with Thomists seated under the canopy of radical orthodoxy, while Burrell
appears more sympathetic to this genre of Aquinas studies; commenting more popularly on
this study, Burrell remarked that ‘the customary horizons of “philosophy” and “theology” are
actively fused’, going on to comment: ‘no work so effectively delivers Thomas from Thomists as
theirs.’39 On the other hand, Kenny indicates his intellectual reservations with this postmodernist
analysis of Aquinas: ‘Since I have never myself been cast into the abyss of postmodernism,
however, it may be churlish of me to sniff at any crumb of comfort that may be offered to those
who have suffered that misfortune. But one thing I do know: Truth in Aquinas is far from being

34
  Long-time editor of International Philosophical Quarterly, the American Jesuit Norris Clarke is a lead-
ing Transcendental Thomist.
35
 Philosophers in this group, in addition to Haldane, include Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe,
Anthony Kenny, Norman Kretzmann, Brian Davies, Scott MacDonald, Eleonore Stump, John Peterson,
Douglas Rasmussen, Robert Pasnau, Christopher Shiels, Fergus Kerr, and Christopher Martin.
36
  Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘The Varieties of Interpreting Aquinas’, in Contemplating Aquinas, 36.
37
  Craig Paterson and Matthew Pugh’s anthology contains recent essays considering the texts of Aquinas
under the rubric of analytic philosophy: Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006).
38
  John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001).
39
  David Burrell, review note on Truth in Aquinas (Amazon Review Service, 2001).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  21

the truth on Aquinas.’40 More traditional Thomist counterparts like Dewan also have criticized
this postmodern interpretation of Thomas.41
Beyond English-speaking philosophers, one might consider, as a fourth group, the rapidly
growing school of Thomism at Utrecht, which is principally interested in reworking the
theological and metaphysical insights of Thomas following the rapid demise of Thomism in
the  years after the Second Vatican Council. Much serious analysis has been undertaken by
advocates of this position; yet the emphasis is on theological issues and apparently avoids
philosophical issues in Aquinas other than those related directly with theological concerns.
Rikhof ’s ‘Thomas at Utrecht’ is a well-developed discussion of the work in Thomism undertaken
at Utrecht.42
Fifthly, there are contemporary philosophers who read Aquinas principally as a theologian.
Jordan has stated this theological interpretation: ‘Aquinas chose not to write philosophy.’43
McInerny suggests that this position is what one might call ‘Continental Thomism’, with its
principal interlocutors being Gilson, Lubac, and Chenu. While respectful of Gilson, McInerny
argues: ‘Gilson ended by so confining Thomas's philosophy to a theological setting that it is
difficult to see how philosophy so understood could be shared by nonbelievers.’44 McInerny
insists that Aquinas rejects what Gilson firmly adopted: ‘the guiding role of the text from Exodus
(with) the consequent need to ground the analysis in scripture and faith’.45 He worries that,
according to Gilson, Aquinas’s philosophy ‘is swallowed up by Theology’ and that ‘Thomas’s
metaphysics is dependent on revelation and faith’.46 Like McInerny, Kenny also adopts the position
that Aquinas added substantively to the wellspring of Western philosophy and was a ‘philosophical
genius’.47 In several works Pasnau discusses at some length the significance of Aquinas as a major
philosopher in the Western tradition. Lastly, in the twentieth century a group of interpreters
attempted to provide grist for the mill by appropriating insights from Augustine’s philosophical
method thus rendering new insights for Aquinas’s texts. The recently published Aquinas the
Augustinian illustrates this patristic emphasis used in interpreting the texts of Aquinas.48
Hence, in contemporary philosophy and philosophical theology, eight somewhat distinct
groups of contemporary scholars work seriously with the texts of St. Thomas: (1–3) the classical
Neo-Thomists (with the Transcendental Thomists and the Gilsonian Thomists as subsets);
(4) the analytical Thomists; (5) the postmodernist students of Aquinas linked to the Radical
Orthodoxy movement; (6) the metaphysical Thomists at Utrecht; (7) the theology-only
position, sometimes called ‘Continental Thomism’, defended by Jordan and with links to
Gilson, Lubac, and Chenu; and (8) the recent interpretations of Aquinas’s texts through the
lenses of Augustine’s philosophical efforts.

40
  Kenny, ‘Aquinas and the Appearances of Bread’, a review of Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas,
Times Literary Supplement (5 Oct. 2001), 14.
41
  Lawrence Dewan, ‘On Milbank and Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas’, Nova et Vetera 1(1) (2003), 199–212.
42
  Herwi M. Rikhof, ‘Thomas at Utrecht’, in Kerr, Contemplating Aquinas, 105–36.
43
  Mark Jordan, ‘Theology and Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 233.
44
  Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 159.
45
  Ibid., 149–50.   46  Ibid., 155.
47
  Anthony Kenny, What I Believe (London: Continuum, 2006), 4; also see ‘Aquinas Medalist’s Address’.
48
  Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (eds), Aquinas the Augustinian (Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

22  Setting the Problem

The analysis undertaken in this book considers Thomas Aquinas as a philosopher, and
assumes that one discovers significant analyses of philosophical issues that are not only
‘perennial’ but also contribute to major discussions in analytic philosophy of mind. Following
John Wippel’s magnum opus on Aquinas’s metaphysics,49 along with McInerny’s Praeambula
Fidei noted above, which directed attention to the Commentary on the Metaphysics, one can
articulate a significant philosophical approach in Aquinas that is conceptually independent
of his theological concerns. Hence, this discussion rejects the revisionist Aquinian studies
position, whose seeds are found in Gilson, suggesting that understanding Aquinas as a
philosopher and not as a theologian is misguided conceptually. The analysis undertaken in
this book argues against the positions both of Jordan/Gilson/Lubac/Chenu and Pickstock/
Milbank, especially the latter, who suggest that Aquinas’s philosophical account of truth is
reducible to a set of theological propositions with postmodernist leanings towards truth.
Indeed, Aquinas can be read as a philosopher seeking tough-minded responses to significant
philosophical queries. This author is in agreement with McInerny’s account in Praeambula
Fidei, where he is at pains to demonstrate not only that Aquinas can be read as a first-rate
philosopher but also that many twentieth-century accounts that place Aquinas under
the  lens of extensive theological influence are misguided and misleading.50 Moreover, in
opposition to these Thomistic scholars—including the Leonine editor, R.-A. Gauthier,
who exemplifies what McInerny wishes to refute—McInerny places Aquinas not only as a
leading commentator on Aristotle but also as one who adopted Aristotelian realism as
a justified philosophical position. Torrell’s recent studies on Aquinas appear to adopt the
Gauthier interpretive principles in opposition to McInerny, Kenny, and Pasnau, and side
with Jordan’s account.
In discussing this vexing set of interpretive issues in Thomas, Tugwell, with the theological
principles of Gauthier in mind, provides probably the best succinct analysis of the complex
issues regarding Aquinas as a philosopher, a theologian, or a hybrid intellectual:
Gauthier argues that Thomas’ concern was always theological, even in his ‘philosophical’ writings, but his
critics have pointed plausibly enough to signs that Thomas did have a serious philosophical purpose and
that he was interested in clarifying Aristotelian philosophy in its own right. Probably there is no real con-
tradiction between the two positions. As we have seen, Thomas’ own theology drove him to recognize the
importance of philosophy as a distinct discipline, if only because philosophical errors that might threaten
faith need to be tackled philosophically. But his philosophical interests were not just apologetic. He was
surely sincere in believing that the theological attempt to understand faith is essentially at one with the
universal human attempt to understand reality. In his last years, as we have noted, the philosophers seem
to have been more enthusiastic about Thomas than many of his fellow theologians were; it is quite likely
that he in return found the philosophers more congenial than some of the theologians. He believed that the
best way to discover the truth is to have a good argument, and in this he was being true to the tradition of
Albert and indeed St. Dominic.51

49
  John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being
(Washington, DC: Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, 2000).
50
  McInerny is probably an example of what those in intramural scholasticism would call ‘River Forest
Thomism’.
51
  Simon Tugwell, ‘Introduction’, in Albert and Thomas, 257–8. This essay may be the best overall intel-
lectual biography of Aquinas.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  23

This author adopts Tugwell’s enlightened analysis. MacIntyre argues, furthermore, that Aquinas
was a leading commentator on Aristotle, and Nussbaum in particular endorsed a similar
position discussing Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and the important contribution his texts
made to understanding Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. On Aquinas’s Commentary, Nussbaum
wrote: ‘Aquinas’ commentary . . . produced in the thirteenth century, is one of the very great-
est commentaries on the work . . . [and] Aquinas’s commentary itself is very insightful; so
too are the extensive remarks about Aristotelian soul-body issues contained in the Summa
Theologiae.’52 In the contemporary dialectic pursued in several areas of analytic philosophy,
especially the philosophy of mind, Aquinas’s insights have much to offer. Perler’s Ancient and
Medieval Theories of Intentionality and O’Callaghan’s Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn
contribute substantively to this ongoing philosophical engagement.53 The philosophy-of-mind
worries in recent analytic philosophy are rooted in the early aporia articulated forcefully
by Russell, Moore, Price, and Ayer in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course, the
sense data controversy dominated these discussions. Earlier commentators like Hamlyn
often read Aquinas through the lenses of sense data theories—a mistake which will be thor-
oughly considered before this discussion is finished.54 Historians of psychology like Simon
Kemp also put forward a form of a sense data position for an explication of Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind.55

appendix 2
Source Material for this Reconstruction
of Aquinas on Mind
This book differs markedly from most traditional and contemporary accounts of Aquinas’s
epistemology and philosophy of mind, where it is assumed that the Summa Theologiae is the
locus classicus for discovering a sophisticated rendition of Aquinas’s philosophical work. Many
commentators from the traditional scholastic school cite Questions 78 and 79 and 84–89 in the
Summa Theologiae as the fundamental texts for an adequate elucidation of Aquinas’s
epistemology and philosophy of mind. The  following discussion encompasses philosophers
ranging from mid-twentieth-­century scholastic philosophy to recent analytic philosophy. In
the former group of historians of philosophy, distinguished commentators such as Gilson in
The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and Copleston in Aquinas—an early attempt to

52
  Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘The Text of Aristotle’s De Anima’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty
(eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 4.
53
  Dominik Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001); John P.
O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
2003).
54
  D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1961), 46–51.
55
  Kemp suggests that it was not until William of Occam that a representative account was rejected and
in its place developed an externalist position that external objects are apprehended directly: Simon Kemp,
Medieval Psychology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 48.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

24  Setting the Problem

explain Thomas for analytic philosophers—frequently refer to the Summa Theologiae for
textual references when dealing with issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. In
addition, two primarily historical works, Armand Maurer’s Medieval Philosophy and David
Knowles’s Evolution of Medieval Thought, copiously cite the Summa Theologiae. Knowles once
indicated this deference to the Summa Theologiae, along with the Summa Contra Gentiles and
the Commentary on the Sentences, when he wrote: ‘pride of place must be taken by his
[Aquinas’s] three large works, the early Commentary on the Sentences (1253–67), the Summa
Contra Gentiles (1261–64) . . . and the Summa Theologiae I and II (1266–71) and III (1272), left
unfinished at his death.’56
Likewise, most historians of philosophy outside scholasticism and neo-scholasticism give a
special place to the Summa Theologiae. Most contemporary analytic philosophers who have
undertaken interpretation and elucidation of Aquinas’s epistemology and philosophy of mind
usually refer almost exclusively to both Summae, with special deference to the Summa
Theologiae. For example, Hamlyn’s Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of
Perception shows nearly continuous reference to texts in the Summa Theologiae. The same
holds for Weinberg’s A Short History of Medieval Philosophy. Two articles dealing with Thomas’s
epistemology—Kenny’s ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’ and Sheehan’s ‘Aquinas on
Intentionality’—refer repeatedly to the Summa Theologiae for textual substantiation.57 The
interested reader would find in the mid-century analysis Aquinas and Natural Law the following
statement: ‘The two Summas have been the most studied and contain most of his mature
work.’58 Another mid-century account is Tranoy’s article on Aquinas in A Critical History of
Western Philosophy, which made almost exclusive use of texts from the Summa Theologiae.59 In
his noteworthy biography of Thomas, Weisheipl writes that the Summa Theologiae is ‘Thomas’s
major work, the crown of his genius’.60 In the late twentieth century, philosophers continue for
the most part to avoid philosophy-of-mind issues. Jenkins writes that ‘on any given issue, the
Summa generally contains the most mature, clear and definitive statement of Aquinas’s
position’; furthermore, he suggests that the Summa Theologiae ‘expresses his most fully
developed thought’.61 Torrell’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work refers almost
exclusively to Aquinas’s theological propositions and claims.62
While this does not purport to be an exhaustive list of textual references from the last half-
century of Aquinas scholarship, nonetheless it indicates sufficiently the predominance of
scholarly reference to the Summa Theologiae as the principal source material for interpreting
Aquinas’s ‘mature’ thought on what contemporary philosophers call phenomenal issues. Even
Kenny, Haldane, and Pasnau refer mostly to the Summa Theologiae in their respective analyses

56
  David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon Press, 1962), 260.
57
  Anthony Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1969).
58
  D. J. O’Connor, Aquinas and Natural Law (London: Macmillan, 1967), 3.
59
  Kurt Tranoy, ‘Thomas Aquinas’, in D. J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy
(New York: Free Press, 1964), 98–123.
60
  James A. Weisheipl, OP, Friar Thomas D’Aquino (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 361; rev. edn
with corrections (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1983).
61
  John Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 78.
62
 Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work; Torrell’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual
Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003) is an excellent
companion volume.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  25

of Aquinas on sensation and perception. Kenny in Aquinas on Mind suggested that even issues
in the philosophy of mind find a better treatment in Aquinas’s more broadly theological texts
than in his Aristotelian commentaries: ‘since the greatest medieval philosophers were
theologians first and philosophers second, it is to their theological treatises rather than to their
commentaries on De Anima that one turns for their insights into philosophy of mind.’63

The Sentencia Libri De Anima

The analysis of sensation and perception proposed in this book, on the other hand, depends
on a tough-minded analysis of significant sections of Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s De
Anima, the Sentencia Libri De Anima. This commentary, also found under the Latin title In
Aristotelis Librium De Anima Commentarium, is a thorough explicatio textus of the many issues
central to Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. Recently, philosophers have paid more attention
to  the Commentary. The Leonine edition of the Commentary, edited by Gauthier, appeared
in  1984.64 Pasnau’s 1999 published translation of the Leonine Commentary is the first fresh
translation of this important work and the first English translation of the Leonine edition.65 The
classic Foster–Humphries edition first published nearly a half century ago was not based on the
critical Leonine edition.66
The judgement expressed in this book is that one needs to read carefully Aquinas’s exposition
and commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima in order to witness Aquinas’s wrestling at his best
with issues in sensation, perception, abstraction, and concept f­ormation. The account of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind normally referred to in contemporary discussions is the short
analysis in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Questions 78 and 79 and 84–89, together
with occasional references to the somewhat whimsical discussions in the Summa Contra
Gentiles. While the account of intellectual knowledge found in the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae is moderately developed, nonetheless Aquinas treats the important issues of sense
knowledge in just two articles of question 78: Article 3 for the external senses and Article 4 for
the internal senses. Given the interest in philosophy-of-mind issues revolving around sensation
and perception in both modern and contemporary philosophy, one must consider where
Aquinas provides an analysis of these issues in more detail. It is to the Sentencia Libri De Anima
that one turns, especially the exposition and commentary from Chapter/Lectio 10 of Book 2
onwards, and in major sections of Book 3, corresponding to Book 2, Chapter 5 onwards in
Aristotle. Aquinas also wrote the Sentencia Libri De Sensu et Sensato, which Torrell suggests was
completed in 1269 in Paris.67 Furthermore, The Quaestio Disputata De Anima, according to

63
  South and McInerny would disagree, suggesting that Kenny is a bit too quick with this interpretive
claim. South also argues that Owens had a more nuanced position on this issue than some commentators
suggest. See Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 20.
64
  Sentencia Libri ‘De Anima’, ed. R.-A. Gauthier (Paris: Vrin, 1984). Until the Leonine edition under the
guidance of Gauthier appeared, the Latin text most readily available was the Marietti edition (1925), edited
by Pirotta. There are 67 extant manuscripts of the Commentary.
65
 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima.
66
 K. Foster, OP, and S. Humphries, OP (trans.), Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of
Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954);
this edition was reissued in 1994 by McInerny’s Dumb Ox Press.
67
 Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, 341. This author, for the most part, has
­followed Torrell’s Latin terminology and dating for Aquinas’s works.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

26  Setting the Problem

Torrell, was an earlier work written in Rome in 1265–6.68 This philosophical account, moreover,
depends conceptually on Aquinas’s analysis of the ontology of the human person as a holistic
entity. This, in turn, is the justification of Aquinas’s famous non-Cartesian claim: ‘Anima mea
non est ego!’69 Furthermore, it is in this Sentencia that Aquinas writes like the first-rate
philosopher he is; accordingly, his philosophical commentary needs to be taken for what it is.
In addition, it appears that the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae and the Commentary on
the Soul were written about the same time, most probably in late 1267.
This discussion over texts is not academic nitpicking; there is an important scholarly point
to be affirmed. Both textual and structural evidence exists indicating that within the confines
of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas was not concerned principally with issues of perception
theory. In other words, the Summa Theologiae itself does not contain (nor was it intended to
contain) a thoroughly worked-out analysis of issues central to sensation and perception. What
it contains is a propaedeutic summary suitable to those beginning their study of philosophy
and theology. Given the elementary nature of the discussions central to sensation and
perception in the Summa Theologiae, historians of philosophy who consider the Summa
passages as Thomas’s final and fully developed account of sensation and perception theory
issues are misguided.
One persuasive indication of the structural evidence suggesting that the Summa Theologiae
is not the place to unearth Aquinas’s sophisticated thought on sensation and perception is the
prologue to Question 78 in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae:
Next we will discuss the powers of the soul in particular. The theologian, however, has only to inquire
specifically concerning the intellectual and appetitive powers, in which the virtues reside. And since the
knowledge of these powers depends to a certain extent on the other powers, our consideration of the pow-
ers of the soul in particular will be divided into three parts: first, we shall consider those powers which are
a preamble to the intellect; secondly, the intellectual powers (the intellect); thirdly, the appetitive powers
(the will). (Summa Theologiae 1, ‘Prologue to Question 78’)

This passage is interesting from a structural perspective because Aquinas states explicitly that
within the confines of the Summa Theologiae he will consider principally the powers or
dispositions of the intellect and of the will, which are the rational cognitive and the appetitive
powers. All other philosophical considerations of mental faculties are secondary. Aquinas
discusses briefly those sense theory issues only if they have direct bearing on the exposition of
the intellect and/or of the will. Therefore, he considers the problems of sensation and perception
only insofar as this inquiry is needed to assist his analysis of the intellect and the will. The
account of perception is not elucidated as a theoretical question philosophically interesting in
and of itself. This exposition in the Summa Theologiae serves only as a set of philosophical
issues preliminary to the more wide-ranging consideration of the intellect and the will, which
are distinctive mental powers for human persons and which Aquinas believed have greater
theological importance and impact.
In the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, as noted above, the philosophical exposition
of the external senses and the internal senses is discussed only within Articles 3 and 4 of

  Ibid., 335.
68

  Commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 15: 17–19, in Aquinas: Selected Philosophical
69

Writings, ed. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 192–3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  27

Question 78. On the other hand, Aquinas specifically considers intellectual knowledge
(what this study refers to as formation of the species intelligibilis through the abstractive
process of the intellectus agens and concept formation and exercise through the mental act
of the intellectus possibilis) in all of the following questions and articles: Question 79, with
thirteen articles; Question 84, with eight articles; Question 85, with eight articles; Question
86, with four articles; Question 87, with four articles; Question 88, with three articles;
Question 89, with eight articles. While sensation and perception are considered in only two
articles, there are forty-eight articles are devoted to abstraction, concept formation, and
concept exercise. The mere quantity of these latter texts treating abstraction and concept
formation/exercise offers more than a philosophical hint where Aquinas’s scholarly interests
lie within the Summa Theologiae itself. Given the expressed theological purpose for which
Aquinas composed the Summa Theologiae, it should not be surprising that he treats only
those philosophical issues that relate unambiguously to theology. This accounts for the
rather sketchy treatment of sensation and perception in the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae.

appendix 3
The Summa Theologiae as a Textbook
In the high Middle Ages, the Summa Theologiae functioned in much the same way as John
Pecham’s Perspectiva Communis, which served as a textbook summarizing optical theory for
beginning students.70 The Prologue to the Summa Theologiae affirms the essentially textbook
character of this treatise, which Thomas wrote for his younger Dominican student novices.
Since the teacher of Catholic theology has not only to develop advanced students but also to
shape those who are beginners, according to St. Paul, ‘Even as unto babes in Christ, I have fed you
with milk and not meat’ [1 Cor. 31], we propose in this work to convey the propositions which are part
of the Christian religion in a style serviceable for the training of beginners. (Prologue to the Summa
Theologiae)

Not only is the Summa Theologiae intended for ‘beginners’, but it was never intended to be an
exhaustive treatment of philosophical issues.
For we have in mind how much beginners in these studies are hindered by various writings about it, partly
by a multitude of pointless questions, articles, and arguments, partly because essential points are treated
according to the requirements of textual commentary or of academic debate, not to those of a sound edu-
cational method, partly because repetitiousness breeds boredom and confusion in their minds. Eager
therefore to avoid these and other like pit-falls, and trusting in God’s assistance, we shall try to pursue the
propositions of Christian Theology, and, so far as the subject permits, to be concise and clear in the process.
(Prologue to the Summa Theologiae)

70
  David C. Lindberg, John Pecham and the Science of Optics (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1970). Lindberg’s introductory chapter is an especially lucid account of the state of optics in
the 13th c.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

28  Setting the Problem

In these two passages, Aquinas writes explicitly that his Summa Theologiae is not to be taken as
a sophisticated philosophical or theological treatise. Rather, it is a work suitable for beginning
students in theology. Accordingly, his own claim suggests that this work ought not to be
understood as a definitive philosophical exposition and analysis. Given Aquinas’s reasons for
writing the Summa Theologiae, the problems central to sensation and perception seem to stand
even less chance of a thorough analysis: from the point of view of theology—which was Aquinas’s
primary impetus in writing this Summa—and from the point of view that the Summa Theologiae
was to be a ‘textbook’ for beginning students and not a sophisticated treatise for university
masters. O’Connor wrote the following about the textbook status of the Summa Theologiae: ‘It
[Summa Contra Gentiles] discusses in greater detail than the Summa Theologiae the arguments
for natural religion. . . . The Summa Theologiae is designed as a textbook of  theology for
beginners—probably, next to Euclid’s Elements, the most famous textbook ever written.’71
In his comprehensive analytical biography of Thomas, Weisheipl noted that although the
Summa Theologiae was begun for beginners in the study of theology, nonetheless, ‘it seems
that only the Prima Pars fits this description; the rest shows Thomas at his best groping for
new solutions to new and old problems, armed with the best resources of his age.’72 Since
the  discussions concerning sensation and perception are located within the Prima Pars
of  the Summa Theologiae, Weisheipl’s interpretation supports the judgement that topics
related to sensation and perception do not find a sophisticated home in the Summa Theologiae.
Boyle wrote extensively on the historical origin of Aquinas’s composition and purpose for
the Summa Theologiae. The textbook character is emphasized by Boyle, who suggested that
Thomas had it in mind to produce a manual treating the set of theological and philosophical
problems that young Dominican students needed to confront as they were formed to
become preachers and confessors for the medieval Church.73 Boyle wrote that Thomas ‘had
striven to provide an integral theology for his brethren in their dedication to the cura
animarum’.74
The evidence provided above indicates that from both textual analysis and from structural
and editorial considerations, it remains a scholarly mistake to rely too heavily on the passages
of the Summa Theologiae when constructing an analysis of Aquinas’s account of sensation and
perception. In addition, the account of these two issues appearing in Question 78, Articles 3
and 4, relies heavily on what is developed in further detail and with much greater sophistication
in the Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On The Soul’. Accordingly, the principal textual material for the
analysis undertaken in this book rests extensively on the passages found in Aquinas’s Aristotelian
Commentary. In discussing the Aristotelian Commentaries of Aquinas, early twentieth-century
commentators on Aristotle’s philosophy like Ross and Taylor remarked that Aquinas’s
expositions are helpful to readers interested in understanding Aristotle.75 It is noteworthy
historically to recall that in the mid-thirteenth century, several ecclesiastical condemnations

71
 O’Connor, Aquinas and Natural Law, 3.   72 Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’Aquino, 362.
73
  Leonard Boyle, OP, The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Medieval Studies, 1982).
74
  Ibid., 28. Boyle also develops this interpretation about the ‘care of souls’ in ‘The Dominican Order and
Theological Study’, Providence: Studies in Western Civilization 2(3) (1994), 241–56. The author is indebted
to Sr Joan Franks, OP, who first called his attention to these important publications by the late Father Boyle.
75
  Taylor once wrote: ‘The great philosopher cannot indeed have too daring an imagination, provided
only that its exercise is controlled by a profound sobriety of judgement, a massive common sense. . . . The
greatness of St. Thomas as a philosopher seems to me to lie in this, that his work combines high originality
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  29

were promulgated prohibiting the study of the Aristotelian texts. Aquinas biographer Walz
notes, however, that Albertus Magnus, William of Moerbeke, and Thomas met in Brabant
sometime after a 1263 reiteration of the Aristotelian prohibitions, and took ‘effective action . . . in
favor of Aristotelianism’.76

appendix 4
On Dating the Sentencia Libri De Anima
In discussing Aquinas’s Aristotelian Commentary, one final item ought to be considered briefly:
the date of composition for the Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On The Soul’. Some indication of the
dating of this Commentary is important in that this book relies heavily on the structural analysis
provided within the pages of the Commentary. Even though until Gauthier’s recent work, textual
scholars were unable to date precisely the composition of the Commentary, nonetheless it
had always been narrowed down to the last six or so years of Aquinas’s life. The dating of
the Commentary is a fascinating puzzle in itself. In establishing dates regarding Aquinas’s
works, the present author pretends neither sophistication nor expertise on these arcane, albeit
important matters. Recent work by Gauthier suggests, however, that a more precise dating
of this Aristotelian commentary can be given. The English translation of Torrell’s St. Thomas
Aquinas: The Person and his Work contains a thoughtful discussion of Gauthier’s research results.
In his introduction for the Leonine edition of the Commentary, Gauthier suggests that Aquinas
at least began, if not completed, this Commentary probably in late 1267, while in Rome before
leaving in the autumn of 1268 for his second stint at the University of Paris. About this time, he
undertook concurrently, so it appears, the composition of the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae, where the account of his philosophy of mind appears in Questions 78 and 79 and
84–89. Hence, Aquinas was figuring out his own take on issues in the philosophy of mind while
wrestling with Aristotle’s De Anima. Gauthier and Tugwell both suggest that this was the first of
Aquinas’s Aristotelian commentaries; Gauthier, moreover, claims that all three books of the
Commentary appeared in Italy before September 1268.77 Tugwell also refers often to the
important work of Gauthier. Pasnau too suggests that Thomas began this important Aristotelian
commentary in November 1267 and finished it by September 1268.78
An earlier yet apparently complete listing of Aquinas’s works is Eschmann’s ‘A Catalogue of
St. Thomas’s Works’.79 Eschmann noted that Bartholomew of Capua had stated that Book I of
the Commentary on the Soul was a lecture course transcribed by Reginald of Piperno, who was
Aquinas’s long-time socius and secretary. Books 2 and 3 were directly composed by Aquinas.

with an unsurpassed sobriety of judgment and sense for reality’: A. E. Taylor, Aquinas Sexcentenary Lecture
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1924), 6.
76
 Angelus Walz, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Biographical Study, trans. Sebastian Bullough, OP
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 103.
77
 Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, 172; Pasnau praises Torrell’s work as ‘the
best study of Aquinas’s life’: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, p. xi.
78
  Ibid., p. xii.
79
  I. T. Eschmann, OP, ‘A Catalogue of St. Thomas’s Works’, in E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of
St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), 403.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

30  Setting the Problem

Eschmann suggested, following several internal textual hints, that the commentary began
probably after 1267. In opposition to Gauthier, however, other textual scholars argue that
Books 2 and 3 were written in 1270–71, while Aquinas was a master at the University of Paris.
But Eschmann also notes that some textual scholars believe the entire work was composed in
Italy during the fall of 1268. In his introduction to the Foster–Humphries translation of the
Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On The Soul’, Ivo Thomas dates the commentary as late as 1271.80
Weisheipl believes internal evidence suggests that the Commentary was written before the
beginning of 1271.81
In his excellent study of Aquinas, Tugwell follows closely Eschmann’s catalogue.82 Tugwell
notes the following concerning Aristotelian Commentaries by Aquinas:
Also towards the end of his time in Rome, Thomas composed what may have been his first fully developed
Aristotelian commentary, on the De Anima, and it is not unreasonable to postulate a connection between
this commentary and the fact that Thomas was writing about the soul in the first part of the Summa. In the
same way the commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, at least in its final form, seems to be related to the compo-
sition of the second part of the Summa.83

For this study, the author accepts the more recent work of Gauthier and Tugwell on  the
dating of the Commentary. However, this is, like most dating of medieval manuscripts, a very
fallible exercise. What is significant is Gauthier’s claim that this commentary on philosophy-of-
mind issues was the first such work Aquinas wrote on any Aristotelian treatises.
It is a historical fact that Aquinas knew little if any Greek. One Aquinas biographer, Angelus
Walz, is unclear on this, suggesting that while some authors held that Thomas knew no Greek,
others suggest that he had an elementary knowledge of this classical language.84 Hence, he was
dependent substantively on the translations provided by his Dominican confrère, William of
Moerbeke. William’s translatio nova of Aristotle’s De Anima appears to have been in Thomas’s
hands before the end of 1267.85 William provided a very literal and turgid translation of
Aristotle’s Greek texts, which today is enormously difficult to render into readable English.
Haldane notes that Aquinas appears to have written his best work on human nature—the
sections in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, the Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima, and
the Sentencia Libri De Anima—within a year or so of receiving Moerbeke’s literal translation of
the Aristotelian treatise. Moerbeke’s translation proved to be rather durable because
philosophers well into the fifteenth century used it.86 Those interested in these issues should
consult Gauthier’s work, Torrell’s account, or Pasnau’s introduction to his own translation of
Aquinas’s Commentary for more in-depth discussions of the issues regarding dating Aquinas’s
commentary.

80
  Ivo Thomas, OP, ‘Introduction’, in Foster and Humphries, Aristotle’s De Anima, 18.
81
 Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’Aquino, 378.
82
  Tugwell, ‘Introduction’, in Albert and Thomas.
83
  Ibid., 256.   84 Walz, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 103.
85
  Tugwell, ‘Introduction’, in Albert and Thomas. Furthermore, Walz writes that Moerbeke spent time in
Greece and later was a member of the Papal Court; after Thomas’s death, William became the Archbishop
of Corinth: Saint Thomas Aquinas, 104.
86
  Haldane, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, 334. It is interesting historically
to note that William was in Constantinople as part of a Dominican mission to facilitate the reunion of the
Eastern and Western Christian Churches. It is unclear how his discovering the Aristotelian texts fits into
his original purpose for being in what was then called ‘the East’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Setting the Problem  31

Gauthier, as we have seen, argues that the Commentary was completed by the autumn of
1268. Aquinas died on 7 March 1274. He appears to have written nothing after 6 December
1273—the date on which he experienced what many in the tradition have called a mystical
encounter from which he withdrew, saying his works were just so much straw. Hence, what
Aquinas writes about the structure of sensation and ­perception in his Commentary on Aristotle’s
‘On The Soul’ can certainly be taken as an example of his more mature thought. Moreover, to
emphasize what Gauthier, Haldane, and Pasnau suggest, the Commentary was written at the
same time as the Prima Pars, the Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima, and also De Spiritualibus
Creaturis, all of which deal with issues (at least in part) in the philosophy of mind. And yet it is
in his Commentary on the Soul where one finds his most careful analysis of an Aristotelian
theory of sensation and perception. Pasnau, for one, would agree with this claim: in his
Introduction to his translation of Aquinas’s Commentary, he wrote: ‘Here, more than anywhere
else, Aquinas gives detained accounts of the processes involved in human cognition.’87

87
  Pasnau, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, p. xiii.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

2
Aquinas on Intentionality

Historical and Contemporary Antecedents

Before a detailed analysis of Aquinas’s theory of perception, several general features
about his epistemology and philosophy of mind require discussion. The next two
chapters provide a concise conceptual elucidation of the principles central to Aquinas’s
theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind, together with an explication of what
appears to be Aquinas’s rather obscure metaphysical language. This chapter under-
takes an analysis of five aspects of intentionality theory and cognitive awareness in
Aquinas:

(a) principles of intentionality in Aquinas’s theory of knowledge;1

(b) how Aquinas differs from contemporary accounts of intentionality theory;
(c) Aquinas as an empiricist;
(d) direct realism in Aquinas;
(e) Aquinas and causal theories of perception.

In his explanatory theory of knowledge and the workings of the mind, Aquinas has
four distinct classes of mental acts and their corresponding intentional objects:

(a) The awareness of sensible qualities like green and square. These are the proper
and common sensibles, which are known through the external senses.
(b) The awareness of distinct individual concreta. Concreta are the particular
objects of Aquinas’s ontology—the tulips, oak trees, and sheepdogs of the
world, which are individuals of a natural kind. Both Aristotle and Aquinas
refer to these concreta as primary substances. For Aquinas, the internal sense
of the vis cogitativa accomplishes the awareness of concreta.
(c) The awareness of essential properties. These are the essential natures or ‘quid-
dities’ of the primary substances. The act of awareness through the abstractive
process of the intellectus agens and the awareness of the intellectus possibilis

1
  In this discussion, the terms ‘principles’ or ‘presuppositions’ are used rather than ‘axioms’. A principle
or presupposition is not epistemologically a priori or self-evident in its own right and is not epistemologi-
cally axiomatic but rather serves an explanatory role.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  33

accomplish the awareness of essential or sortal properties that determine a

natural kind. These are first intentions.2
(d) The awareness of universals. These are the intentional categories of genus, spe-
cies, differentia, proprium, and accidens. These logical categories, often called
the ‘predicables’, result from the reflective capacity of the intellectus possibilis.
These are second intentions. In De Ente et Essentia, Aquinas suggests this dis-
tinction between essence and universal.
In developing his philosophy of mind, Aquinas should be read as a philosopher fol-
lowing the advice of the mid-twentieth-century positivist turned metaphysician Gustav
Bergmann: ‘epistemology is merely the ontology of the knowing situation.’3 This ‘onto-
logical assay’, a metaphilosophical principle used by Bergmann, as appropriated by
Aquinas, is more elaborate, intricate, and more interesting philosophically than many
students of philosophy have been wont to admit. This inquiry provides a lucid analysis of
what Bergmann would have called ‘Aquinas’s ontological assay of the awareness situa-
tion’, with special emphasis on sensation and perception.4 Kenny wrote, ‘Aquinas’s doc-
trine of the intentional existence of forms remains one the most interesting contributions
ever made to the philosophical problem of the nature of thought.’5 In another context, he
wrote: ‘[Aquinas’s] map of the mind is a complicated one but it is superior to that offered
by many another philosopher.’6 Haldane addresses the roots of intentionality found in
the texts of Thomas: ‘[G]iven the present day interest in the “aboutness” of thought, it is
worth nothing that […] Aquinas [offers] a turn upon the nature of intentionality and its
difference from physical relations. (Indeed, the very term and concept originate in the
medieval notion of esse intentionale, the ‘intentional being’ of thoughts.)’7
Nonetheless, in ‘Brentano’s Problem,’8 Haldane suggests correctly that there are two
senses of ‘Aboutness’, which need to be distinguished when considering the intention-
ality theory of Aquinas. ‘Aboutness-1’ refers to the content of any given mental act,

2
  A first intention is the awareness of a thing; a second intention is an awareness of a thought. It follows
that in Aquinas there is a difference between an awareness of an essence and the awareness of a universal.
This distinction will be explained in more detail in a later chapter.
3
  Gustav Bergmann, ‘Ontological Alternatives’, in Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1964), 126.
4
  While this study focuses attention on Aquinas’s position, nonetheless Richard Taylor reminds us that
the sophisticated treatments of mind issues found in Avicenna and Averroes should not be overlooked. See
‘Abstraction in al-Farabi’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 151–68; Richard Taylor and Max Herrera, ‘Aquinas’s Naturalized
Epistemology’, in Social Justice: Its Theory and Practice: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 79 (2005), 85–102.
5
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 80.
6
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas Medalist’s Address’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind, 23–726.
7
  John Haldane, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.),
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 335.
8
  John Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989), 1–32. This essay is an
extended analysis of the differing issues that Haldane discerns in the various versions of intentionality
theory brought forward by Brentano.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

34  aquinas on intentionality

either of perception or understanding. ‘Aboutness-2’ refers to the real relation that

holds between a mental act and the external world. Haldane argues that Aquinas
appropriates this first sense of ‘Aboutness’. The second sense too easily deflates into a
real relation requiring objects for nonexistents—a problem with which Brentano
wrestled much of his philosophical life. This distinction will be expanded upon as this
narrative develops.

Intentionality in Aquinas’s Philosophy of Mind

The first part of this inquiry elucidates the principles presupposed in Thomas Aquinas’s
theory of knowledge, which can be classified as ‘principles of intentionality’. Haldane
reminds us: ‘the Thomist account of intentionality is more sensitive and more complex
than is usually supposed.’9 The concept of intentionality is used because Aquinas’s phi-
losophy of mind and epistemology can best be elucidated and understood by contem-
porary philosophers in terms of a thesis of intentionality. Geach wrote extensively
about Aquinas’s distinction between esse naturale and esse intentionale.10 Aquinas uses
this distinction as a means of rendering a category difference between knowers and
non-knowers. In turn, this distinction grounds the position that an intentionality the-
sis serving as a backdrop offers a fruitful method for analysing the difficult passages in
which Aquinas considers the problems of knowledge, mind, and the role of cognitivity
in mental agents. This discussion of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality follows much
recent work in Aristotelian philosophy of mind.11
Part of the difficulty of reading Aquinas on mind and knowledge lies in the obscure
metaphysical language in which the narrative is couched. The principal statement of
this theory asserts that knowledge is the ‘having of a form of another without its mat-
ter’. In the Summa Theologiae, one finds a straightforward description of a knower in
Aquinas’s system: ‘The difference between knowing and non-knowing beings is that
the latter have nothing but their own form; the knowing being, on the other hand, is
one whose nature it is to have in addition the form of something else, for the likeness
(form) of the thing known is in the knower’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 14 a. 1).
Admittedly this is a difficult bit of philosophical language to analyse and explain.
First, the concepts are not expressed in ordinary language. Secondly, and more impor-
tantly, to understand these concepts requires an understanding of other concepts from
Aristotelian metaphysics that function as presuppositions for Aquinas’s philosophy of
mind. The purpose of this section is to lay bare these metaphysical presuppositions,

9
  Haldane argues that contemporary Thomistic commentators like Maritain misinterpret Aquinas on
intentionality, rendering Aquinas a representationalist. Haldane suspects that this misreading of the
Aquinas texts is rooted in the commentaries by John of St Thomas and Cardinal Cajetan. See ibid.
10
  G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1961), 95ff. The term ‘esse intentionale’ occurs frequently in the texts of Aquinas.
11
 Names like Richard Sorabji, Myles Burnyeat, Hilary Putnam, Victor Caston, Christopher Shiels,
Dorothea Frede, Cyrille Michon, John McDowell, Jonathan Jacobs, and Martha Nussbaum are included in
the list of those who have spent time trying to unearth what insights Aristotle offers in the general area of
intentionality theory.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  35

which provide the principles upon which Aquinas constructed his philosophy of
mind; the expected result is a better understanding of Aquinas’s account of knowledge,
mind, and cognitive agents through the lens of an intentionality theory. The following
three presuppositions are fundamental to Aquinas’s theory of intentionality:
(a) The acknowledgment of an ontological distinction between mental phenom-
ena and physical phenomena. This is an ontological theory of intentionality.12
(b) The basic characteristic of the mental as being one of ‘tending towards’ or ‘about-
ness’ directed towards that which is known. This is Haldane’s ‘Aboutness-1’.
(c) The acceptance of some form of the act/object distinction.
A theory of intentionality need not entail a realm of subsistent objects. While it is true
that some philosophers—most notably Meinong and, according to Chisholm, the early
Brentano13—did postulate subsistent objects of intentional acts, nonetheless such a postu-
lation is not a necessary condition for a theory of intentionality. In this analysis of Aquinas,
intentionality is considered as the set of ontological characteristics distinguishing know-
ers from non-knowers. This distinction entails no ontological commitment to subsistent
objects. One vexing problem constantly remains with any ontological realm of subsistent
entities: it requires extraordinary epistemological gymnastics to account for an awareness
of such entities—one need only recall the theory of anamnesis in Plato’s ontology.14
A case will be made for the following three propositions:
(a) In principle, Aquinas agrees with Brentano’s distinction between mental or
intentional states and physical states. This corresponds to Aquinas’s distinction
between an esse intentionale and an esse naturale.
(b) In a manner similar to Moore and Russell,15 Aquinas accepts the act/object
distinction, especially as described in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
(c) The characteristic of ‘tending towards’ or ‘aboutness’ is built into epistemologi-
cal dispositions discussed in Aquinas’s theory of knowledge and of mind.
Geach once wrote that in Aquinas’s account of intentionality, the human mind
‘reaches right up to the reality’.16

12
  This analysis is in agreement with Bergmann’s claim that an intentionality theory need not commit
one to a particular view on the mind–body problem. Therefore, this first presupposition does not force
Aquinas into accepting Augustinian–Cartesian dualism or any form of spiritualist ontology similar to what
Burnyeat argued in his criticism of Aristotle’s theory of mind. See Myles Burnyeat, ‘Is an Aristotelian
Philosophy of Mind Still Credible? (A Draft)’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays on
Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 15–26.
13
  Roderick Chisholm, ‘Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional’, in Edward N. Lee
and Maurice Mandelbaum (eds), Phenomenology and Existentialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1967), 1–23.
14
  This difficulty appears to have bothered Brentano during much of his philosophical career.
15
  While it is true that Aquinas, like Moore and Russell, accepted the act/object distinction, nonetheless
it is also true that Aquinas’s account of a ‘structured’ mental act is opposed fundamentally to the ‘diapha-
nous’ mental act espoused by Moore, Russell, and many other early 20th-c. British philosophers. For a
discussion of this difference, see Anthony J. Lisska, ‘Deely, Aquinas, and Poinsot: How the Intentionality of
Inner Sense Transcends the Limits of Empiricism’, Semiotica 201(178), no. 1 ( 2010), 135–67.
16
  Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers, 95.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

36  aquinas on intentionality

This does not imply that Brentano had it all correct in interpreting Aquinas on inten-
tionality. Several articles in the Nussbaum and Rorty volume suggest similarities and
contrasts of the role Brentano’s account of intentionality played in offering differing
interpretations of the Aristotelian and Aquinian principles regarding the immaterial
reception of forms.17 Haldane argued for significant differences. Like Aquinas,
Brentano was an anti-materialist, which is grounded in his thesis of intentionality.
Considering Brentano’s account of intentionality, Haldane writes: ‘Nonetheless
Brentano’s philosophy of mind does introduce a major problem, viz: that of how to
explain the contentfulness of mental states without lapsing into some version of episte-
mological idealism, or adopting an extravagant ontology.’18 Haldane suggests that a
contemporary analysis of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind offers a solution to this vexing
set of issues faced by Brentano. Accordingly, one must not make too tight a connection
between Brentano’s account of intentionality and Aquinas’s position on esse intention-
ale. Following Haldane, Brentano’s classic account of intentionality noted above con-
tains four features distinguishing the mental from the physical: ‘(i) Intentional
Inexistence; (ii) Immanent Objectivity; (iii) Reference to a content; and (iv) Direction
to an object.’19 Haldane also suggests that the first two characteristics refer to ontologi-
cal properties of intentionality, while the latter two refer to psychological properties.
Both the ontological and the psychological sets of properties are necessary conditions
for rendering Aquinas’s account of intentionality consistent and workable. In
Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Brentano characterizes this fundamental
intentional property: ‘Characteristisch fur die psychischen Phanomene ist die Beziehung
ein Object.’20
This intrinsic capacity of referring or ‘aboutness’ is the cornerstone of intentionality
theory, which in turn grounds the externalism in Aquinas’s theory of mind. Given this
necessary referring relation, Aquinas cannot be reduced to an internalist. Externalism
normally suggests a cognitive theory in which at least some of our ideas and concepts
are connected with and dependent upon facts or things in the external world. An inter-
nalist, for the most part, will deny this external connection, preferring instead to claim
that justification in knowledge depends in some manner on a priori claims that are
known immediately and upon which one’s theory of justification is constructed. While
there are several offshoots of these two theories, nonetheless this account, while sche-
matic in form, provides the background as this narrative on Aquinas unfolds. Simply
put, a Cartesian epistemology with its criterion of certainty would be a paradigm case
of an internalist position, while Aristotle’s cognitive theory rooted in his De Anima
would be an externalist account.
The following propositions apply to Aquinas’s use of intentionality:

17
  Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima.
18
  Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’.    19  Ibid.
20
  Much of this renewed interest in Aquinas’s position on intentionality in analytic philosophy, in turn,
is due to Geach, Anscombe, and Kenny.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  37

(a) Aquinas is an ontological realist, which entails that the world is structured in
organized ways.21
(b) Aquinas is an epistemologist realist, which entails that knowers in some way
are able to grasp these structures that organize the external world.
(c) ‘Esse intentionale’ is the cognitive content of an act of awareness; this is not the
object of knowledge but the means by which a knower is aware of an object.
(d) ‘Esse intentionale’ depends on an ontological ability or power of a knower to
attain knowledge states.
(e) Sense knowledge, both external and internal, and intellectual knowledge
depend on ontological abilities or powers of the person to have knowledge and
are expressed by the respective notions of esse intentionale.
(f) It follows that Aquinas is an externalist in matters of mind. It should be noted,
however, that Aquinas probably did not consider internalist theories of the
mind—what Veatch once referred to as ‘the transcendental turn’ in modern
philosophy—even possible.22
In the context of contemporary discussions on the nature of the human mind and its
epistemological connection with the external world, Stump argues correctly that
Aquinas might best be described as an ‘externalist/reliabilist’; on this point, this study
agrees with Stump’s characterization of Aquinas.
At times when considering esse intentionale in discussions of Aquinas on intention-
ality, there is confusion between propositions (c) and (d) above. Esse intentionale refers
to the cognitive content of the act of awareness; yet this act of awareness and its content
depend on an ontological characteristic of the knower, which is a necessary condition
for explaining the possibility of knowing. This in turn depends on a holistic theory of
the human person with ontologically grounded dispositional properties able to exer-
cise cognitive abilities at the levels of both sense and intellect. Introspection, contrary
to the Cartesian paradigm, is not the hallmark of the mental, nor is the reality of a
Cartesian immaterial ego a necessary condition for an intentionality thesis.
Haldane suggests correctly that an appeal to what Aquinas scholars call ‘the formal
identity’ between the mental act and the object perceived or known—Aristotle’s for-
mal cause—is a necessary condition to move beyond the limits of representative theo-
ries of perception. Perspicuously, Haldane then suggests that this formal identity
requires the possibility of two distinct kinds of exemplification, one for esse intention-
ale and the other for esse naturale or reale.23 This dual account of exemplification is
21
  The term ‘structure’ refers to the ontological position that the primary substances—the individuals of
a natural kind—have a fundamental organization determined by the essential properties. This use does not
refer to the overall ‘world structure’ for the entire cosmos.
22
  Stump writes: ‘Like Aristotle, Aquinas is a metaphysical realist; that is, he assumes that there is an
external world around us and that it has certain features independently of the operation of any created
intellect, so that it is up to our minds to discover truths about the world, rather than simply inventing or
creating them’: Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 231.
23
  John Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 161–3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

38  aquinas on intentionality

needed in order to account for the possibility of a form existing both in rerum natura as
well as in cognitive organs and faculties. In other words, a form in a thing requires an
emmattered existence because a form as form cannot exist by itself. Yet the form itself
is not material, although its ontological role is for physical objects; the form is exempli-
fied in matter in order for a primary substance—an individual of a natural kind—to
exist. In other words, a form in itself—forms in rerum natura—can neither exist nor
subsist by itself.24 This same form, insofar as it is not material per se, can exist inten-
tionally in a cognitive faculty. In this way, Aquinas argues for knowing to be the having
of a form without matter in a sense faculty or intellect capable or having the cognitive
power of awareness. Hence, this dual notion of exemplification is a necessary condi-
tion for unpacking what Aquinas suggests with his theory of intentionality. The two
forms—esse intentionale and esse naturale—exemplify two different modes of being,
yet their formal structures are identical. Haldane sums up his instructive account of
Aquinas in the following perspicuous way:
[This is . . . ] a philosophical theory in which the conceptual structure of our thinking is securely
connected to the ontological structure of the world. The character of this connection is of such
an order, viz., formal or structural equivalence, as to warrant the title ‘mind–world identity’ in a
description of the theory within which it features.25

In Aquinas’s theory of intentionality, the concept of esse intentionale is critically

important. For Aquinas, it is apparent that esse intentionale and the property of inten-
tionality in a human knower are connected intrinsically. Put differently, in agreement
with an observation put forward by Haldane, esse intentionale indeed constitutes the
property of intentionality. This ‘mind/world identity’ determines the meaning of the
oft-used Aquinas propositions: ‘sensus in actu est sensible in actu’ and ‘intellectus in
actu est intelligible in actu’. The analytic task is to render Aquinas’s ‘doctrine’ of inten-
tionality ‘intelligible’. This elucidation of esse intentionale in terms of a unique set of
dispositional properties grounding the possibility of intentionality is an example in
Aquinas of what Chisholm called ‘a funny kind of characteristic that ordinary physical
things don’t have’.26 Chisholm’s ‘funny characteristic’, however, appears referentially
opaque. Aquinas, to the contrary, attempts to put ‘cognitive flesh’ on the bare bones of
Chisholm’s ‘funny characteristic’. This is analogous to Haldane’s criticism of Putnam’s
lack of a ‘metaphysical skull’ when referring to Aristotle’s intentionality. It follows that

24
  The rational soul’s immortality is a special issue in itself.
25
  Haldane, ‘Mind–World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in John Haldane and Crispin
Wright (eds), Reality, Representation and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33. Haldane
further suggests that this position on Aquinas ‘may have counterparts in contemporary metaphysics’; one
such counterpart is found in the writings of John McDowell: See e.g.: ‘ . . . McDowell, “Scheme-Content
Dualism, Experience and Subjectivity”, who in connection with Wittgenstein remarks that “We are (to
stand) on the idea that the structure of elements that constitute a thought (a thought itself, in Fregean
sense), and the structure of elements that constitutes something that is the case, can be the very same
thing” ’: ibid., 37, n. 44.
26
 Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid S. Sellars, ‘Intentionality and the Mental: A Correspondence’,
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (1957), 524.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  39

Aquinas’s concept of intentionality is a de re claim and never reducible to a de dicto

position.

‘Intentional’ is Not Identical with

or Reducible to ‘Spiritual’
At the outset, one must realize that Aquinas’s discussion of the concept of ‘mental’ or
‘intentional’ is neither equated with nor coextensive with the concept of ‘spiritual’.
When Aquinas considers esse intentionale, he is not referring to Ryle’s infamous ‘ghost
in the machine’. Aquinas does not adopt a Cartesian immaterial mind; in fact, he wrote
explicitly, ‘Anima mea non est ego’, which is a strong statement affirming his non-­
Cartesian theory of mind and person.27 This does not entail that there are no spiritual
existents in Aquinas’s ontology. Like most medieval philosophers, Aquinas did talk
about God and separated substances (angels and disembodied human souls).
Nonetheless, it does not follow that, because a being is capable of intentionality, that
being also exemplifies a non-material, spiritual existence. Stump reminds us of this
hermeneutical point in discussing Aquinas’s theory of intentionality: ‘Aquinas tends to
use “immaterial”, “intentional”, and “spiritual” roughly synonymously to refer to this
kind of change or reception of form.’28 Nonetheless, Aquinas was aware of this possible
confusion of ‘intentional’ with ‘spiritual’.29 In the Summa Theologiae, when discussing
how an angel knows, Aquinas distinguishes explicitly between a ‘spiritual existence’
and an ‘intentional existence’. This is, sadly, often an overlooked passage when com-
mentators attempt an explanation of intentionality theory by putting Aquinas too
hastily into the dustbin with ontological, Cartesian dualism. The following is among
the clearest passages in which the distinctions between a ‘spiritual existent’ and an
‘intentional existent’ are spelled out.
When one angel knows another angel, it is through a species existing in its intellect; such an
existence differs from the known angel not according to a difference between material and
immaterial being, but rather according to the difference between natural (esse naturale) and
intentional (esse intentionale). For the angel itself is a form subsisting in natural being; yet its
species in the intellect of another angel is different in that, in the intellect, it possesses only an
intentional existence. In a like manner, the form of color of the wall has a natural existence; yet
the same form in a different medium (i.e., when the color is known) has intentional being.
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 56 a. 2 ad 3)

This passage is significant for three reasons. First, Aquinas mentions explicitly esse
intentionale. Secondly, he distinguishes esse intentionale from esse spirituale. While
27
  Thomas Aquinas, ‘Commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 15: 17–19’, in Timothy
McDermott (ed.), Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 192–3.
28
 Stump, Aquinas, 528, n. 35.
29
  In addition to human knowledge, Aquinas considers both divine and angelic knowledge. However,
there is textual evidence that no esse spirituale is identical with an esse intentionale. In addition, the purpose
here is to elucidate the principles of intentionality found in the terrestrial human condition. Thus there is
no present concern with how disembodied souls, angels, or God might have knowledge.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

40  aquinas on intentionality

esse intentionale is ‘immaterial’, it is neither identical with nor reducible to Cartesian

substance immateriality. Thirdly, Aquinas notes explicitly that esse intentionale holds
when a perceiver is aware of the colour on the wall.30 This discussion of angelic knowl-
edge and angelic existence—or ‘subsistence’—indicates that esse intentionale and esse
spirituale are neither identical nor coextensive. Furthermore, esse spirituale is an
instance of esse naturale. An entity with esse spirituale—God, angels, devils, and dis-
embodied human souls—would be part of the furniture of reality. Given this distinc-
tion, a human cognitive agent for Aquinas is not reducible to a Cartesian substance
dualist position. To repeat: ‘Anima mea non est ego.’
Aquinas’s characterization of intentionality is neither an incidental nor accidental
dispositional property or ability found in the human essence. Rather, the built-in char-
acteristic of ‘tending towards’ is a defining ontological structure of this dispositional
property. Aquinas writes generally about ‘intention’ in the following way: ‘intention, as
the name indicates, means to tend towards something’ (Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 12 a. 1).
Aquinas stresses continually that all knowledge implies that the thing known is some-
how present in the knower. Accordingly, the set of dispositional properties, which
constitutes a knower as a knower, enables the knower to go beyond itself and yet not
physically and entitatively become that which it is ‘tending towards’. In discussing the
epistemology of Aquinas, Geach wrote the following about the directedness of mental
acts: ‘What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual
occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in an X—it is that our mind
“reaches right up to reality”.’31
In Aquinas’s ontology, therefore, the immateriality characteristic of a cognitive
being—a knower—is an ontological primitive, which is a metaphysical property that
grounds the possibility of intentionality. This is an Aristotelian rendition of Chisholm’s
‘funny characteristic’. Aquinas offers further analysis of the claims of immateriality
and the basic ‘tending towards’ or ‘aboutness’ property characteristic of mental acts in
his Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul when he discusses Empedocles’s principal
epistemological principle ‘Like knows like’.

The Principles of Intentionality in Aquinas’s

Philosophy of Mind
With these preliminary remarks on intentionality theory completed, an elucidation of
the principles of intentionality is the next order of business. These principles are devel-
oped in a generic manner and are the most general presuppositions necessary for
understanding Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. Each principle serves as a presupposi-
tion for both Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception and for his theory of
­concept formation and exercise. At this rudimentary level of analysis, Aquinas’s

30
  Aquinas differs from the version of intentionality theory spelled out by Sellars, among others.
31
  Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers, 95.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  41

account of sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge depends on the same set of
principles.

Principle A.  An act can only be an act of some ‘X’ or other that has a potency
The potency/act distinction is the central metaphysical principle upon which Aquinas
constructs his ontology, his philosophy of mind, and his epistemology. A dominant
explanatory principle is not odd in philosophical systems. Commenting on the signifi-
cance of such principles, Bergmann offered the following insight: ‘In what a great phi-
losopher says there is a pattern. It all flows from one source, a few fundamental
ontological ideas. In the light of this source and only in this light, it can all be under-
stood.’32 In Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, the potency/act distinction is what
Bergmann would refer to as a ‘fundamental ontological idea’. Aquinas uses this distinc-
tion in his ontological account both of the things of the truncated world33—except
God—and of those cognitive beings capable of intentionality. Hence, this principle
applies to Aquinas as both an ontological realist and an epistemological realist. It fol-
lows, therefore, that what Veatch called ‘the transcendental turn’ derived from Kantian
theory and adopted by many twentieth-century philosophers is structurally distinct
from Aquinas’s metaphilosophy.
Neither a potency nor an act has an ontological status by itself; a potency is always a
potency of an individual thing, and an act is always an act of an individual thing. The
existents in Aquinas’s space–time realist ontology—what one would quantify over—
are individual primary substances. Throughout this discussion, therefore, one must
remember that things have potencies and acts. Potencies and acts never exist by them-
selves. The exception is God, who as an Actus Purus (the ‘pure act’) is the only subsist-
ent act in Aquinas’s ontology. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Aquinas writes:
‘potency and act are the prime division of being’ (III, lec. 2). Using Aristotelian termi-
nology, the analogy here is between matter and form. Form is the perfection, which in
some way determines the matter to be what it is. The form is the organizing principle
providing the substantial unity of the individual of a natural kind. Thus, an animal
body with its multiple types and layers of tissue, fluid, solids, etc. is held together onto-
logically by the structure of the substantial form. In the Summa Contra Gentiles,
Aquinas mentions this analogy: ‘for matter and form are related as potency and act’
(lib. 2 d. 71 n. 2).
In the writings of Thomas, therefore, ‘act’ is neither identical nor coextensive with a
‘mental act’. Rather, it is construed more broadly as any perfection or completion,
which anything at all possesses. Act, therefore, is a generic term or concept. It refers to

32
  Gustav Bergmann, ‘Inclusion, Exemplification and Inference in G. E. Moore’, found in Studies in the
Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by E. D. Klemke (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 82.
33
  Bergmann introduced the concept of a ‘truncated world’, which is one without minds. A priori, a
truncated world in itself rules out the possibility of an intentionality thesis. In addition, the affirmation of
a truncated world is a denial that idealism is true. A theory of ontological realism entails some semblance
of a truncated world.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

42  aquinas on intentionality

both ontological and epistemological completions or perfections. Some acts are only
ontological, while others are also epistemological in nature. Put differently, every epis-
temological act is an ontological act, but not every ontological act is an epistemological
act. An epistemological act has an ontological structure in the mind through which an
object is present to the mind in the most general sense. This structure pertains to the
ontological nature of a knower, no matter how this might be spelled out. Furthermore,
there may be an entity that is unknown by any knower, and thus there would be an
instantiation of an ontological act that did not have a corresponding intentional act. It
is sufficient for an ontological act that it is epistemological in nature, but it is not neces-
sary that an ontological act be an epistemological act. In effect, this distinction renders
idealism impossible in the ontology of Aquinas. This is another instance indicating
that Aquinas is an ontological realist and an externalist.
Moreover, act is to be understood in two additional senses. First of all, there is the
actual state or capacity of an existent. Act as state or capacity is best defined as a dispo-
sitional property. This distinction applies to both ontological and epistemological acts.
In Aquinas’s ontology, a substantial form, for instance, is best understood as the onto-
logical ground for a set of dispositional properties.34 This distinction between disposi-
tion and exercise is especially important in discussing Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
A discussion of concepts-as-dispositions and concepts-as-being-exercised in acts of
knowing is central to his philosophy of mind. Briefly put, a concept, as an acquired
epistemological or intentional disposition, would be Marianne’s ability to read French.
Yet this concept as an acquired epistemological disposition is only ‘exercised’ when in
fact Marianne is here and now reading French. At the moment, Marianne may be read-
ing Dilbert’s Principles of Management, but when she is reading about Dilbert’s esca-
pades with Dogbert, she has not lost her ability to read French.35 In Aquinas’s
Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul this distinction is discussed:
And as a receiver is to what it receives, a potency is to its act. And as act is the perfection of
what is potential, so being acted upon in this sense implies rather that a certain preservation
and perfection of a thing in potency is received from an object in act. For only the actual can
perfect the potential, and actuality is not, as such, contrary to potency. . . . (Commentary on the
Soul, #366)

In effect, Principle A asserts that in Aquinas’s ontology, there are no ‘free-floating’ acts.
Rather, each and every perfection is a perfection of something or other. Put differently,
Principle A is a fundamental principle of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Each individual
thing in the world is a compound of two principles: matter, which is by definition a
potency; and form, which is by definition an act. The Commentary on the Soul

34
  A substantial form is always, as McDowell suggested, an embodied form with matter: John McDowell,
Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 91.
35
  Ch. 4 on epistemological dispositions considers this distinction in more detail. In general, disposition
is a general or ‘type term’, and a concept is a specific instantiation or ‘token’ of this genus or ‘type’. Thus, a
concept is an acquired disposition, which is an Aristotelian ‘acquired habit’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  43

i­ llustrates this claim: ‘Matter, then, differs from form, in this, that it is a potential being.
Form is the “entelechy” or the act that renders matter actual. The compound is a result-
ing being (a particular primary substance)’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 215).
Because God is the only exception to this Principle, it follows that God as an Actus
Purus in effect becomes the only ‘free-floating’ act in Aquinas’s ontology.36
In his study of Aquinas on human nature, Pasnau argues correctly that there is a
‘deep metaphysics’ that lies implicit in Aquinas’s ontology, especially his account of
human nature. The ontological theory of ‘actuality’—or ‘act’ as used in this book—is
central to Aquinas’s account of real beings. Pasnau writes that ‘actuality is explanatorily
basic because it is metaphysically basic, because there is simply nothing else that might
figure into an explanation’.37

Principle B.  A potency as such can only be affected by some ‘X’

or other that is in act
Principle B is co-relative with Principle A. Various texts discuss this interrelationship
between act and potency:
Actuality is not per se contrary to potency; indeed the two are really similar, for potency is
nothing but a certain relationship to act. And without this likeness, there would be no neces-
sary correspondence between this act and this potency. Thus, potency in this sense is not actu-
alized from contrary to contrary, but rather from like to like, in the sense that the potency
resembles its act. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 366)

The following passages note this co-relative connection: ‘a potency is actualized by

something already in act’ (#373), and ‘A thing in potency is one that can be in act’
(Commentary on the Physics, lec. 3, no. 2). This interrelationship between potency and
act applies equally to knowing situations, as the following passage indicates: ‘whenever
a potential knower becomes an actual knower, she must indeed be actualized by what
is already in act’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 371).38

36
  Parenthetically, Kenny, in Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), is critical of this aspect
of Aquinas’s metaphysics. Kerr, in response, once suggested that possibly God should be looked upon as an
event rather than as a ‘being’. Space limitations obviously preclude further analysis of these fascinating
metaphysical questions in the philosophy of religion.
37
  Thomas Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a
75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31; what Pasnau suggests is compatible with the
discussion of the centrality of ‘act’ in this study. Pasnau’s analysis is in an appendix to ch. 4: ‘Excursus met-
aphysicus: Reality as Actuality’, 131–40.
38
  Many traditional scholastic commentators have argued for the importance of the act-potency distinc-
tion in understanding Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology. One such example is Copleston’s classic expo-
sition, Aquinas, where one finds the following account: ‘The foregoing outlines of the distinction between
substance and accident, matter and form, essence and existence, all of which illustrate in their several ways
the general distinction which runs through all finite being, namely, the distinction between act and poten-
tiality.’ See: F. C. Copleston, Aquinas (London: Penguin, 1955), 104. Likewise, Kenny writes: ‘The key con-
cepts in Aquinas’s metaphysics are those of actuality and potentiality. He derives the notions obviously
from Aristotle and from Aristotle’s commentators, but he applies them in new areas and with new degrees
of sophistication’: Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2005), 195. Gilson once argued in much the same vein. ‘The principle of the real distinction between
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

44  aquinas on intentionality

Principle C.  A potency of any ‘X’ must be specified or properly disposed

in order to receive any given act
Principle C, like both Principle A and Principle B, applies to both the existents in a possible
truncated world as well as to cognitive beings capable of intentional acts. This principle
entails that natural entities have dispositional properties. The dispositions, moreover, are
‘tailor-made’ for specific acts, as the following text illustrates: ‘Indeed the two are really
similar in that a potency is nothing more than a certain relationship to an act. Without this
likeness, there would be no necessary correspondence between this act and this potency’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 366). Principle C entails that every potency must be adapted
to receive a specific act. In other words, there is an ontological relationship between a
potency and the specific act that perfects that potency, which entails that a potency or dis-
position is ‘tailor-made’ for a particular act. In Aquinas’s ontology, for example, a category
mistake results if one were to suggest that the form of an oak tree could be embodied with
the matter that was disposed to receive the form of a mouse. In effect, Aquinas argues that
dispositional properties intrinsic to a potency are conditions necessary for a form or an act
to be instantiated in that potency. It follows that, in Aquinas’s ontology, there is no such
ontological existent as ‘pure matter’. The only matter that exists is ‘natured matter’, which
one finds with a substantial form in a primary substance. Accordingly, ‘materia prima’, a
concept that occurs frequently in Aquinas’s texts, is used as a mental construct. It does not
exist separated or by itself—‘fleshed out’, as it were—in the truncated world. Dispositional
properties account for change in the external world. Like Aristotle, Aquinas adopts biol-
ogy as a paradigm of explanation; hence, change and process are endemic to explaining
the external world and our awareness of that world.39
In Aquinas’s ontology, change is a reception of a different form with the ‘substratum’
or ‘subject’ remaining the same. In the Commentary on the Physics, Thomas distin-
guishes between two types of change:
(a) substantial change;
(b) accidental or incidental change.
In the first case, in the primary substance, a new essence results from the change,
while in the second case, some new incidental property accrues to a primary substance
with the essence remaining the same. The substratum or subject in substantial change is
the prime matter however that might be analysed; in incidental change, however, the
substratum or subject is the primary substance of a natural kind. In addition, Aquinas,
following Aristotle, enumerates three kinds of incidental change: qualitative, quantitative,

act and potency is one of the most fundamental and far reaching principles in Thomistic philosophy, having
for St. Thomas an even wider application than for Aristotle from whom it emanated. The two notions are
complementary and are practically synonymous with “being determined” and “being determinable” ’: The
Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. E. Bullough (St Louis: Herder, 1939), p. 78.
39
  The mathematical paradigm of explanation, adopted by Plato following the Pythagoreans, returned in
early modern philosophy with Descartes and is characteristic of much early analytic philosophy; this met-
aphilosophy is fundamentally foreign to Aristotle and Aquinas.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  45

and change of place. Changes central to his philosophy of mind belong to the category
of ‘qualitative’ change. Often such cognitive changes are classified as ‘alterations’.
In Aquinas’s ontology, therefore, since a primary substance is an individual thing, in
the case of substantial change, a new kind of primary substance comes about in the
world; in the second case, the same primary substance remains constant during the
change, but some new incidental property accrues to it. In each instance of change,
however, some ‘X’ or other is serving as a ‘substratum’. Nonetheless, it must be remem-
bered that the ‘X’ as substratum for a substantial change never exists as a concretum
itself. A concretum for incidental change—i.e. the individual primary substance—is
always a compound. Principle C entails that any change, which has been defined by
Aquinas as the reception of a form into a disposition or ‘matter’, can occur only if there
is an adequate relationship between the ‘substratum’ and the ‘received act’. Principle C,
furthermore, applies to instances of both esse intentionale and esse naturale. Both cate-
gories fit under the rubric of a ‘thing’ receiving a different form—one category in
nature and another in knowing. In other words, a form can be exemplified in two radi-
cally different potencies, one in the external order of things and the other in a knowing
power. This ability for two fundamentally different exemplifications of a form is the
root foundation for the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale.
One additional point needs to be made. The metaphysical criterion for the existence
of a set of dispositional properties serving as a substantial form, it might be argued, is a
counterfactual proposition. This claim is not the assertion that the counterfactual prop-
osition itself is the ontological ground for a substantial form. Aquinas is more of a realist
than that. However, the counterfactual proposition is the means or methodological
move for determining whether or not a set of dispositions, which constitute the onto-
logical structure of a primary substance, is present in any given existent. Simply put, the
content of a disposition is not exhausted by the linguistic entity. The counterfactual
proposition is the linguistic means for determining an ontological ground.40 The
mid-twentieth-century writings of Everett J. Nelson on the ontological categories of
causality and substance are instructive in this discussion of Aquinas’s ontology.41 Nelson

40
  Peter T. Geach, Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 4–7. On the status of a counterfac-
tual proposition relative to dispositional properties, Geach’s interpretation is more in line with Aquinas
than is Ryle’s.
41
  Simply put, Nelson distinguished between ‘nomic universal propositions’ and ‘accidental universal
propositions’. An accidental universal proposition refers to a collection of individuals classed together
because of an accidental property; e.g. ‘All the chairs in the room are blue.’ A nomic universal proposition,
on the other hand, refers to a collection of individuals classed together because of an essential property; e.g.
‘All human beings are rational beings.’ A primary substance occurring in nature would be an instance of a
member of a natural kind. Only a nomic universal proposition will uphold a counterfactual proposition.
With an accidental universal proposition, e.g. ‘All chairs in this room are blue’, the following counterfactual
proposition will not hold: ‘If X were a chair in this room, then it would be blue.’ There is nothing about
‘being a chair in this room’ that entails ‘being blue’. It just happens that all of the chairs in a given room are
blue. On the other hand, given a nomic universal property, e.g. ‘All humans are rational beings’, the follow-
ing counterfactual proposition will hold: ‘If S were a human being, then S would be rational.’ See Everett J.
Nelson, ‘The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Induction’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 40 (1967), 19–33.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

46  aquinas on intentionality

used a counterfactual proposition as the means towards establishing the ontological

necessity for the category of substance and the category of causality. Nonetheless, one
should note that, in a similar vein, it is logically possible that Aquinas’s system is com-
patible with using a counterfactual proposition as the means towards establishing
the  ontological necessity for a substantial form determining a natural kind. Using
Aristotelian terminology, the counterfactual proposition forces one to consider the dis-
tinction between essential and accidental properties. Because a substantial form deter-
mines the set of dispositional properties essential to a primary substance of a natural
kind, the use of counterfactual propositions is a fruitful analytic device for determining
the category difference between properties of substantial forms and properties of acci-
dental forms. Aristotle spells out this distinction between essential predication and
accidental predication in the Categories, where he distinguishes between properties
‘said of ’ a substance and properties ‘found in’ a substance (Categories, 1a20–24).

Principle D.  An act remains ‘specifically’ the same but it may have different
embodiments or exemplifications in different potencies
This principle asserts that the ‘species’—i. e. the content—of an act remains the same
even though different existential instances or embodiments of the species or natural
kind exist. All existential instances are different numerically from one another but
remain specifically the same. This is Aquinas’s way of suggesting a solution to the per-
ennial ‘one–many’ problem. The basic sameness of things grouped together in natural
kinds is accounted for because members of each group possess substantial forms iden-
tical in content. Individuality or particularity, on the other hand, occurs insofar as
these forms, which are specifically the same, have been instantiated in different poten-
cies. An entailment of this principle is that the ‘matter’ or ‘potency’ of any given thing is
that which accounts for its individuality. In De Ente et Essentia, Aquinas writes: ‘The
principle of distinct individuality is not matter in any and every sense of the word, but
only marked-off matter. By marked-off matter I mean matter thought of as having defi-
nite dimensions’ (De Ente et Essentia, lec. 2).
The principle of distinct individuality is what Aquinas refers to as ‘materia signata
quantitate’. Furthermore, the individuating principle requires not merely that matter
be ‘marked off ’ but that it is ‘properly disposed’. What is properly disposed can receive
the same type or species of form, i.e. forms of the same species. Therefore, an act, while
remaining specifically the same as to content, can be found in numerically different
potencies. Principle D refers also to incidental change. A primary substance might be
the subject of changing incidental qualities, with the subject itself remaining the same.
In this case, the incidental quality could be specifically the same yet be instantiated in
several primary substances, which are different numerically.
Principle D also expands the significance of Principle A. Taken with Principle A, the
previous discussion makes it clear that an ontological act—either a substantial form or
an incidental form—can never be an ontological existent by itself. Any awareness of
this kind of isolated act must be a mental construct. If the act were not a construct but
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  47

had existence by itself, then it would follow that Aquinas is a Platonist; this would
entail that Aquinas embraced some form of extreme realism—universalia ante rem,
either in rerum natura or in a subsistent transcendental realm—which he denies as
holding in the natural world.42 Parenthetically, this is why Aquinas postulated the intel-
lectus agens as a necessary condition for abstraction in preparation for concept forma-
tion. However, this construct of the form is not a fiction. Rather, in the case of
substantial form, it is the ontological ground for establishing the necessity of a coun-
terfactual proposition. The above analysis elucidates part of the cash value of the often-
used category of ‘moderate realism’ when referring to Aristotelian ontology.

Principle D-1.  A knower is, by definition, any ‘X’ which has

a set of dispositional properties to acquire or to exemplify acts
in a non-entitative or non-materialist manner
This principle is a corollary, albeit an extremely important one, of Principle D. In
Brentano’s terminology, this corollary is a description of the fundamental principle
elucidating Aquinas’s thesis of intentionality. This is the case if one considers an inten-
tionality thesis as the philosophical description distinguishing ontologically a knower
from a non-knower. Principle D-1, therefore, indicates the structural difference
between knowers and non-knowers.43 In Aquinas’s ontology, this principle establishes
the basis of intentionality.44 Principle D-1 asserts that a knower has cognitive potencies
or dispositions to receive or to be impressed with acts in a special manner or mode.
This special manner or mode entails that a knower, when receiving or exemplifying an
intentional form, neither literally nor entitatively becomes the type of thing which the
knower knows. Accordingly, a knower is, by definition, an existent that possesses a
peculiar set of dispositional cognitive properties enabling it to take on the form of the
material thing ‘immaterially’. This immaterial reception of a form implies that a dis-
tinct object with formal existence (esse naturale) does not come about from the
informing of a cognitive power or potency: on the contrary, this results in an esse inten-
tionale. In this context, it is necessary that the concept of ‘immateriality’ not be misun-
derstood. It does not refer to a spiritual entity akin to a Cartesian ‘res cogitans’, which is
an immaterial substance. Rather, it refers to a knower’s possession of the requisite set of
dispositional properties enabling that particular knower to acquire acts or forms with-
out the act or form becoming existentially ‘tied down’ with a material potency.

42
  Aquinas does postulate a ‘Divine Exemplarism’ with Divine Ideas analogous to Plato’s forms subsist-
ing in the Divine Mind. Of course, this must be reconciled with Divine Simplicity. Nonetheless, a terrestrial
form never exists by itself without being instantiated in matter. This is what McDowell refers to as ‘an
embodied form with matter’.
43
  Brentano knew about intentionality and the medieval analysis of knowledge; see Franz Brentano,
Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt, trans. D. B. Terrell: ‘Every mental phenomenon is characterized
by what the scholastics of the middle ages called the intentional or mental inexistence of an object’:
Roderick M. Chisholm, Realism and the Background to Phenomenology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), 50.
44
  Bergmann wrote, ‘the characteristic feature of minds (knowers) is their intentionality’: Meaning and
Existence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), p. vi.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

48  aquinas on intentionality

That Aquinas regards knowledge faculties as cognitive potencies or dispositions is

expressed in the following passage: ‘The senses and the intellect are distinguished
from the sensible and the intelligible objects in that both the senses and the intellect
are in the state of potentiality’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 14 a. 2; emphasis added). In a
general sense, therefore, there are two modes for the reception or exemplification of
forms into potencies: (a) materially or entitatively and (b) immaterially or intention-
ally. An entitative reception of a form, either a substantial form or an incidental form,
entails a new instantiation of a physical existent. The result is an entity that has esse
naturale. It is either a new kind of a thing or a thing with a new incidental property.
An immaterial reception of a form, on the other hand, entails the instantiation of a
‘piece of knowing’. The result is an act of awareness that has an esse intentionale.
Aquinas discusses a twofold division of ‘immutation’ in the reception of forms; this
division corresponds to the reception of forms entailing either an esse naturale or an
esse intentionale.

There are two kinds of immutation or change, natural and intentional. It is natural change
when the form of the source of change is received into the subject of the change in a physical
manner. An example would be heat as it is absorbed by the object being heated. It is an inten-
tional change when the form of the source of change is received in the subject of change in an
immaterial manner. An example would be the manner in which the form of color is in the eye.
The eye does not become physically the color it sees. The activity of the senses involves imma-
terial reception of forms. In this way, the intention of the sensed form comes to be in the sense
organ. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3)

In the Supplement to the Tertia Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas explains more
fully this distinction regarding the two kinds of immutation or alteration:

However, it must be observed that things outside of the soul in two ways affect (immutat) the
organs of the senses:
(a) First, by a natural affecting (immutatio), when namely the organ is disposed by the
same natural quality as the thing outside the soul, which acts on that organ. For
instance, when the hand is heated by touching a hot object, or becomes fragrant through
contact with a fragrant object.
(b) Secondly, by a spiritual (intentional) affecting (immutatio), as when a sensible quality
is received in an instrument, according to a spiritual (intentional) mode of being,
when, namely, the species or the intention (intentio) of a quality, and not the quality
itself is received. Thus, the pupil receives the species of whiteness and yet does not
itself become white.

Accordingly, the first reception does not cause sensation, properly speaking, because the senses
are receptive of species in matter but without matter, which is to say, without the material
‘being’ which the species had outside the soul. (De Anima, ii lec. 121)
This reception affects the nature of the recipient, because in this way the quality is received
according to its material ‘being’. (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 82 a. 3)
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  49

Aquinas explicitly uses the term ‘intentio’ in the above passage. In his response to the
second objection to the above text, Aquinas comments: ‘inanimate bodies are altered
by sensible qualities only naturally and not spiritually (i.e. intentionally)’ (Summa
Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 82 a. 3 ad 2).
Haldane writes about the esse intentionale and esse naturale distinction as follows:
Each actuality (thought and object) has a structuring principle (concept and substantial form);
and these principles, though distinct in the modes of their actualization, are specifically alike.
The form of dog exists naturally and substantially (in esse naturale) in the dog, and intention-
ally and predicatively (in esse intentionale) in the thought.45

The important insight that Haldane offers is that in intentionality theory, the inten-
tional form is in a predicative mode exemplifying the content of the substantial form,
but in a different manner. It is not a substantive mode and thus not an instantiation of
this form. It follows that in Aquinas’s account, there are non-empirical modes for the
reception of forms. Furthermore, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul,
Aquinas asserts unequivocally that the ‘receiving of a form without matter’ is the onto-
logical ground for distinguishing a being with only esse naturale from a being capable
of possessing an esse intentionale. This denotes the ontological ground for intentional-
ity. Here, Aquinas elaborates upon this twofold manner of receiving forms with an
explicit reference to the esse intentionale involved in sense perception.
Every potency receives something from the agent insofar as it is an agent. Yet an agent acts
through its form, and not through its matter. Therefore, every potency receives a form without
matter.
Sometimes, however, a form is received into a potency according to a different mode of
being than that found in the agent. . . . In this way, the senses receive form without matter,
because the form has a different mode of being in sense knowledge than in a physical object.
For in a physical object, the form has natural being (esse naturale) while in sense knowledge, it
has intentional being (esse intentionale). (Commentary on the Soul, no. 553)

This distinction between esse naturale and esse intentionale entails that in Aquinas’s
ontology, there are at least two generic classes of things—knowers and non-knowers.
Non-knowers are grouped into real classes—specific ontological categories—insofar
as a group of existents—water, sodium chloride, poplar trees, acorns, and so forth—
possess the same kind of substantial form. In other words, a class or natural kind of
thing is determined insofar as each member of that class or kind has the same set of
specific, sortal dispositional properties. This follows from an earlier suggestion that a
substantial form in Thomas’s ontology is best analysed in terms of the ontological
ground for a supreme set of dispositional properties determining a natural kind of
specific objects.
45
  John Haldane, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, in David S. Oderberg (ed.), Form and
Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 54. Haldane’s essay is instructive
in discussing these issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and in traditional Aristotelian theory.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

50  aquinas on intentionality

Each distinct group of knowers possesses in its substantial form a supreme set of dispo-
sitions, which might be referred to as ‘a primary integrated complex of dispositions’. This
formal structure places the knower into a specific natural kind—e.g. cats, horses, sheep-
dogs, human beings. The class-determining set of dispositional properties in knowers,
however, contains one additional set of dispositional properties which non-knowers lack.
This additional set of dispositional properties comprises the cognitive abilities to receive
forms in a non-entitative manner. Hence, the ability to receive or exemplify forms in a
non-entitative manner as instances of esse intentionale—both through sense knowledge
and intellectual knowledge—spells out the ontological force of Principle D-1.
Aquinas argues that not every thing possessing an Aristotelian ‘soul’ can have
knowledge:
Aristotle’s analysis also gives us the answer to another question, namely, why plants do not feel,
though they have some share in soul and are affected by certain sense-objects; i.e., tangible things,
as well as by heat and cold. The reason why they do not feel is that they lack the proportion needed
for sensation, in particular that balance between extremes of the tangible qualities which is a pre-
requisite of the organ of touch, apart from which there can be no sensation. Hence, they have no
intrinsic principle for receiving forms ‘apart from matter’. This means that they have no sense. They
are affected and undergo changes only materially. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 557)

Only some individual natures have substantial forms possessing dispositional proper-
ties constituted as cognitive powers. Some of these powers are connected with bodily
organs. This set comprises the external and the internal senses. In human knowers,
another power exists independently of any set of bodily powers, and this would be the
intellect, both active (intellectus agens) and possible (intellectus possibilis) for Aquinas.
By way of summary, the following passage indicates that an additional set of
dispositional properties establishes the ontological difference between knowers and
non-knowers:
Knowing agents differ from those that do not know because non-knowers possess their own
form only. On the other hand, the knower is adapted from its origin to possess the form of
another thing. This means that the species of the known thing may be present in the knower.
The nature of a non-knower is more restricted and limited, while the nature of a knower has
greater fullness and extension. This is why the Philosopher claims in the Third Book of On the
Soul that ‘the soul is in a way all these things’. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 14 a. 1)

The above collection of texts establishes the importance Aquinas gave to the concept of
immateriality as the characteristic property grounding his thesis of intentionality. In
his Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas elucidates this concept of immateriality in terms
of a set of dispositional properties which places an individual into a particular class—
which is obviously the class of knowers:
We speak [. . .] in one sense of a potency when we say that a human person is a knower. This
refers to the person’s natural capacity for knowledge. A human being, we say, is one of that class
of beings that know or have knowledge, meaning this, that a person’s human nature can know
and form habits of knowing. (Commentary on the Soul, #359)
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  51

A human person is said to be ‘able’ (to know) through belonging to a certain genus or
‘matter’; that is, one’s human nature has a certain disposition that puts the person in this
genus, and the person as knower is in potency to knowledge as matter is to form. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 360)

In the last passage, ‘matter’ refers to ‘second matter’; this concept of second matter—
also what Aristotle refers to as ‘secondary substance’—is best understood as the
essence of a primary substance.
Aquinas’s characterization of intentionality, moreover, is not merely as an ordinary
dispositional property. Rather, the built-in characteristic of ‘tending towards’ or
‘aboutness’ is part of the ontological structure of this dispositional property. Aquinas
stresses continually that all knowledge implies that the thing known is somehow pres-
ent in the knower. Accordingly, the set of dispositional properties, which constitutes a
knower as a knower, enables the knower to go beyond itself and yet not physically and
entitatively become that which it is ‘tending towards’.46 In Aquinas’s ontology, there-
fore, immateriality is the ontological dimension grounding the possibility of inten-
tionality. In discussing Empedocles’s theory of perception in his Commentary on the
Soul, Aquinas offers additional analysis of the claims of immateriality and the basic
‘tending towards’ property characteristic of mental acts. Empedocles held as his prin-
cipal epistemological principle: ‘Like knows like.’ Furthermore, Empedocles provided
a literal interpretation of this principle. An entailment of this principle is that the sense
faculties are constituted entitatively of the same kinds of object that exist in the mate-
rial world. According to Empedocles, the elements, which make up the sense faculties
and enable perception to occur, are the same structurally and entitatively as the con-
stituents of the physical objects in the external world. In commenting upon the
Empedoclean principle and its implications for the philosophy of mind, Aquinas spells
out his own thesis about knowledge:
note that all, who, like Empedocles, said that like was known by like, thought that the senses were
actually sense objects—that the sensitive soul was able to know all sense objects because it con-
sisted somehow of those objects; that is, of the elements of which the latter are composed.

Two things follow from this hypothesis put forward by Empedocles:

(a) If the senses actually are, or are made up of, the sense objects, then, if the latter can be
sensed, the senses themselves can be sensed.

46
  ‘The purpose of this chapter is to explore what I conceive to be the profound truth contained in the
Thomistic thesis that the senses in their way and the intellect in its way are informed by the natures of
external objects and events’: Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Being and Being Known’, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 34 (1960), 209. In The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum discusses the directedness
of mental activities towards an object: ‘[Aristotle . . .] holds […] that the account of each particular orexis
and each particular phantasia or aisthesis or noesis will involve some essential reference to an object in the
world towards which that activity is directed, characterizing it under some intentional description’: Martha
C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 274–8; orexis is
desire, phantasia is imagination, aisthesis is sense awareness, and noesis is cognition. Each mental act is
directed towards an object; Nussbaum argues that the roots of this analysis are found in Plato.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

52  aquinas on intentionality

(b) Since the presence of its object actually exists in the faculty of sense as part of its com-
position, it follows that perception can take place in the absence of external objects.
But both of these consequences are false. (Commentary on the Soul, nos 352, 353)

In refuting Empedocles’s position, Aquinas in effect ruled out any theory of physical-
ism or reductive materialism—positions that Thomas ascribes to the ancient natural-
ists (‘antiqui naturales’) (Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 75 a. 1 ad 2).47 In Aquinas’s theory,
neither Cartesian substance dualism nor reductive materialism is compatible with a
thesis of intentionality. Texts in both the Summa Theologiae and the Commentary assist
in this analysis of intentionality.
In contemporary philosophy, Haldane argues against a physicalist account of
Aquinas’s theory of intentionality: ‘Thus, in so far as Physicalism is committed to the
possibility of a descriptively adequate extensionalist theory of human beings, the
ineliminabilty of intentional characterisations is problematic.’48 This is not an ersatz
issue in Aquinas’s theory because Sorabji argues for a physicalist account of intentional-
ity in Aristotle and theories based upon the Aristotelian theory of sense and mind. In
addition, Cohen argued that for Aquinas, the immaterial reception of a form in sensa-
tion is a reductively physical process.49 The value of the above passage does not lie in the
arguments Aquinas provides attempting to refute representationalism. Rather, their
philosophical import lies in what is affirmed within the passage. If ‘like knows like’ is an
adequate philosophy of mind principle, then it must be understood in a manner quite
different from the analysis put forward by Empedocles. In effect, Aquinas affirms the
following two propositions: (a) the centrality of an immaterial or intentional reception
of forms—point number one in the above passage; (b) a basic ‘tending towards’ or
‘aboutness’ property to an object beyond the knower itself—point number two.

The Act/Object Distinction

In considering Aquinas on intentionality, one needs to recall Aristotle’s conception of
the act/object distinction.50 In the Metaphysics, this distinction is central to Aristotelian
intentionality theory, which also indicates his realism and externalism: ‘But it is clear
that knowledge, perception, opinion and understanding always have some object
other than themselves. They are only incidentally their own objects. [. . .] “Thinking”

47
  For a resourceful discussion of the antiqui naturales, see Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature,
30–4.
48
  Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’, 165.
49
  S. M. Cohen, ‘St. Thomas Aquinas on the Immaterial Reception of Sensible Forms’, Philosophical
Review 91(2) (1982), 193–209. In responding to this critique, Haldane appears to agree with part of Cohen’s
analysis allowing ‘that sensation is a physical process having physical products’: See: ‘Aquinas on Sense-
Perception’, The Philosophical Review 92(2) (1983), 239. Haldane changes his analysis in later writings.
50
  This distinction, especially as entertained in the epistemological treatises of modern and contempo-
rary philosophers like Brentano, Moore, Russell, and Bergmann, often served as a basis for intentionality
theory.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  53

and “being thought of ” are different. [. . .] For the essences of “thinking” and “being
thought of ” are not the same’ (Metaphysics, bk XII, ch. 9).
The text just considered illustrates the importance of the act/object distinction.
Insofar as the object is distinct from the mental act, this suggests the need for a connec-
tion between the mental act and the object known. This connection is analysed in
terms of a property of ‘tending towards’, which in turn is grounded in the unique char-
acteristic of the immaterial dispositions providing for the ontological possibility of
intentionality. This is the root analysis explaining the possibility of knowing provided
in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. This distinction reiterates the claim, not surprisingly,
that in the Aristotelian–Aquinian philosophy of mind, idealism is false. Aquinas is an
ontological realist to the core.
The philosophical weight of combined passages and, a fortiori, of Principle D-1
itself is that a knower, when it takes on or exemplifies the form of an object in the
external world, does not itself literally and physically become the object as it is in the
material world. This principle and its elucidation in terms of an immaterial manner of
becoming are necessary conditions for an analysis of Aquinas’s thesis of intentionality.
Were it not for a knower’s possessing the unique set of dispositional, cognitive proper-
ties capable of being actualized and activated by the form of an object without literally
becoming that object entitatively, then, it could be argued, Aquinas could not explain
the possibility of knowledge.51 Given the Aquinian ontology in terms of hylomor-
phism, the possibility of esse intentionale, and a fortiori of discussions in the philoso-
phy of mind, would be removed a priori. This indicates once again the ontological
dimension to Aquinas’s theory of intentionality. A natural entity existing in the exter-
nal world is there only because it has esse naturale. An act of awareness in a knower is
there only because this act of awareness is of an object that possesses esse intentionale
in a knower. Hence, in Aquinas’s system, there are two kinds of existence that a thing
might possess: things that exist naturally outside of the mind’s awareness and things
that have the ontological capacity to have acts of awareness; and when an act of aware-
ness of an object is in a knower, this is an exemplification of an esse intentionale. Hence
there are two categories of the act of existence—natural existence and intentional
existence. A knower has the capacity to have an intentional existence of an object. This
is the root foundation of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. While it is similar structurally
to the insights of Brentano, nonetheless it is rooted in the ontological possibility of a
being undertaking acts of mental awareness. Hence, what Aquinas proposes is close to
Chisholm’s account of intentionality, and removed from the classical phenomenolo-
gist attempt at ‘pure description’ of mental acts of awareness.52

51
  Often Aquinas uses the term ‘being impressed with’, which is reducible to ‘being actualized by’ or
‘being realized by’. In effect, this means that the cognitive potency is actualized by either an incidental or a
substantial form. The process of cognitive abstraction requires the intellectus agens, a process which will be
discussed in the final chapter.
52
  Historically, this intentional reception of forms is similar structurally to the distinction Descartes
utilized in the Third Meditation between formal and objective reality (realitas formalis and realitas
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

54  aquinas on intentionality

The purpose of indicating other sources like Descartes, Brentano, Husserl, and
Chisholm in this analysis of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is not to suggest that all five
philosophers entertained identical intentionality theories. Certainly they did not.
Rather it suggests that Aquinas’s method in discussing an ‘immaterial reception of
forms’ is not as odd epistemologically as one might at first glance suspect. In effect,
Aquinas’s account is akin structurally to any philosophy-of-mind discussion in terms
of the general characteristics of an ontologically based intentionality theory. It is con-
nected less with contemporary intentionality theories suggesting that propositional
attitudes are sufficient conditions for an analysis of intentionality. Needless to say,
among philosophers there are specific differences regarding various accounts on
intentionality. As an epistemologist considering intentionality, Aquinas attempts to
provide an ontological analysis and explanation of what it means to be a knower. His
explanation of this primitive datum of human experience is through the notion of
‘having a form in an immaterial manner’. By this account, Aquinas believes that he
offers an analysis of why, when a knower is aware of ‘red’ or ‘horse’, this knower,
although receiving a form, nevertheless does not become another red object or another
horse in the world. If this immaterial reception of forms were not the case, assuming
the hylomorphism of Aquinas’s ontology, it would follow that every contact of an act
on a potency would produce another object or quality in the external world.
Accordingly, there would be no possibility of explaining the pre-analytic datum of
knowledge. Obviously Aquinas’s account is couched within a framework of
Aristotelian hylomorphism. Furthermore, this explanation is in concert with an ear-
lier claim that Aquinas’s philosophy of mind follows from his ontological account of
primary substances. If a primary substance is an ontological conjoining of matter and
both substantial and incidental forms, then Aquinas’s intentionality thesis explains
how these two forms as ontological structures of reality are known. This explains how
Thomas accounts for the possibility of knowing a primary substance and its incidental
properties. In his On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists, Aquinas elaborates
on this point: ‘If there were some colour within the pupil, that inside colour would
make it impossible for an outside colour to be seen, and in some way would prevent the
eye from seeing other things’ (ch. 1, sect. 20).
This principle describing the immaterial reception of forms as the basis of an inten-
tionality thesis is, therefore, the central principle in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The
denial of Principle D-1 entails the abolition of the distinction between esse naturale
and esse intentionale. Furthermore, the principle of immaterial reception of forms is

objectiva): ‘This truth is not only clear and evident in regard to the effects which philosophers call actual or
formal reality, but also in regard to the ideas where one considers only what they call objective reality’: See
Meditation III. While textual criticism revolves around Descartes’s use of realitas objectiva, nonetheless in
the Third Meditation his use of the term seems conceptually similar to what Aquinas meant in discussing
intentionality. When Brentano wrote about the distinction between the ‘class of physical and the class of
mental phenomena’ he provided his own analysis of this distinction. Moreover, Husserl suggested that
Brentano ‘presented to the modern era the idea of intentionality’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  55

the basis for the isomorphism between the form in the mind and the form in the world.
Ultimately, this isomorphism is the structural ground for the possibility of veridical,
objective knowledge. Concerning the necessity of isomorphism in order to ground the
very possibility of knowledge, Sellars once set out the following principle, one with
which Aquinas would agree: ‘I believe it must be granted that unless the sensation of a
white, triangular thing were in some way isomorphic with its external cause, knowl-
edge of the physical world would be impossible.’53 Within Aquinas’s metaphysics,
therefore, a denial of Principle D-1 entails the a priori impossibility of knowledge. The
realism is evident, and there are no lingering shadows of postmodernism. By his the-
ory of forms, Aquinas articulates the possibility for an epistemological realism and an
ontological realism, both of which are rooted in his externalism.

A Brief Interlude
What is surprising about all of this, when considered from the historical distance of
more than a half-century, is that, while the twin characteristics of philosophical real-
ism and an adherence to the role of common sense permeated the discussions of the
early analytic philosophers, as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin,
the great realist philosophers of the Aristotelian tradition were, for all practical pur-
poses, overlooked, neglected, and ignored. The analysis put forward in this chapter
suggests that this oversight is a conceptual pity. The Aristotelian philosophy of mind
tradition, especially as found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, offers insights regard-
ing the nature of sensation and perception that might have moved these perception
discussions forward in important ways. Hence, the analysis of philosophical concepts
found in the writings of Aquinas, especially as spelled out in his detailed Commentary
on Aristotle’s De Anima, are philosophical themes with much more than historical
interest. These discussions encompass analyses of intentionality theory, adopting a
role of common sense, rendering a distinction between sensation and perception, elu-
cidating a naturalistic philosophy of mind, treating what Davidson once called an
‘anomality of the mental’, rejecting what Putnam refers to as ‘the inner theatre of the
mind’, and finally transcending the limits of British empiricism. Putnam’s denial that
the mind is an ‘inner theatre’ is akin structurally to the common-sense philosophy of
mind defended by Aquinas.54 Putnam’s ‘inner theatre’ model is a direct reference to
representationalism, which is familiar in all Cartesian and Lockean philosophy of
mind and is found in Russsell’s writings.
In responding to Russell and others, representationalism entails that efficient
causation is a sufficient condition to explain sensation and perception. Secondly,

53
  Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Humanities Press, 1963), 47.
54
 Hilary Putnam, ‘Aristotle’s Mind and the Contemporary Mind’, in Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou,
Jagdish Hattiangadi, and David M. Johnson (eds), Aristotle and Contemporary Science (New York: Lang,
2000), vol. 1, 7–28.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

56  aquinas on intentionality

r­ epresentationalism assumes what McDowell and Putnam call ‘the highest common
factor’ for a veridical awareness and a non-veridical awareness (e.g. an illusion). Both
Putnam and McDowell suggest, on the other hand, that this analysis is a ‘disjunctive
account’ lacking the common factor that most representationalists assume. This
account suggesting the lack of a common property linking sense perception with illu-
sion is most helpful in understanding Aquinas on intentionality theory, for Aquinas
too acknowledges this disjunction. In writing about direct realism—what he some-
times refers to as ‘natural realism’—Putnam comments on McDowell’s work along the
same lines, which is similar to what Aquinas might have said:
McDowell argues persuasively that this picture, whether in its classical version or in its mod-
ern materialist version, is disastrous for just about every part of metaphysics and epistemol-
ogy. In McDowell’s terminology the key assumption responsible for the disaster is the idea
that there has to be an interface between our cognitive powers and the external world. [. . .]
Accounts of perception that reject this claim are conventionally referred to as ‘direct realist’
accounts. [. . .] But there is less to some versions of ‘direct realism’ than meets the eye. [. . .] All
one has to do to be a direct realist about visual experience, for example, is to say, ‘We don’t
perceive visual experiences, we have them. [. . .] ‘We perceive external things—that is, we are
caused to have certain subjective experiences in the appropriate way by those external things’,
such a philosopher can say.55

While agreeing with this account in both Putnam and McDowell, Haldane raises the
question about how this account of direct realism is possible. Like Aquinas, Haldane
requires as a necessary condition some connection between the object in the external
world and our intentional awareness of that object. It is at this juncture that Haldane,
reverting to his Aquinas thrust, requires some account of both an efficient cause and a
formal cause. This aspect of formal cause is a necessary condition in order for Aquinas
to render an account of direct realism. One must take Aquinas literally here—there is a
strict, formal identity of form between the knower and the known. This is what
Aquinas means when he claims, ‘Sensus in actu est sensible in actu’, and ‘Intellectus in
actu est intelligible in actu’. What makes knowledge possible is that the form known is
identical with the form in the thing. This holds for both sense knowledge and intellec-
tual knowledge. Haldane comments: ‘What does this mean? And how is it possible? It
means that when I think of something, that which makes my thought to be the kind of
thought it is [. . .] is formally identical to that which makes the object of my thought to
be the kind of thing it is.’56
This concludes the extended analysis of Principle D-1, which is the foundational
claim upon which Aquinas builds his thesis of intentionality.

55
  Hilary Putnam, ‘Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind’,
Journal of Philosophy 91(9) (1994), 453–4.
56
  Haldane, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, 54. A cognitive capacity has the ontological
power to have an esse intentionale, which is that by means of which a thing in the external world is known.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  57

Principle E.  A form is, by definition, an act

This principle indicates why Aquinas writes that a knower takes on the ‘form’ of an
object in the external world. Structurally, the relation of form to act also applies to
Aquinas’s ontology: ‘For, because of form, which is an actuation of matter, matter is
made into an actual thing’ (De Ente et Essentia, lec. 2). The concept of form is con-
nected intrinsically with the concept of the act/potency distinction. It is only upon
realization of the latter distinction that the former concept can be understood.57

Principle F.  An ‘X’ is knowable only insofar as it is in act

Given Principles A, B, and D-1, Principle F might be considered a derived proposition.
If a knower, which is an existent capable of receiving a form of another immaterially,
takes on the act of an object in an immaterial manner, then the object, which is known,
must have been in act before it could have been known. This philosophical statement
follows from Aquinas’s notion that every potency is affected only by something which
is in act. This is a restatement of Principle B.
Aquinas argues for two different kinds of potencies:
(a) ontological potencies (which are the materia prima and materia secunda in the
individual);
(b) epistemological potencies (which are the cognitive faculties of the external sen-
sorium, the faculties of the internal sensorium and the intellectus possibilis).
It follows from Principle F that neither an ontological potency nor an epistemological
potency is a direct object of knowledge. An ontological potency is either a mental
­construct—e.g. materia prima—or known by means of a complicated abstractive pro-
cess of the intellectus agens working in tandem with the intellectus possibilis—e.g. mate-
ria secunda or the set of sortal properties rooted in an essence of a primary substance.
Neither kind of ontological potency can have an extra mental referent, which is capa-
ble of informing an epistemological potency. Noted above is the claim that if an onto-
logical potency had an extra mental referent—especially in the case of materia
secunda—then Aquinas would be a Platonist. Moreover, epistemological potencies are
themselves never the direct object of knowledge. Principle F holds that neither facul-
ties of the external or the internal sensorium nor the intellectus possibilis can know
themselves by an act of direct awareness.
In Aquinas’s account of perception, reflective awareness is only possible because
there is a specific faculty—the sensus communis—by which one can be aware of the

57
  Concerning this principle, it should be noted that this dos not entail that an act is identified with a
form. Rather, a form is a type of act. That Aquinas would not make such an identification is apparent from
the fact that in his ontology, as noted above, God is ‘Pure Actuality’—an Actus Purus—but not a form. A
form is a type of act, which needs a potential complement. The combination of this potential complement
with an act brings about an existent. Thus form and act are neither identical nor coextensive.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

58  aquinas on intentionality

acts of the external senses.58 The sensus communis is that faculty by means of which a
perceiver is aware that she is aware. Put differently, the acts of awareness become the
object of a second act of awareness of the sensus communis. The sensus communis will
be discussed in detail later. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Aquinas argued that
the intellectus possibilis is capable of self-reflection. This is due to the complete spirit-
uality or immateriality of this faculty. In other words, it is not tied ontologically to any
physiological organ; Aquinas is not a physicalist. This claim, however, requires a much
more detailed analysis than can be given here.59
Principle F further amplifies Principle D-1. The ontological potency is what gives
‘body’ or ‘fleshing-out’ to the materially existing concretum. In Aquinas’s ontology,
weight and extension follow from (in the sense of being ontologically dependent upon)
matter. And matter is the ultimate potency of any physical object. An epistemological
potency, on the other hand, is the cognitive capacity to receive the form of an existing
thing but not to give that form a material embodiment as happens with an ontological
potency. In one sense, however, there is a ‘fleshing-out’ with respect to the epistemo-
logical potencies. It is by means of an epistemological potency that a ‘piece of knowl-
edge’ is anchored into a particular space–time context, with the result that a cognitive
agent now is engaged in an act of knowing.
The ontological force of Principle D-1, together with Principle F, is that if an episte-
mological potency were exactly the same as an ontological potency in all of its func-
tions, then this identity would rule out a priori the possibility of a knowing agent’s
possessing esse intentionale. Thus, Principles D-1 and F ground ontologically the pos-
sibility for making the distinction between esse naturale and esse intentionale.
Moreover, these two principles elucidate that ‘funny characteristic’ that Chisholm
used to ground the distinction between existents capable of intentional acts and those
other existents manifesting only physical phenomena. Immanent action is a central
item in discussing Aquinas’s account of mental acts.60 This further indicates that
Aquinas adopts the ontological theory of intentionality.

58
  In order to avoid confusion over various pre-philosophical discussions of ‘common sense’, it seems
preferable in this study to leave the terms of this internal sense faculty in the Latin customary to the uni-
versity discussions of Thomas’s time. Hence, the terms ‘sensus communis’ are used throughout this book as
the mode of referring to what Aquinas refers to as the ‘common sense’ faculty. This term is not coextensive
with what Reid or Moore meant by common sense.
59
  On this issue, Kenny and Haldane differ on the need of a material vehicle for the intellectus possibilis.
See John Haldane, ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’, in John Cottingham and Peter Hacker
(eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010),
119–39.
60
  Aquinas distinguishes between a transient action and an immanent action. A transient action is a
physical change, while an immanent action is intentional in character. The immanent action remains
within the agent while the transient action passes out to another thing. It follows from this distinction that
intentional acts are not esse naturale because every change bringing about an esse naturale would be a
transient action. Furthermore, every actio humana would be immanent while every actio hominis would be
transient. In the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes: ‘Sentire et intelligere sunt actiones
immanentes.’
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  59

This concludes the elucidation of the seven principles of intentionality, which are
presupposed in the philosophy of mind of Thomas Aquinas. These seven principles
spell out the metaphysical machinery acknowledged, at least implicitly, in those writ-
ings of Aquinas concerned with explaining the possibility of knowing. A clear elucida-
tion of this machinery in terms of principles of intentionality is necessary in order to
provide some insight into a rather difficult bit of philosophy of mind theory. That the
Aquinian account is difficult no one will deny.
After this discussion of Aquinas’s account of intentionality, the next item for consid-
eration is an inquiry into how Aquinas fits into the general categories of the classical
rationalism/empiricism debates. It is difficult to classify either Aristotle or Aquinas
within the rigid categories for differing philosophy-of-mind theories commonly used
by historians of modern and contemporary philosophy. Chapter  3 begins these
discussions.

appendix
Aquinas and Contemporary Intentionality Theory
While it is customary to begin discussions of Aquinas on intentionality theory by referring to
passages from Brentano, nonetheless the place where Aquinas falls in such theories as spelled
out in contemporary discussions needs to be indicated. Like most philosophical concepts,
intentionality theory means different things to different philosophers. It is more a ‘family
resemblance’ than a concept with a strictly defined set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
The following discussion merely hints at the differences found in contemporary and historical
accounts of intentionality theory.
Franz Brentano (1838–1917) is considered the philosophical godfather of contemporary
discussions on intentionality theory. Interest by analytic philosophers harkens back to
Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirschen Standpunkt, which brought the medieval concept of
intentionality theory into mainstream analytic philosophy.61 A classic expression often
considered in contemporary essays on mind is Brentano’s first principle of intentionality:
The data of our consciousness make up a world which, taken in its entirety, falls into two great classes,
the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena. [. . .] Every presentation of sensation or imag-
ination offers an example of the mental phenomena. [. . .] Thus hearing a sound, seeing a colored
object, sensing warm or cold, and the comparable states of imagination as well, are examples of what
I mean. [. . .]
Examples of physical phenomena, on the other hand, are a color, a shape, a landscape, which I see; a
musical chord which I hear; heat, cold, odor, which I sense. [. . .] These examples may suffice as concrete
illustrations of the distinction between the two classes.62

61
  Kerr reminds us of the importance of Bolzano in these discussions. See Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘Origins of
Analytical Philosophy’, New Blackfriars 84(991) (2003), 387.
62
 Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, trans. Terrell, in Chisholm, Realism and the
Background to Phenomenology, 39–41.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

60  aquinas on intentionality

Brentano is given credit for introducing the concept of intentionality into contemporary
philosophy-of-mind discussions. Furthermore, he exerted substantial influence on both
contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary phenomenology. Russell and Moore,
through their analyses of Meinong’s philosophy on objects and their combined refutations of
idealism, helped introduce intentionality theory into English-speaking philosophy. Later,
Geach in the context of analytic philosophy incorporated these discussions into his analysis of
Aquinas on intentionality. The phenomenologists, on the other hand, appealed to Brentano’s
concept of intentionality in order to begin what they considered to be ‘descriptive’ accounts of
mental experience. This is especially true of Husserl. Husserl, often referred to by historians of
twentieth-century philosophy as ‘the father of phenomenology’, once remarked that it was
Brentano who ‘earned the epoch-making advantage of making phenomenology possible [. . . in
that] he presented to the modern era the idea of Intentionality’.63 Brentano played important
roles in the eventual evolution of both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental
phenomenology, and is thus considered the philosophical godfather of two distinct
contemporary developments in intentionality theory.
It was Chisholm who introduced the concept of intentionality into mainstream American
analytic philosophy: ‘Franz Brentano wrote, in a well-known passage, that intentionality is
peculiar to psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon, he said, shows anything like it;
hence, intentionality affords us a criterion of the mental or psychical. Let us refer to this as
“Brentano’s thesis”.’64 However, Chisholm and Russell part company on the philosophical
importance of Brentano’s thesis of intentionality. Nonetheless, the role Brentano played in the
beginning stages of analytic philosophy cannot be underestimated.65 In discussing Chisholm
on Brentano and intentionality, Jaegwon Kim noted that Chisholm eventually held that ‘the
capacity of language to refer and represent should be explained in terms of the capacity of the
mind to refer and represent’.66
Within the context of analytic philosophy, there are several different categories of
philosophical discussions on the concept of intentionality. First of all, recent intentionality
theory has focused attention on the ‘tending towards’ aspect of propositional contents. This
suggests that an intentionality theory is rooted in an analysis of propositions and is therefore
seen as a semantic property of intentional sentences. William Lycan, among others, would fit
into this category.

63
 Husserl, Ideen III, in Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: Harper
& Row, 1972), 187.
64
  Chisholm served for many years as executor of the Brentano papers. See Chisholm, ‘Intentionality
and the Theory of Signs’, Philosophical Studies 3 (1952), 56. While Chisholm is often given credit for intro-
ducing intentionality, especially from Brentano, into mainstream philosophical discussions, nonetheless,
Russell in The Analysis of Mind also referred to Brentano’s concept of intentionality: ‘We may take as some
of the best and most typical representatives of this school the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose
Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, though published in 1874, is still influential and was the start-
ing-point of a great deal of interesting work. (Russell here quotes the passage from Brentano noted above
from Brentano’s Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint) […] The view here expressed, that relation to an
object is an ultimate irreducible characteristic of mental phenomena, is one which I shall be concerned to
combat’: Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), 14–15.
65
  Peter Simons notes that ‘the relevance of Brentano’s work for the beginning of analytic philosophy has
become plain’: ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint,
trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), p. xxii.
66
  Jaegwon Kim, ‘Chisholm on Intentionality: De Se, De Re and De Dicto’, in Louis Hahn (ed.), The
Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 364.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  61

Secondly, philosophers like Chisholm hold what he called the ‘funny characteristic’ possessed
by knowers as the defining property of intentionality theory. This emphasis indicates the
ontological difference between knowers and non-knowers. Chisholm’s ‘funny characteristic’
posits an ontological characteristic distinguishing knowers from non-knowers. This ontological
thrust is not reducible to a discussion only of propositions, but is a de re claim and not a de dicto
position. Commenting on this ontological dimension in Chisholm’s theory of intentionality,
Kim remarks: ‘Chisholm has come to accept the position that intentionality is a basic and
uneliminable feature of the world. In fact, not only his philosophy of mind and language but his
general ontology itself is now based on an intentional foundation.’67
Lest one believe that Chisholm and Aquinas are bedfellows as far as intentionality is
concerned, one must consider what Chisholm once wrote about Aristotelian intentionality
theory. He articulated the following reservation suggesting that Aristotle and Aquinas’s account
of intentionality might not hang together philosophically.
[Aristotle taught that the soul] receives the form of the object (and that) actual knowledge is identical with
its object. [ . . . ] This doctrine which was developed by Thomas Aquinas and his commentators [ . . . ] could
be taken to say that when (a) man perceives a dog, then the man, or his soul, takes on all the characteristics
of the dog, though without becoming identical with the matter of the dog, and that when the man perceives
a dog and a bird together, then the man becomes ‘formally identical’ with the dog, and also with the bird.
There have been many attempts to make this doctrine intelligible, but I cannot feel that they have been
successful.68

Haldane, in commenting on Chisholm’s theory of intentionality, wrote about the centrality of

ontology in Chisholm’s approach to philosophy: ‘intentionality is ontologically significant,
and subsequent reading led me to see that ontology is central to Chisholm’s own understanding
of philosophy.’69 Chisholm himself once wrote that ‘reflection on the self and on what it is to
think provides us with the key to understanding the fundamental categories of reality’.70 What
both Chisholm and Haldane suggest is that a necessary condition for understanding a
coherent thesis of intentionality is an adequate metaphysical theory. Aquinas fits under this
metaphilosophical umbrella. In his discussions with Putnam, Haldane again brings forward
the necessity of an adequate ontology in order to underpin an Aristotelian theory of
knowledge. Haldane worried that Putnam’s account is ‘a multi-authored American pragmatism
with an Aristotelianism detached from certain ontological assumptions’.71 Haldane argues
that ‘one cannot enjoy the benefits of Aristotelian epistemological realism without accepting
aspects of its attendant metaphysics’, continuing: ‘I hope that Putnam might be persuaded that
what is true in pragmatism is not only compatible with, but actually requires important
aspects of Aristotelian metaphysics. Realism with a human face requires the support of a
metaphysical skull.’72

67
  Ibid., 366.
68
 Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing, quoted in Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’, 149.
69
  Ibid.
70
 Chisholm, On Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. vii. This passage is
found in Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’.
71
  John Haldane, ‘Realism with a Metaphysical Skull’, in James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen (eds),
Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2001), 97.
72
  Ibid. The title of Haldane’s essay is a direct reference to Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

62  aquinas on intentionality

Aquinas adopts this aspect of intentionality theory when he suggests that a knower has the
‘ontological ability to acquire a form immaterially’. This, of course, differs from most
phenomenologists who aspired to derive an analysis of mental activity independent of
ontological presuppositions. This ontological feature renders Chisholm an externalist, and
Aquinas too.
A third difference concerns whether intentionality belongs to concepts only or also
includes percepts and sensations. Some analytic philosophers argue that intentionality
applies only to the cognitive content of concepts and not to perceptual matters. Hence the
phenomenal realm is divorced from intentionality discussions, and several twentieth-
century analytic philosophers have questioned the role of intentionality regarding the sense
faculties. For example, Sellars argued that the senses have only ‘pseudo-intentionality’.73 This
claim depends upon Sellars’s analysis of cognitivity in terms of an awareness of ‘being in
kind.’ Sellars believes this limits intentionality to cognitive matters of concepts and removes
intentionality theory from matters of sensation.
It is important to see how these distinctions apply to Aquinas’s theory of intentionality as an
externalist. Aquinas argues for an ontological theory of intentionality. A knower has an ontological
capacity or ability, rooted in the substantial form of a knower, to be able to acquire forms of other
things in an intentional manner. Also, the content of an awareness, what Aquinas refers to as esse
intentionale, has a basic ‘tending towards’ or an ‘aboutness’ for an object in the external world.
Aquinas writes: ‘An immaterial immutation is when a species is received in a sense organ or in a
medium in the manner of an intention “per modum intentionis” ’ (Commentary on the Soul, II, 14).
Telkamp comments on this passage: ‘By saying that the species are being received in the medium
per modum intentionis, he [Aquinas] broadens the scope of intentionality placing it outside the
mind. In doing so he seems to follow mainly Avicenna’s theory of the intentio.’74 Yet Aquinas also
writes that the most important characteristic of an intention is its direction towards an object. In
his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, he writes: ‘By the very name of an intention
suggests that it is able to be received by moving towards a power; for it is said that to intend is a
tending towards another item’ (‘intendere enim dicitur, quasi in aliud tendere’) (Commentary on
the Sentences, II q. 1 a. 3). In the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, he writes much the
same thing: ‘Intendere est in aliud tendere’ (I–II q. 12 a. 5). In discussing sense knowledge in the
Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas uses the language of intentio: ‘In the operation of
the senses, an immaterial change is required, through which an intention of the sensible form
[intentio formae sensibilis] is received in the sense organ. On the contrary, if a natural change
alone were a sufficient condition for the activity of the sense, it would follow that all natural
bodies would feel when they underwent alteration’ (I q. 78 a. 3).
It should be noted here that Aquinas appears to understand at least two important senses of
intentio:

(a)  when the effect of a causal interaction with an entity in the external world produces an
act of awareness;
(b) the causally effective product in the medium that interacts with the sense faculty.

73
 Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality; also found in ‘Being and Being Known’, in In The Space of
Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfred Sellars, ed. Kevin Sharp and Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 214.
74
  Jörg Tellkamp, ‘Aquinas on Intentions in the Medium and in the Mind’, Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 276.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

aquinas on intentionality  63

The exact nature of this difference will be spelled out later, when external sensation is
considered. Tellkamp argues that in order to understand Aquinas on intentio, one needs to
consider his Arabic sources, especially Avicenna.75 From the above accounts, it can be
determined that Avicenna argues that the intentional being of a species has a mind-independent
status in the medium together with an intentional existence in a sense faculty. This twofold
account will be most important in considering an awareness of a sensible quality in a sense
faculty.
Furthermore, Aquinas argues that esse intentionale pertains to both sense awareness and the
cognitive exercise of acquired concepts. Sense awareness for Aquinas holds for both the
external and the internal senses. Hence, even if Sellars were correct in limiting intentionality,
this study suggests that his critical analysis applies only to the external senses in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind. Aquinas claims that the vis cogitativa, which is a faculty of inner sense, is
aware of individuals as members of a natural kind.76 The vis cogitativa will be treated later.
Textual justification that Aquinas uses ‘esse intentionale’ when referring to both sense
knowledge and intellectual knowledge is used extensively later in this book.
A final note on Bergmann, who (as Hochberg pointed out) towards the end of his life
ventured into an analysis of Aquinas’s metaphysical principles and became one more analytic
philosopher who began to dust off an ontological realism similar to Aquinas. Hochberg
unearthed themes of Aristotelian hylomorphism in Bergmann’s later writings. Hochberg notes
that throughout his career, Bergmann focused his attention on three metaphysical issues: the
problems of individuation, universals, and intentionality, which are metaphysical issues
common to the philosophical tradition of Aquinas. Hochberg writes that what Bergmann
called ‘ultimate sorts’ function as ‘categorical natures that are components of what they inform’.
Hochberg comments: ‘Here Bergmann saw a connection to “. . . Aristotle’s composition of a
substance out of form and matter, or, rather in the manner of Aquinas, out of an essence and a
bit of materia signata . . .”. Irrespective of the accuracy of his reading of Aquinas, regarding
essences and materia signata, his claim is clear, as is the influence of Aristotle and Aquinas.’77 In
his later years, Bergmann began delving into serious metaphysical work; as Hochberg notes,
Bergmann’s ‘turn to metaphysics was unique among the positivists that emigrated to the United
States and England’.78 The themes Bergmann addressed are similar structurally to several
ontological positions put forward by Aquinas. Hence, Bergmann provides another interesting
yet generally unknown confluence of late twentieth-century analytic metaphysics and
philosophy of mind with traditional ontological and epistemological realism and a realist
philosophy of nature articulated and defended by Aquinas. Chisholm’s account of intentionality
and Bergmann’s discussion of both intentionality and form offer significant contributions to
the possible project of locating Aquinas within the context of analytic philosophy.

  Ibid., 277ff.   76 Cf. Commentary on the Soul, nos 396ff.

75

  Herbert Hochberg, ‘The Radical Hylomorphism of Bergmann’s Aristotelian Metaphysics and the
77

Ontology of Relations’, Modern Schoolman 78(4) (2001), 264.

78
  Ibid., 257.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

3
Aquinas and Empiricism
From Aquinas to Brentano and Beyond

The preceding chapter provided a detailed analysis of the principles of intentionality,

which serve as the necessary conditions or presuppositions that Aquinas used in
developing his philosophy of mind. The present chapter continues this discussion with
six additional presuppositions necessary for understanding Aquinas’s explanation of
how knowledge is possible.
(a) Aquinas as an empiricist;
(b) Aquinas’s relation to Thomas Reid and James Gibson;
(c) Aquinas’s relation to direct realism;
(d) Aquinas and causal theories of perception;
(e) intentionality and the curse of representationalism;
(f) Aquinas’s definition of truth.
This general history of philosophy locates the place Aquinas holds in philosophy-­of-
mind discussions, both traditional and contemporary.

Aquinas as an Empiricist
In two senses of the term, Thomas can be considered an empiricist. First, he refused
to  admit into his ontology any subsistent entities which would serve as objects of
knowledge beyond the individually existing concreta of the physical world. Using ter-
minology from medieval philosophy, Aquinas denied the existence of universalia ante
rem, which is a version of classical Platonism.1 Ontologies, therefore, which admit sub-
sistent entities, be they Platonic Forms, Moorean Propositions, Meinongean Inexistent
Objects, or objects in Lewis’s or Plantinga’s possible worlds, are in opposition to
Aquinas’s philosophy. He opts for a structured mental act, which is opposed to the
diaphanous mental act of Plato, Moore, Russell, Meinong, and others; in this way,

1
  Aquinas is somewhat like Quine in ‘On What There Is’, since both philosophers rejected the ‘overpop-
ulated Universe’ characteristic of a Platonic position on subsistent ontological entities: Willard Van Orman
Quine, ‘On What There Is’, in From A Logical Point of View, rev. edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 1–19.
While God and angels are in Aquinas’s system, these do not have a direct connection with understanding
the first-order awareness of the world.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  65

Aquinas undercuts the philosophy-of-mind requirement for positing subsistent objects,

and remains an empiricist. In this first sense, he is an empiricist because his ontological
realism lacks subsistent entities determining essences beyond the space–time realm.
This position articulated by Thomas is a denial of classical Platonism.
Secondly, Aquinas is classified as an empiricist because he adopts the epistemologi-
cal maxim ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu’. The manner in which
Aquinas accepts this proposition must be qualified, however. He asserts a more
Leibnizean than Lockean or Berkeleyan interpretation of this proposition. Aquinas
would be in agreement with Leibniz’s characterization of Locke’s maxim: ‘Nihil est in
intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse.’ In other words, Aquinas is
not an empiricist in any sense structurally identical to or coextensive with much
British or American empiricism. This claim will become apparent later when the
structured acts of awareness of the vis cogitativa and the intellectus agens are discussed.
Both of these acts of awareness provide an esse intentionale for a kind of object. It is by
means of a structured mental act of both the vis cogitativa and the intellectus agens that
Aquinas transcends the limits common to British and American empiricism. The vis
cogitativa provides an awareness of the individual concretum as a subsistent particular;
this is more than the bundle of sensations common to the empiricist model of percep-
tion whose associationist techniques have evolved from Locke and Berkeley through
Hume to Mill and on into the twentieth century. By means of a sophisticated account
of intentiones non sensatae, Aquinas provides the machinery for an awareness of indi-
vidual concreta. In addition, it is through the structured mental act of the intellectus
agens abstracting the species intelligibilis that Aquinas provides for the acquisition of
knowledge with the intellectus possibilis of essential or sortal properties.2 What is
important to realize is that Aquinas, while an empiricist in a substantive sense, is also
to a certain degree a rationalist.3 Through the means of a structured mental act, he
transcends the limits of classical empiricism yet avoids the pitfalls of Cartesian innate
ideas. Nonetheless, the empiricist tenor of his philosophy of mind entails that all
knowledge must begin in sense experience.4

2
  Accounts of the vis cogitativa and of the intellectus agens need more explication and analysis, which is
offered in later chapters.
3
  Judith Marti Baumrin writes that recent scholarship ‘relates mid-twentieth century work in psychol-
ogy to Aristotle’s theory of sensation and perception. […] having for so long claimed Aristotle as a cham-
pion empiricist, the psychological community may after a careful reconsideration of Aristotelian
psychology find a nativism that is not one palatable to the most committed empiricists among us but also
one that we perhaps cannot do without’: ‘Aristotle's Empirical Nativism’, American Psychologist 30(4)
(1975), 494.
4
  Commenting on where Aquinas fits in the classical discussion of empiricism and rationalism, Kenny
wrote: ‘Aquinas’s account places him between empiricists who regard ideas as arising simply from experi-
ence, and rationalists who postulate innate idea. He also stands in the middle between realists and idealists.
He agrees with the realists that the human mind is capable of genuine knowledge of an extra-mental world.
But he agrees with the idealists that the universals that the mind uses to conceptualise experience have no
existence, as universals, outside of the mind’: Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas Medalist’s Address’, in Intelligence
and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 26.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

66  aquinas and empiricism

Issues in realism and externalism, together with the connection with empiricism,
will become more clear as this analysis of Aquinas’s works unfolds.5 In his Compendium
of Theology, he considers his empiricism:
Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that the human intellect is indebted to the
sense powers for the origin of its knowledge. This is why intellectual knowledge is thrown
into confusion when the soul’s faculties of phantasm [phantasia], imagination or memory
are impaired. On the other hand, when these powers are in good order, intellectual appre-
hension becomes more efficient. (Compendium of Theology, pt I, ch. 122; emphasis
added)

Aquinas continues with this theme: ‘an injury to an organ of the body may indirectly
weaken the intellect, insofar as the activity of the intellect presupposes sensation’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 688). These passages indicate the dependence of the
intellect on the senses. This, of course, is a classical expression of empiricism. This
dependence of the intellect on the senses is threefold:
(a) The content of the cognitive concepts depends upon the abstractive process of
the intellectus agens from the phantasms in the internal sensorium.
(b) It is necessary for the intellectus possibilis to refer to phantasms in its act of
understanding.
(c) The proper functioning of the intellect requires the functioning of the organs
of the external and the internal senses.
All three propositions indicate the manner in which Aquinas is an empiricist in his
philosophy of mind and in his epistemology.
While accepting a modified form of empiricism, nonetheless Aquinas accepts a
semblance of Platonic duality regarding knowledge:
(a) sense knowledge—which includes direct awareness of sense objects by the
external sensorium and phantasm formation through the internal sensorium;
(b) intellectual or conceptual knowledge—which includes attaining the species
intelligibilis through the abstractive process of the intellectus agens and concept
formation and exercise through first intentional and second intentional aware-
nesses through the intellectus possibilis.
The following two texts indicate this twofold division regarding knowledge:
Aristotle discriminates between actual sensation and thinking; and he believes the first reason
for distinguishing these activities is the difference between their objects, i.e. the sense-objects
and the intelligible objects, which are attained by actual sensation and actual thinking respec-
tively. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 375)

5
  Simon Kemp expressed Aquinas’s empiricist thrust: ‘While Aquinas’s approach to psychology is in no
way experimental, it is often empirical, and he made frequent reference to observed behavior’: Medieval
Psychology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 24.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  67

Aquinas continues by considering the objects of the two categories of knowledge:

The sense objects that actualize sensitive activities, the visible, the audible, etc., exist outside the
soul; the reason being that actual sensation attains to the individual things, which exist exter-
nally outside the mind. Rational knowledge, on the other hand, is of universals, which exist
somehow within the soul. Thus, it is clear that the person who already has scientific knowl-
edge about certain things does not need to seek such things outside of himself; the person
already possesses them inwardly. Hence, one is able, unless prevented by some incidental
cause, to reflect on them whenever one pleases. But a person cannot sense whatever one
pleases. Because sense objects are not possessed inwardly, one is forced to receive them from
outside. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 375; emphasis added)

Another difference between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge concerns the
necessity of a bodily organ: ‘Now the difference between intellectual and sensitive
awareness is that the latter is corporeal. Sensation cannot occur apart from the mental
act of a bodily organ. Understanding, on the other hand, as we shall prove later, does
not take place by means of such an organ’ (Commentary on the Soul, #622). Using this
distinction between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge, Aquinas reiterates
the Platonic distinction between sense knowledge or opinion and intellectual under-
standing or science. Like Plato, the former deals with human awareness of the particular
things and sensible qualities of the world, while the latter treats knowledge of essences
and universals.6

Reid, Gibson, and Aquinas: Epistemological

Naturalism Revisited
Chisholm and Haldane have suggested that Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is similar to
what one finds in the writings of Thomas Reid. Haldane comments on this similarity:
‘Like Thomas Reid writing five hundred years later, Aquinas himself is simply trying
to identify at the level of metaphysical description what is implicit in our everyday
dealings with the world.’7 Nonetheless, it seems that Aquinas shares some metaphysi-
cal convictions with Moore and Reid. In fact, Haldane writes that ‘[t]he similarities
between Reid’s “new found” realism and long established scholastic orthodoxy are
striking’.8 He further writes that Reid’s ‘theory bears a remarkable resemblance to that
of St. Thomas and later scholastics: and from the language, structure and content of

6
  Later chapters consider Aquinas’s distinction between knowledge of universals and knowledge of
essential properties—knowledge types which are neither identical nor coextensive. This is the root distinc-
tion between first and second intentional mental acts, which are medieval classifications found in e.g.
William of Shyreswood, Peter of Spain, and Albert the Great, and reiterated in Thomas’s De Ente et Essentia.
7
  John Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 167.
8
  Haldane, McInerny, and Chisholm all suggest this similarity of Aquinas with Reid. See John Haldane,
‘Reid, Scholasticism and Current Philosophy of Mind’, in M. Dalgarno and E. Matthews (eds), The
Philosophy of Thomas Reid (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 292.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

68  aquinas and empiricism

Reid’s arguments it is impossible to resist the conclusion that […] he was influenced by
the philosophy of the schools.’9
Reid, Kneale once wrote, rescued the word ‘perception’ from the early modern phi-
losophers where (Kneale suggests) the term ceased to have any clear meaning.10
Empiricists like Hume thought themselves entitled to use ‘perception’ as an ‘omnibus
word’ for whatever goes on in the mind. On matters of perception, Aquinas differs
radically from Hume. Aquinas’s analysis is reminiscent of Strawson’s ‘descriptive meta-
physics’, and is a philosophical defence of common sense.11 Moreover, Aquinas would
neither deny nor belittle the importance of what contemporary cognitive scientists call
‘folk psychology’.
The explicatio textus of sense organ and sense faculty in the Commentary is remark-
ably similar to the method articulated by Gibson in discussing the evolutionary devel-
opment of human sense organs. It is through this evolutionary development, Gibson
maintains, that a human knower can make his or her way around the environment.
This position is often referred to as ‘ecological perception theory’. One needs to broach
the subject of naturalism inherent in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The explicatio tex-
tus suggested here is remarkably similar, it would seem, to the method articulated by
Gibson in discussing the evolutionary development of human sense organs. It is
through this evolutionary development that a human knower can make her way
around the environment. In the Commentary on the Metaphysics, when discussing the
three levels of knowledge found in animals other than human persons, Aquinas writes
about the need for memory in higher animals.
For since sensory cognition enables animals to make provision for the necessities of life and to
perform their characteristic operations, then those animals that move towards something at a
distance by means of local motion, must have memory. For if the anticipated goal by which they
are induced to move did not remain in them through memory, they could not continue to move
towards the intended goal that they pursue. (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk 1, no. 10)

In this passage, one notes that because of the need that an animal has to move towards
some necessary item in the world, the animal has developed for the purpose of survival
some ability for memory. Aquinas includes humans in the animal realm. Accordingly,
he provides a naturalist account of this development in the animal, which appears to be
moving towards Gibson’s analysis.
In De Veritate, Aquinas is more explicit in explicating his general method in deter-
mining how the sensitive powers of the animal arise. The following passage exhibits a
strong evolutionary drive:

9
  Ibid., 301.
10
  William Kneale, ‘Analysis of Perceiving’, in in F. N. Sibley (ed.), Perception: A Philosophical Symposium
(London: Methuen, 1971), 68; this passage considers ‘common sense’ as a manner of knowing and not
as a specific faculty of the internal sense, the ‘sensus communis’, which both Aristotle and Aquinas adopt as
a necessary condition for sense knowledge.
11
  In Strawson’s writings, ‘descriptive metaphysics’ is opposed to ‘revisionary metaphysics’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  69

But, if we study the matter carefully, we find that in both types of powers, acts and objects are
not only signs of diversity, but in some way causes of it. For every thing which has existence
only because of some end has its manner determined for it from the end to which it is ordained.
Thus, a saw has this kind of form and this kind of matter in order to be suitable for its end,
which is to cut. But every power of the soul, whether active or passive, is ordained to act as to
its end, as is clear in the Metaphysics. Hence, every power has a definite manner and species by
reason of which it can be suitable for such an act. Therefore, powers are diversified because the
diversity of acts requires different principles from which to elicit acts. Moreover, since object is
related to act as its term, and acts are specified by their terms, as is plain in the Physics, acts
must also be distinguished according to their objects. Therefore diversity of objects brings about
diversity of powers. (De Veritate, q. 15 a. 2; emphasis added)

Aquinas argues explicitly that the sensitive faculties or powers are what they are
because of the objects in the external world. Were these objects not in rerum natura,
the sensitive powers would not have come about. This is another indication of the
naturalist elements influencing the structure and development of Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind.
While Gibson does not affirm an ontology of holistic primary substances, he does
consider the role the environment plays in determining how sense organs and faculties
have developed and function. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for Aquinas. This
gives certain value to Aquinas’s oft-repeated claim that ‘nature does not act in vain’ and
that ‘the knowing faculty is made for the act of knowing, which in turn is made for the
object of knowing’. ‘The first things known are things outside the mind to which the
intellect is first directed in thought’ (De Potentia, q. 7 a. 9).
In discussing direct realism in medieval philosophy, Kemp suggests several signifi-
cant connections with Gibson’s account: ‘Another issue in modern psychology that
parallels one raised in medieval perception concerns the extent to which perception is
direct. [. . .] An alternative modern approach, again suggested by Gibson, is that per-
ception is direct and does not require mediating processes [. . .].’12 In this account of
Gibson, while considering the lack of mediating principles in perception, Kemp sug-
gests that Gibson’s position ‘does not require knowledge of the object’. Hence, while
direct, it depends on a variety of stimulus cues that are found in the external world.
Aquinas, to be sure, requires the existence of a world of primary substances, which are
individual hoc aliquids; while Gibson and Aquinas have several interesting structural
similarities in discussing perception, their two theories of perception are neither iden-
tical nor isomorphic.
Following interpretive insights from Gibson’s analysis,13 this set of teleological
expressions found in Aquinas’s texts might be his way of introducing a version of

12
 Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 48.
13
  This is not to suggest that Aquinas and Gibson are identical in developing their theories of knowledge.
Rather, it suggests that there are similarities in the way Aquinas and scholars like Gibson approach the
relation of the human person to the surrounding environment and how this relation has an impact on
the development of the faculties of sensation and perception.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

70  aquinas and empiricism

‘epistemological naturalism’. Haldane notes that contemporary philosophers can learn

a significant meta-philosophical method from Aquinas: ‘[If philosophers . . .] follow
Aquinas and Quine and distinguish philosophical explanation from justification, then
there is no general problem of inductive scepticism that the philosopher or anyone
else is obliged to answer.’14 Haldane suggests that in much contemporary philosophy
of mind, there is ‘a conflict between two fundamentally opposed positions: Cartesian
representationalism and naturalistic, cognitive psychology [. . . and] Aquinas’s the-
ory is located within the naturalistic tradition [. . .].’15 Aquinas’s naturalism argues
that perception and thought are human activities involving cognitive responses to
influences of the external environment. This connection with the external environ-
ment a fortiori suggests the rejection of a Cartesian position, which accounts for
the mind as an autonomous self-contained and environment-independent self—a
res cogitans.
One must understand what this position on Aquinas and naturalism means. There
are at least three senses of naturalism in philosophy-of-mind discussions regarding
Aquinas:
(a) scientific reductionism, meaning that all mental terms are reducible to natural
causes and explanations;
(b) the analysis of the development of knowing powers that have evolved in order
to ‘grasp’ the structures of reality;
(c) an analysis of the intellectus agens arguing that the abstractive process of this
intellectual faculty is not reducible to a form of divine illumination.
Aquinas, through the use of his theory of intentionality, accepts the second position
of naturalism but rejects the first. This is the equivalent of Aquinas’s claim that ‘nature
does not act in vain’. In agreement with Haldane’s suggestions, intentional capacities or
dispositions may be ‘a very special case of the teleological’.16 In addition, the first posi-
tion would apparently reject Aquinas’s distinction between immanent and transient
action. The rejection of the third position is of an interpretation adopted by Pasnau
and by Smit.17 The argument against interpreting Aquinas in a manner reducible to
divine illumination will be discussed later in this book.
In the end, Aquinas argues that the structure of the sense organs and faculties are
best suited to be aware of the world as it is. In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima,
Aquinas writes: ‘If anyone wants to examine also the particular organs of the human
body, she will discover that they are organized so that a human being might engage in
sense knowledge most effectively. [. . .] One can determine the meaning of the human
body with respect to the particular features that belong to a human being by nature’

14
  John Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 73 (1999), 43.
15
  John Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989).
16
  Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, 41.
17
  Houston Smit, ‘Aquinas’s Abstractionism’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10(1) (2001), 85–118.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  71

(q. 8). Aquinas appears to suggest that a human being is what it is by nature in order
for  that individual human person to get along better in his encounters with the
external world. While Aquinas was certainly not opting for a theory of natural selection,
his conclusions are strikingly similar. Kenny once wrote: ‘Aquinas is surely correct to
insist that the way to understand the nature of a sense is to start by looking at the
objects which fall under it.’18 Kerr writes that Aquinas ‘has a proto-Wittgensteinian
conception of how subjective experience depends on our engagement with objects in
the public world’.19
Pasnau provides an informative account of teleology in Aquinas on sensation, which
he develops in terms of a functional analysis: ‘Most of Aquinas’s functional analysis
could stand without any such theological assumptions. [. . .] To continue to speak
of  function and purpose in the absence of design would require some account of
how these terms are being used, but there is no reason to suppose such an account
unavailable.’20 Pasnau’s point is compatible with the suggestions from Gibson’s eco-
logical perspective on psychology. It is towards inhabiting this arena that the analysis
in this book is directed. Stump, however, would question this point. She argues that the
sense organs and faculties are ordered to specific objects of awareness only because
God set us up that way.21 This is a particularly vexing issue in Aquinas’s ontology, to
which the discussion in this book is but a sketchy response. In his Warrant and Proper
Function,22 Plantinga argues that a naturalistic account of the evolutionary develop-
ment of cognitive faculties is not sufficient to guarantee the reliability of these faculties.
He accordingly argues that reliability entails a supernatural or divinely based onto-
logical theory. In ‘Cognitive Faculties and Evolutionary Naturalism’,23 Cantens argues
against the irrationality of naturalism maintained by Plantinga. In addition, in asking
the reliability question about naturalistically based cognitive developmental theories,
Plantinga appears to adopt a Cartesian methodology, seeking justification and not
explanation. While these arguments cannot be discussed in the detail required here,
nonetheless Cantens has argued plausibly that the Plantinga thesis need not be accepted
without a serious rejoinder.
Cantens, Gibson, and Pasnau would respond that the realist connection of objects
to faculty is reducible to the process of human evolutionary developments. Pasnau
notes the following:

18
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34.
19
  Fergus Kerr, OP, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 25.
20
  Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a
75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180.
21
  Eleanor Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 233–4.
22
  Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); the interested
reader might consult James Beilby’s collection of essays on the Plantinga position, Naturalism Defeated?
Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2002).
23
  Bernardo Cantens, ‘Cognitive Faculties and Evolutionary Naturalism’, Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 201–8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

72  aquinas and empiricism

It is easy to see how one could mount an evolutionary defence of the principle that ‘nature does
not fail in necessary things’. Animals that fail at necessary details will not (very often) repro-
duce. Deficient genes will not be passed on, and deficient animals will tend to be rare. ‘Except
for a few cases’, then, animals will have all of the capacities they need to have.24

This explicatio textus of sense organ and sense faculty in the Commentary again appears
remarkably similar to the method articulated by Gibson in discussing the evolutionary
development of human sense organs. It is through this evolutionary development,
Gibson suggests, that a human knower can make his way around the environment.25
This teleology is a signpost suggesting Aquinas’s way of bringing a version of ‘epistemo-
logical naturalism’ into the discussion. Aquinas might respond also that the form of the
evolutionary process is determined by Augustine’s rationes seminales, which are reduci-
ble to the divine plan working itself out in the course of time. Stump also argues that
Aquinas holds that the human possibility for error is a result of original sin, and suggests
that the evolutionary thesis is not finally reconcilable with Aquinas’s theological con-
cerns.26 Nonetheless, it is possible to account in naturalistic terms for the function of the
sense powers as directed to the respective objects. This is an explanatory and not a jus-
tificatory account. The divine appeal seems reducible to a justificatory criterion, which
is beyond the issues posed by Aristotle and Aquinas. This direction notes the naturalism
that is congruent with the philosophy of mind as articulated by Aquinas. Like Gibson,
Aquinas would agree that the ecological development of the faculties of the external
senses have been determined by the structure of the objects of sensation.
This issue of naturalism is controversial, to be sure. Aquinas at minimum offers an
explanatory account of perception in terms of faculties and acts being determined by
their objects. However, while he would not, it appears, adopt a ‘survival of the fittest’
method of justification, the passages from the Commentary on the Metaphysics and the
De Veritate point in this adaptive direction. In other words, in discussing naturalism,
two propositions must be articulated with care:
(a) Because the environment is E, the animal has faculties F.
(b) Animals with faculties F are better adapted to Environment E; this helps
explain the survival of animals with faculties F.
Aquinas adopts in some form both these propositions. Because the objects of knowledge
are what they are, the knowing faculties have been developed—or created by God
when human nature was first formulated in the divine mind. Secondly, it is with the
knowing faculties that one is better able to navigate the world with other primary
substances. The passage from the Commentary on the Metaphysics indicates enabling
‘animals to make provision for the necessities of life’, and thus these animals ‘must have

24
 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 177.
25
  See also James Gibson, ‘The Perceiving of Hidden Surfaces’, in Robert G. Turnbull and Peter Machamer
(eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 422–34. James Ross also sug-
gests this structural similarity between Aquinas and Gibson.
26
 Stump, Aquinas, 234.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  73

memory’. Accordingly, no memory entails no survival. Of course, this is all in accord

with Divine Providence, which, like Augustine’s rationales seminales, works out human
development over time.27 Nonetheless, in his explanation of cognitive activities,
Aquinas appears to have adopted a modified form of naturalism. This position is in
accord with Haldane’s claim that both Aquinas and Quine are philosophical natural-
ists when considering cognitive activities.

Direct Realism in Aquinas

According to standard procedure for epistemological classification, theories of
­perception are divided into direct realism and representationalism or representative
realism.28 This distinction emphasizes whether the mind has for its direct object the
‘thing’ in the external world or an ‘idea’ of the thing. On the former view, the mind is
directly aware of an object in the external world; on the latter, there is an ‘epistemo-
logical wedge’, a tertium quid, driven between what is directly perceived and the object
existing in the external world.29
Several (but not all) medieval philosophers give evidence of direct realism leanings,
while many modern philosophers, following Descartes and Locke, tend towards rep-
resentationalism. Proponents of representationalism normally put the foundational
questions as primary in epistemological discussions. In his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Locke provides the following explicit account of representationalism:
‘It is evident that the mind knows no things immediately but only by the intervention of
the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge therefore is real only so far as there is conformity
between our ideas and the reality of things.’ Locke next suggests an obvious difficulty
with representationalism: ‘But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind,
when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things them-
selves?’30 Locke notes the necessity for a foundationalist epistemology. The search for a
criterion becomes the driving hallmark for undertaking epistemology; Descartes argues
in a similar manner. Elsewhere Locke discusses the relation between ideas and things.31

27
  The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer who suggested this account of evolution.
28
  In this monograph, these latter two terms will be used interchangeably, although ‘representationalism’
is more frequently used in contemporary writings.
29
  In contemporary philosophy of mind, Fodor perhaps would appear to be a successor of the Cartesian
tradition of representationalism. ‘(Perhaps) all such (mental) states can be viewed as relations to rep-
resentations, [. . .] the least hypothesis that is remotely plausible is that a mental state is type individuated
by specifying a relation and a representation such that the subject bears the one to the other [. . . and this]
is tantamount to a sort of methodological solipsism’: Jerry A. Fodor, Representations Philosophical Essays
on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 231. Putnam
and McDowell have raised serious philosophical issues concerning representationalism as an adequate
cognitive theory of mind.
30
  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), bk
4, ch. 4, no. 3.
31
  ‘Whatever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or under-
standing, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject
wherein the power is. Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

74  aquinas and empiricism

In placing Aquinas in one category rather than another, it is important to realize

from the outset that he considers sensation and perception as an awareness of par-
ticular things in the world rather than as an awareness of ideas of those things. In his
epistemology and philosophy of mind, Aquinas stresses the possibility of ‘thing con-
sciousness’, which is reducible to an externalist position in the nature of knowing. ‘The
sense objects, which actualize sensitive activities—the visible, the audible, etc.—exist
outside the soul; the reason is that actual sensation (or perception) attains to the indi-
vidual things, which exist externally outside of the mind’ (Commentary on the Soul,
#375; emphasis added); also: ‘Sense is a passive power and is naturally immuted by the
exterior sensible. Hence, the exterior cause of intentional immutation is what is per se
perceived by the sense’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3). To the contrary, Aquinas
denies that he is a representationalist: ‘The proper active principle in external sensa-
tion is a thing existing outside the soul and not an intention existing in the imagination
or reason’ (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 82 a. 3). Furthermore, Aquinas supports
a distinction regarding the ‘object’ of awareness that a representationalist could never
affirm: ‘In discussing the kinds of sight, we note this difference: (a) Bodily sight termi-
nates at the body itself. (b) The sight of the imagination, on the other hand, terminates
at the image of the body as its object’ (De Veritate, q. 10 a. 3). These passages provide
evidence that Aquinas rightly adopted direct realism and not representationalism; he
is a realist epistemologist and an externalist. In the Latin texts, Aquinas often used
‘immutatio’ to denote the ‘in actu’ status of the sense faculty when acted upon by the
external sense object. Accordingly, as translated, he argues: ‘the sense objects [. . .]
actualize’ and also ‘sense [. . .] is naturally immuted by the exterior sensible’. Both prop-
ositions refer to the same epistemological issue.
Aquinas did write about the possibility of representationalism, which he appears to
dismiss rather quickly. The following extended passage demonstrates that he rejected
representationalism as a possible theory of perception:
Some have suggested that our cognitive powers know only the impressions made on them. For
example, that sense knows only the alteration of its organ. According to this reading, mental
states are the objects of knowledge. (This would be reducible to an internalist position on
knowing.).
This opinion seems to be false for two reasons. First, if the objects of intelligence and science
were merely mental states, it would follow that science does not deal with non-mental things,
but merely with impressions in consciousness.
Secondly, it would revive the ancient error asserting that whatever seems so is truly so, and
that contradictions are simultaneously tenable. Were a cognitive faculty able to perceive no
more than its own proper state, then it could judge only about those. Because an object appears
according to the manner the faculty is affected it follows that were modes of consciousness the

round, the powers to produce those ideas in us as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are
sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of them some-
times as in the things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which
produce them in us’: ibid., bk 2, ch. 8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  75

only data, a faculty could judge about merely its own proper impressions. Hence, every judg-
ment would be true. When a person with a healthy-tasting tongue judges honey to be sweet,
then it would judge truly; and thus when a person with an ill-tasting tongue judges it to be
bitter, then also would it judge truly. In each case, the person would be going on the direct
impressions. It follows that every opinion would be equally valid; so also in general would be
whatever was fancied. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2)

In the Supplement to the Tertia Pars, Aquinas suggests that his epistemological realism
is proper for a theory of sensation and perception:
Every passive power, according to its specific nature, is determined to some special active prin-
ciple, since a power as such bears a relation to that with respect to which it is said to be the
power. Thus, since the proper active principle in external sensation is a thing existing outside
the soul and not an intention thereof existing in the imagination or reason, if the organ of sense
is not moved by external things, but only by the imagination or other higher powers, there will
be no true sensation. Therefore, we never say that madmen or other witless persons (in whom
there is this kind of outflow of species towards the organs of sense, because of the very powerful
influence of the imagination) indeed have real sensations, but that it seems to them that they
have sensations. (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 82 a. 3; emphasis added)

These passages taken together illustrate the manner and force with which Aquinas
voices his objections to representationalism and internalism.

Aquinas and Causal Theories of Perception

In discussing Aquinas and direct realism, his position on a causal theory of perception
requires explanation. Succinctly put, a causal theory of perception is a version of
externalism in which what a knower perceives has some direct or appropriate causal
relation with the object that is known. In much history of philosophy, a connection
exists between representative or indirect realism and causal theories of perception.
Locke is a prime example; the Greek atomists with their account of idola adopted this
position. Early twentieth-century sense data philosophers are contemporary exam-
ples. The epistemological assumption since the rise of the new science suggests that if
we are to have knowledge, there is a need to posit intervening entities of some variety
that stand between our minds and the objects existing in the external world. However,
one need not be a representationalist and hold a causal theory of perception. This
depends on the kind of causal relation that exists between the object of perception and
the content of the idea. Although Aquinas provides a causal theory of perception,
nonetheless he maintains a position of direct realism. Given his faculty psychology of
dispositional properties as knowing powers, he argues that the objects in the world are
potentially sensible and intelligible. Hence, there is no intervening mental entity
between the mind and the world. This isomorphism is captured by Aquinas’s Latin
propositions ‘Sensus in actu est sensible in actu’, and ‘Intellectus in actu est intelligible in
actu’. He transcends the limits of efficient causality normally connected with both the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

76  aquinas and empiricism

philosophers of the new science and modern empiricists. Following Aristotle, Aquinas
opts for a theory of formal causality and for efficient causality. The analysis of causality
in his theory of perception cries out for clarification.32
Representative realism, as noted above, argues that a perceiver is never aware
directly of a physical object. There are at least three different rationales from which
philosophers argue for representative realism. These apply especially to Descartes and
Locke:33
(a) a causal theory of perception;
(b) the problem of error and illusion;
(c) the scientific distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the apparent’.
Representative realism in principle raises fundamental questions about the veridi-
cal nature of sensation and perception. If representative realism is correct, the follow-
ing three questions might be asked:
(a) What is the ontological status of the representative entities? In other words,
what is the status of the ‘idea’ or ‘sense datum’?
(b) What does ‘represent’ mean? Put differently, what is the ‘logic’ of the proposition
‘X represents Y?’
(c) How does one know that the representative or representing entity represents
anything at all? Historically, this was Malebranche’s worry concerning Descartes’s
version of representationalism. Berkeley’s concerns about the adequacy of
causal explanations in Locke are similar in structure.
The causal theory of perception is linked with representative theories of perception
in the following way: there is a causal bombardment of the sense faculties with mater­
ial entities producing a reaction, which is the object of knowledge. An illustrative
model would be atomism, in which the ‘idola’ were given off by the physical object and
then produced an ensuing reaction with the sense faculties. With Aquinas, therefore, it
remains to be established how one can have a causal theory of perception that does not
entail representative realism. This requires a different analysis of cause from that pro-
vided by the early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Descartes. A distinction
between efficient and formal cause is a necessary condition for this explication.34 The
rise of the new science brought about a dichotomy between what is ‘real’ and what
32
  There are more distinctions regarding causal theories of perception than are discussed here.
33
  The author is indebted to Alan Hausman, who first suggested these distinctions.
34
  Historically, it appears that the problem of error and illusion did not influence Locke but did concern
Descartes, especially in the ruminations central to the First Meditation. Nonetheless, error and illusion
have influenced philosophers in the early and mid-20th c. who have argued for sense data positions. For
example, in his Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer appeared to use error and illusion as aporia
leading to representative realism. Like Aristotle, Aquinas seems not to have been bothered by the problems
of error and illusion. In discussing these issues, Aquinas resembles ordinary language philosophers in the
mid-20th c. dismissing the possibility of sense data. Aquinas rejects Descartes’s dream problem almost
out of hand. His appeal is to common-sense notions of consistency and coherence; he seems to be saying:
‘A dream image just does not fit together, and if you think it does, you’d better think again!’
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  77

‘appears’ to a perceiver. Simply put, this is the ‘microscopic’ versus ‘macroscopic’

world-view problem. This scientific world-view forced a huge theoretical chasm
between the medieval philosophers and their early modern counterparts. That
Aquinas was not concerned about this scientific problem is obvious—he lived some
four centuries before the scientific revolution.
Given the three issues whose consideration might result in representationalism,
only the analysis of a causal theory of perception requires in-depth elucidation. Like
many mid-twentieth-century ordinary-language philosophers, Aquinas spent little
time considering the possibility that the problems of error and illusion are viable phil-
osophical issues. Lastly, since he lived well before the scientific revolution, the concern
over the ‘appearance/reality’ distinction consequent upon the primary/secondary
quality distinction has no bearing on his theory. It follows, therefore, that his view of
cause will be a salient issue in distinguishing his theory from the representative realists
of the seventeenth century.
In discussing the causal theory of perception as championed by Locke and other
mechanists, Berkeley put the problem thus: how could an object produce a representa-
tion of itself? Put differently, how can an object communicate knowledge of itself? The
causal mode characteristic of these seventeenth-century discussions, however, was
one of ‘push–pull’—i.e. there existed a causal chain of impulse. One might suggest that
Locke and Descartes combined an Aristotelian ‘effect’, which would be the idea pro-
duced, with a ‘new science’ account of cause. At issue here, obviously, is an analysis of
the medieval view of cause. The medievals followed Aristotle in using a ‘qualitative’
view of causality, with emphasis on the distinctions between a formal cause and an
efficient cause.
Even though some historians of philosophy suggest that the causal theory of percep-
tion alone is sufficient to generate representative realism, this is predicated upon the
view that causal interaction occurs only on the impulse or efficient-cause model. In
the new science view of sensation and perception, human perceivers have bodies—
collection of atoms—among other bodies. Sensation and perception are the result of a
causal change. Moreover, when an idea is produced, this is not a special case of causa-
tion. For many medievals, to the contrary, causality exercised in knowledge situations
is a special case, and ‘intentionality’ becomes important for understanding medieval
accounts of the philosophy of mind. On a logical reconstructionist model, for the
medievals, the notion of intentionality is a primitive, explanatorily basic principle. In
this case, ‘primitive’ does not mean that no analysis is needed. It is more like an intrin-
sic, non-acquired, irreducible capacity or power of a human person. This intentional
capacity needs to be developed and actuated on the cognitive level; nonetheless, it is
primitive in the sense that it is a constitutive feature of a human person. It is rooted in
the substantial form of human nature.
For the early moderns, this causal change is not a special case of causation; hence,
intentionality or mental acts are reducible to a mechanistic analysis; a mental act is like
‘melting wax’—i.e. the logic of the two events is the same. Given this view, the visual
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

78  aquinas and empiricism

field is treated as an effect, which is the end of a mechanistic causal change. What is
produced is the object of perception, not the mental act of awareness. This is, in effect,
the ‘inner theatre’ view of perception.35
Although Aquinas is involved in a causal theory of perception, his theory does not
generate representationalism. First of all, as noted in Chapter 2, Aquinas adopts a spe-
cial thesis of intentionality. Secondly, his view of cause involving awareness will be an
analysis in terms of a qualitative model and not a quantitative or mechanistic model.
Thirdly, the mental act will always be that ‘by means of which’ (a quo) we acquire an
awareness of the world around us in normal awareness situations; it is not the direct
object (id quod) of sensation or perception. Lastly, causality is discussed in Aquinas
as a formal cause, which is not reducible to an efficient cause. Modern philosophy
adopted principally the paradigm of efficient causality. Although Aquinas adopts a
causal theory of perception, his analysis of cause in principle avoids the pitfalls of rep-
resentative realism. Like Putnam, Aquinas does not adopt the ‘inner theatre’ approach
to perception.36
In De Veritate, Aquinas comments on his position that to know is to have the form of
another not naturally but intentionally. This is, for Aquinas, the fundamental principle
of knowing. In De Veritate one finds him writing that ‘knowing in us is the stamping of
things on our minds’ (De Veritate, q. 2 a. 1 ad 2). Thomas develops this position:
‘Human knowers have actual sensations or actual knowledge (understanding) only
because our senses or our intellects are informed by the species or likeness (similitudo)
of the sensible or intelligible object’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 14 a. 2). In his Aristotelian
Commentary on knowledge, Aquinas writes: ‘Accordingly, a sense receives form with-
out matter, the form having, in the sense, a different mode of being from that which it
has in the object sensed. In the latter, it is a material mode of being (esse naturale), but
in the sense, a cognitional and immaterial mode (esse intentionale)’ (Commentary on
the Soul, no. 553). Aquinas continues: ‘for the sense is assimilated to the sensible object
in point of form, not in point of the disposition of the matter’ (no. 554).

Haldane and Putnam on Formal Cause:

Connections with Aquinas
This section incorporates several insights on formal cause gleaned from the exhaustive
writings of Haldane on major issues in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The discussion
above on form and structure in Aristotle and Aquinas illustrates Haldane’s conviction
that there is ‘no epistemology without ontology’. Haldane further suggests that there is

35
  Sorabji appears to argue that Aristotle’s position on intentionality is reducible to a form of mechanism.
See Richard Sorabji, ‘Intentionality and Physiological Processes: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense-Perception’, in
Martha Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 195–226.
36
  The complete analysis of how this causal theory is possible will be explained later.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  79

a different architectonic of proceeding in Aristotle and Aquinas from what one finds in
most modern philosophy, in which the former focuses attention on the need to explain
rather than to offer justification in the mode of foundationalist epistemology. Haldane
has suggested the importance of form for contemporary philosophy of mind, and
takes his cue from the work of three philosophers who defend some version of direct
realism: Davidson, McDowell, and Putnam. From Davidson, Haldane accepts ‘the
anomality of the mental’, which suggests the non-reducibility of the psychological to
the physical. From McDowell and from Putnam, Haldane accepts the double claim
that any form of representationalism is false and that efficient causation alone is insuf-
ficient to explain the possibility of knowledge. These positions are two sides of the
same coin. In his analysis of contemporary philosophy of mind, Haldane bluntly
argues: ‘I will proceed boldly and suggest that progress (in the philosophy of mind)
may be achieved by making use of the ancient doctrine of hylomorphism.’37
Clearly input from the world is relevant and is in part at least a matter of efficient causation.
However, if there is to be the sort of conformity of mind to thing which Putnam and McDowell
seek, then I can only see this being provided according to an account of the sort developed by
Aquinas when he writes that the intellect in act is the intelligible in act; or less scholastically,
that a thought will only be of a thing when it is formally identical with it; when what we think
and what is thought are the same.38

This is nothing other than a statement of what Aquinas proposed, and what later phi-
losophers, under the influence of Brentano, have called a theory of intentionality
incorporating the fundamental relationship of ‘tending towards’ or ‘aboutness’ for the
object. The principal statement of Aquinas’s theory, accordingly, is that knowledge
is the ‘having of a form of another without its matter’ and the ‘receiving of a form with-
out matter’. This is the ontological ground for distinguishing esse naturale from esse
intentionale.39
Intentionality theory in Aquinas requires that the capacity to know be considered
a ‘primitive’ in one’s ontology of knowing, which is rooted in a subject capable of
cognitivity. ‘Taking on the form of another without matter’ entails that there is an iso-
morphism of structure between the form of the thing and the form as known in the
mind. To reiterate briefly: one must take Aquinas literally here—there is a strict, formal
identity of form between the knower and the known. This refers to Aquinas’s meaning
when he claims in several texts: ‘Sensus in actu est sensible in actu’ and ‘Intellectus in
actu est intelligible in actu’. What makes knowledge possible is that the form known is
identical with the form in the thing. This holds for both sense knowledge and intellec-
tual knowledge. Haldane writes the following about this set of claims:

37
 John Haldane, Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics, ed. David S. Oderberg
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 41.
38
  Ibid., 54.
39
  Geach and Kenny often emphasized the ontological differences between esse reale/naturale and esse
intentionale.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

80  aquinas and empiricism

What does this mean? And how is it possible? It means that when I think of something, that
which makes my thought to be the kind of thought it is […] is formally identical to that which
makes the object of my thought to be the kind of thing it is. […] The form of dog (what I would
call the foundation for the natural kind of dog) exists naturally and substantially (in esse natu-
rale) in the dog, and intentionally and predicatively (in esse intentionale) in the thought.40

Haldane argues, endorsing the positions offered by Putnam and McDowell, that
­efficient causation alone cannot explain the possibility of knowing things in the external
world: ‘the difficulty is insurmountable so long as one is confined to efficient causa-
tion.’41 Haldane is troubled that, while McDowell approaches direct realism, he falls
short in explaining how the object as known is the content of the mental act of aware-
ness. This too is Aquinas’s concern; this is where the formal cause as a necessary condi-
tion enters the picture. Haldane acknowledges that ‘McDowell is concerned to present a
form of direct realism in opposition to views that embody one or another form of epis-
temological dualism’.42 Haldane comments on this worry: ‘However, McDowell’s way of
viewing the issues is Wittgensteinian in inspiration, and unlike the medievals with their
accounts of intentional existence (esse intentionale) he has little to say about the meta-
physical structure of the relation between thought and its objects.’43 To remedy this lack
in McDowell’s analysis, Haldane, like Thomas, calls for the role of formal cause as a
necessary condition in order to explain how the mind indeed knows the world.
Sellars and Haldane argue that some position on formal structure is a necessary
condition; otherwise scepticism, following from a causal theory of perception rooted
in efficient cause alone, is unavoidable. To avoid this consequence requires some
account of formal cause. Therefore, within analytic philosophy itself—from Nelson’s
synthetic necessary causal connections of causality and from Sellars’s and Haldane’s
requirement of form as a necessary condition for the isomorphism needed to explain
the possibility of knowing, to Bergmann’s accepting of sortal properties in an
Aristotelian mode—it is apparent that the concept of form in matter, especially as
found in the writings of Aquinas, is not irreconcilable with the requirements of con-
temporary analytic ontology and philosophy of mind. This justifies a reconsideration
of a causal theory of perception in terms of formal cause. Formal cause, moreover, is
never reducible to efficient cause.

Intentionality and the Curse of Representationalism

Several important aspects of contemporary work on intentionality theories and
Aristotelian realism require discussion. Haldane’s insights on formal cause and
Putnam’s denial that the mind is an ‘inner theatre’ are important in understanding
40
  John Haldane, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, in David S. Oderberg (ed.), Form and
Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 54.
41
  Ibid., 56.
42
  John Haldane, ‘Rational and Other Animals’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41 (1996), 22.
43
  Ibid.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  81

Aquinas.44 This ‘inner theatre’ model is a direct reference to representationalism,

which is familiar in all post-Cartesian philosophy of mind. The ‘inner theatre’ account
entails that efficient causation is a sufficient condition to explain sensation and percep-
tion. Secondly, it assumes what Putnam calls ‘the highest common factor’ for two
­disjuncts: a veridical and a non-veridical awareness:
Aristotle has, like McDowell today, a ‘disjunctive account’, one that does not postulate any
‘highest common factor’ between an illusion and a veridical perception. (I suspect that
McDowell, who is a fine Aristotle scholar, got his account from Aristotle, in fact.) Thus the
‘infallibility’ of sensation is a conceptual matter, not a problematic empirical claim. And the
intentionality of sensation lies in the fact that it is a taking in of the very sensible quality that it
is said to be ‘about’. Of course, the presence of that quality is one of the causes of its being taken
in; but the cause is singled out by what sensation is.45

This account put forward by Putnam is helpful in the attempt to reconstruct Aquinas
on intentionality theory and its relationship to a rejection of representationalism.
Kenny too directs his attention to this set of issues.46 Nonetheless, what analytic philos-
ophers neglect to consider is a theory of intentionality based on formal identity. To
reiterate an earlier claim, by his intentionality theory, Aquinas offers a middle ground
between Cartesian dualism on the one hand and the physicalism and functionalism
common to much contemporary work in the philosophy of mind on the other.
Furthermore, Aquinas’s intentionality theory goes beyond the functionalist account of
Aristotle on mind once attributed to Aristotle by Nussbaum and Putnam.

The Return to Form

The role of form in Aquinas’s ontology is to determine structure. Structure, in turn,
determines the organization of reality. This is what Aquinas calls a formal cause. As
Haldane noted: ‘If realism is to be vindicated, the relevant relationship between the
content of a veridical state and its object is one of identity.’47 It is through an analysis of
form that ontological realism and epistemological realism hold together. Aquinas
means more by ‘form’ and ‘formal cause’ than the mere arrangement of physical struc-
ture of an entity of a natural kind. Substantial form is ‘determinative’ of the essential or
sortal properties of a kind. Following Aristotle, the form of a biological kind deter-
mines a complex integrated set of metabolic processes concerned with sustaining life,

44
 Hilary Putnam, ‘Aristotle’s Mind and the Contemporary Mind’, in Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou,
Jagdish Hattiangadi, and David M. Johnson (eds), Aristotle and Contemporary Science, vol. 1 (New York:
Lang, 2000), 7–28.
45
  Ibid., 39.
46
  ‘Some people think of the mind as being a kind of inner environment, the polar opposite of the exter-
nal environment of the physical universe. This, I shall argue, is not the correct way to think of the mind: the
boundary between the mental and the material is not the same as the boundary between inner and outer’:
Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 15.
47
  Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, 40.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

82  aquinas and empiricism

growth, sensation in animals, mobility, and so forth. In the case of non-living primary
substances, the function of the form is what ultimately counts for tensile strength, duc-
tility, whether or not it is a good conductor of electricity, and so forth. An individual of
a natural kind will have a form-dependent physical arrangement; much more than
this, however, arrangement is form-dependent and essential to a specific kind of pri-
mary substance. Regarding substantial form, ontological realism argues that there
exists a structured world independent of consciousness. The correlative to ontological
realism is epistemological realism, which claims that in perception and thought, a
human knower is capable of direct awareness of the world and of attaining knowledge
of its structure. In the metaphysics and philosophy of mind of Aquinas, both ontologi-
cal realism and epistemological realism depend on an analysis of form, both substan-
tial forms for sortal properties and accidental forms for incidental characteristics.
Representationalism or representative realism is the theoretical rival of epistemologi-
cal realism, which illustrates the wide gap between Aquinas and Descartes.
What does the analysis put forward in this chapter entail? The following ten propo-
sitions follow from the extended discussion developed above:
(a) The acceptance of a position of ontological realism. This position holds that
there is a pre-existing structure to reality that is independent of mind.
(b) The acceptance of a position of epistemological realism. This position holds
that human knowers can be directly aware of reality and know its structure.
Ontological realism is a necessary condition for epistemological realism.
(c) Propositions (a) and (b) entail adopting some form of externalism and a rejec-
tion of internalism.
(d) Intentionality theory requires that the capacity to know be considered a ‘prim-
itive’ in Aquinas’s ontology. For Aquinas, intentionality is rooted in a set of
cognitive dispositions or powers grounded in the substantial form of the
knowing subject or cognitive agent. Being a ‘primitive’ does not suggest that no
analysis is required. Rather, primitive is an intrinsic, non-acquired, irreducible
capacity of a human being. Intentionality is a constitutive feature of a human
being.
(e) From the texts noted above, Aquinas spells out this characteristic in terms of a
knower’s ‘taking on the form of another without matter’, which is the equiva-
lent of esse intentionale in Thomas.
(f) This analysis requires that there is an isomorphism of structure between the
form of the thing and the form as known in the mind.
(g) One must take Aquinas literally here—there is a strict, formal identity of form
between the knower and the known. The content of knowing as exemplified in
esse intentionale is formally identical with the quality—either sortal or inciden-
tal characteristic—exemplified in the esse naturale of the thing.
(h) It follows from proposition (g) that the form structuring a primary substance
or individual of a natural kind outside is exemplified in that individual. When
the form is known in a knowing or cognitive potency, the form is exemplified
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  83

in that cognitive potency. This second exemplification determines the ‘aboutness’

of the mental act.
(i) Aquinas illustrates this formal identity when he claims that ‘Sensus in actu est
sensible in actu’, and ‘Intellectus in actu est intelligible in actu’. What makes
knowledge possible is that the form known is identical with the form in the
thing. This holds for both sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. Hence,
form as the foundation for isomorphism is the grounding for his ontological
and epistemological realism.
(j) Efficient causality alone cannot explain the exemplification of the content in a
mental act. Hence, formal causality is a necessary condition for perception.
It follows that isomorphism of structure or form is a necessary condition for under-
standing intentionality theory in Aquinas. The two Latin propositions ‘Sensus in actu
est sensible in actu’ and ‘Intellectus in actu est intelligible in actu’ denote this isomor-
phism. The explication of these two propositions is: (a) the sense faculty in perceiving
(in actu) is the identical form of the extensional sensible object (in actu); and (b) the
possible intellect (intellectus possibilis in actu) in knowing a set of sortal properties (the
essence) is, in principle, identical with the natural kind (in actu) in the external world.
The ‘est’ is the ‘is of identity’.
In conclusion, what Aquinas contributes to the contemporary discussion in the
philosophy of mind might be articulated in the following set of propositions:
(a) a formal identity of knower and known; this is the ‘equivalent value’ of the esse
naturale/esse intentionale distinction;
(b) an ontological theory of intentionality;
(c) a necessary condition in sensation theory requiring more than efficient
causality;
(d) a denial of the ‘inner theatre of the mind’ model for explanation;
(e) an argument for direct realism in opposition to representationalism;
(f) the adoption of externalism and a rejection of internalism.
The analysis put forward in this study is rooted in Aquinas’s Commentary on
Aristotle’s On the Soul. In the end, this chapter is in agreement with Haldane’s suggestion:
‘in their own ways influential figures such as McDowell and Putnam have been
working towards positions very close to that of Aristotle and Aquinas.’48 In a differ-
ent context, Kenny wrote: ‘I believe as a matter of fact, that the clearest insight into
the nature of the mind is to be obtained from the Aristotelian viewpoint.’49 If this
analysis is correct, this explains the subtitle for this chapter: ‘From Aquinas to Brentano
and Beyond’, which suggests that this analysis of intentionality theory rooted in
Brentano is of more than merely historical interest. Possibly the insights of medieval
philosophy may assist philosophers to go beyond Brentano and his successors in the
philosophy of mind.

48
  Ibid., 42. 49
 Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 18.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

84  aquinas and empiricism

From Ontology to the Philosophy of Mind

In reconstructing Aquinas’s take on issues in the philosophy of mind, philosophers
must begin with his account of the fundamental category in his metaphysics, which is
the primary substance. Aquinas’s ontology is a world of individuals—a world, none-
theless, of individuals grouped as members of natural kinds. The discussions of Kripke
and the earlier Putnam illustrate of several issues that drove Aquinas in considering
how to categorize the world of individuals. The language of formal cause rigidly des-
ignates the ontological category of substantial form in a hylomorphic ontology. The
individual is a member of a natural kind because its set of essential, sortal properties
established through its substantial form determines the essential structure of the nat-
ural kind. This is a de re and not a de dicto account. Thus, the sortal properties are
definitive of the kind in more than merely a linguistic sense. This individual is modi-
fied incidentally by a set of accidental forms. It is these forms that serve as the basis for
the formal causality that Aquinas requires in order to explain the possibility of human
knowledge. A substantial form, however, in opposition to Platonism, is always ‘embed-
ded’ with matter in the space–time realm; it is never a stand-alone ontological entity or
reified property.
Put differently, Aquinas’s question, given this metaphysical theory, is: how are these
individual primary substances known? In other words, what kind of intentionality
theory must one accept in order to explain the possibility of an awareness of these
individuals? Aquinas appears to construct a block-by-block intentional edifice in the
philosophy of mind; all the important objects of awareness come through the various
faculties or cognitive dispositions of the external and internal senses leading up to the
formation of a concept through the ingenious abstractive activity of the intellectus
agens and then known by the intellectus possibilis.
Regarding sensation, what this account proposes is that the intentional form in the
perception of a proper sensible—the esse intentionale—is identical with the structure
of the causal incidental or accidental form in the primary substance. Hence, for
Aquinas, ‘red’ has a causal structure in the world. What intentionality theory forces
Aquinas to accept is that the knower is aware of the red—for example, in the Jonathan
apple—by sharing in the form identically in an intentional but not an entitative man-
ner. This is the ‘esse intentionale’ and ‘esse reale’ distinction. There is a strict isomor-
phism between the esse intentionale and the esse reale. This is what renders perception
possible. Renaissance scholastics, to be sure, went through many contortions trying to
explain this causal structure. The intentional form, it must be emphasized, is never the
object of knowledge. It is the ‘a quo’ for perceiving, not the ‘id quod’ of knowing; in
other words, the intentional form is that by means of which the thing in the world is
known. From this it follows that Aquinas is not a sense datum philosopher. Furthermore,
a phantasm is not the object of knowledge with the external senses. To identify a phan-
tasm with a sense datum is a substantial category mistake. There is sufficient textual
evidence demonstrating that a phantasm is associated only with the faculties of
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  85

the internal sensorium—the imagination, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory.
A phantasm is never found in the external sensorium alone. This intentional analysis
put forward by Aquinas depends radically on the theory of formal causality. This is a
category difference in causal analysis from the paradigm of efficient causality adopted
by the early modern philosophers with the corresponding entanglement of represent-
ative realism. Aquinas’s analysis of a metaphysical theory of form enables his theory
to  transcend the limits of perception theory enunciated in the texts of modern
philosophy.
It is sufficient for now to have considered, albeit briefly, how Aquinas treated indirect
realism. Throughout the remainder of this book, Aquinas’s direct realism will be ana-
lysed in detail. Obviously, indirect realism has been suggested only in a limited manner
so far. One principal purpose of this book will be to establish direct realism. This will be
true when the thesis of objective relativism is considered later in this study. Textually,
Aquinas’s account repeatedly is removed from under the umbrella of indirect realism.
In contrast to the almost negligible worry about the possibility of indirect realism in
perception theory, Aquinas provides detailed analysis and criticism of exaggerated
realism or early Platonism. This problem is related to an analysis of the intellectus agens
and the ‘coming to be’ of the universal in the mind. Transcendental Platonism is, in
essence, related to concept formation through the process of anamnesis, which is Plato’s
classic theory of recollection. Aquinas, on the other hand, roots every act of knowledge
in the things of the common-sense world of experience. Hence, his analysis is opposed
theoretically to positions that entail subsistent or transcendental objects of awareness.
He argues against any theory of universalia ante rem, which entails Platonism. Much of
Aquinas’s efforts in analysing the ontological requirements for epistemology were
directed at refuting the need for ‘illuminatio divina’ and the ‘separate intelligences’
common to the Arabian philosophers. Historians suggest that during Aquinas’s time,
various forms of divine illumination were defended vigorously at the University of
Paris, by both the Latin Averroists and the Franciscan philosophers, especially
Bonaventure. Recent work by Pasnau suggests that Aquinas may be a more significant
figure in the tradition of divine illumination than many scholastic historians of phil­
osophy have been wont to admit. Pasnau writes: ‘Aquinas represents the end of a long
tradition in western philosophy. All the great philosophers, until the end of the thir-
teenth century, had seen no way to explain the workings of mind without appealing to
the supernatural.’50 Pasnau argues that with Duns Scotus, the break with a supernatural
‘illumination’ is finally achieved. Scotus, Pasnau writes, ‘would propose a thoroughly
naturalistic account of the working of the mind’, and hence ‘viewed from this perspec-
tive, Aquinas marks the end of the first chapter in the history of the philosophy of mind’.51

50
 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 309.
51
  Ibid., 310. In a review of Pasnau’s book, Kenny argues against this interpretation of Aquinas’s intellec-
tus agens; see Times Literary Supplement (7 Mar. 2003); see also Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 164.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

86  aquinas and empiricism

An analysis of the intellectus agens will occur near the end of this book. At that time,
Pasnau’s intriguing suggestion about illuminatio divina and its connection with
Aquinas’s intellectus agens will be discussed in more detail.
Nonetheless, Taylor and Herrera provide one of the better accounts refuting the
divine illumination thesis, although they do not refer to Pasnau’s account directly.52
The foil for their analysis is Smit, who argues that a form of divine illumination is the
only consistent reductive analysis of the intellectus agens.53 Taylor and Herrera argue
that Aquinas, following insights from Averroes, held that the intellectus agens is able
to utilize its ability for abstraction following the standard interpretation of Aristotle’s
philosophy of mind, which is not reducible to Augustine’s divine illumination theory.
Taylor and Herrera argue, moreover, that when Aquinas mentions the ‘divine light’ in
referring to the intellectus agens, what he means is a use of primary causality, which
would be similar to the continuous creation adopted by Descartes. This is the overall
dependence that any created object has in Aquinas’s view of the world. This is not
reducible to rendering the abstractive power of the intellectus agens into a divine cog-
nitive operation.

Aquinas on Truth
Aquinas offers a version of a correspondence theory of truth which fits in with the
ontological realism found in his philosophy of mind and in his epistemology. Often
Aquinas considers truth as a ‘conformity’ (read ‘adequatio’) of mind and thing:
‘adequatio rei et intellectus’. In De Veritate, he writes as follows about the nature
of truth:
Just as the true is found primarily in the intellect rather than in things, so also is it found
­primarily in an act of the intellect joining and separating, rather than in an act by which it
forms the quiddities of things. For the nature of the true consists in conformity of thing
and  intellect. Nothing becomes conformed to itself, but conformity requires distinct terms.
Consequently, the nature of truth is first found in the intellect when the intellect begins to
possess something proper to itself, not possessed by the thing outside the soul, yet correspond-
ing to it, so that between the two—intellect and thing—a conformity may be found. In forming
the quiddities of things, the intellect merely has a likeness of a thing existing outside the soul,
as a sense has a likeness when it receives the species of a sensible thing. But when the intellect
begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgement is something proper to
itself—not something found outside in the thing. The judgement is said to be true when it
conforms to the external reality. Moreover, the intellect judges about the thing it has appre-
hended at the moment when it says that something is or is not. This is the role of ‘the intellect
composing and dividing’. (De Veritate, q. 1)

52
  Richard Taylor and Max Herrera, ‘Aquinas’s Naturalized Epistemology’, in Social Justice: Its Theory
and Practice: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 79 (2005), 85–102.
53
  Smit, ‘Aquinas’s Abstractionism’, 85–118.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  87

Scholastic philosophy often considered three acts of the mind:

(a) Simple apprehension: the apprehension of a quiddity or natural kind by means
of a concept. This is the working of the intellectus agens through abstraction in
forming a species intelligibilis and the intellectus possibilis in knowing the con-
tent of the quiddity or essence.
(b) Judgement: the formation of a proposition by joining together a subject and a
predicate using a copula. An example would be: ‘A horse has four legs.’
(c) Reasoning: moving from one proposition to another by means of one of the
Aristotelian logical forms exemplified in the theory of demonstration based on
the Aristotelian syllogism.
The property of ‘true’ applies to subjects and predicates being ‘combined and
divided’ in a way that corresponds to things in the external world. Hence, ‘true’ is a
property of judgement. ‘Simple apprehension’ refers to the acquisition of a concept
through the process of abstraction using the intellectus agens and the intellectus possi-
bilis. The object of the awareness is a ‘quiddity’ or an ‘essence’ of a natural kind which is
the result of abstraction using the intellectus agens and then the act of knowing of the
intellectus possibilis. ‘Reasoning’ refers principally to the use of the Aristotelian syllo-
gism where the rules of formal logic apply.
Aquinas also offers a distinction between what we might call ‘ontological truth’ and
‘formal’ or ‘epistemological’ truth. Ontological truth is the relation that holds between
an exemplar in the Divine Mind and instances of that exemplar in the material world.
For instance, one Divine Idea is the exemplar of human nature. Human beings are
what they are, Aquinas argues using an Augustinian insight, because they are made in
the ‘image and likeness of God’, which is the correspondence of individual to the
Divine Idea. Epistemological or formal truth holds when the idea in the human mind
corresponds with the thing in the external world, in reference either to essential or
accidental properties. In either case, truth is an ‘adequatio rei et intellectus’.54
The next chapter will begin the explicatio textus of the relevant sections—taken,
for the most part, from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Soul—that treat sensation and
perception in detail. The author agrees with Pasnau’s judgement expressed in his trans-
lation of the Commentary: ‘The De Anima commentary is particularly important for
understanding certain aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy. Here, more than anywhere else,
Aquinas gives detailed accounts of the processes involved in human cognition.’55 It is in
the spirit of Professor Pasnau’s observations that the remainder of this study is directed.

54
  Recent work by postmodernist theologians like Milbank and Pickstock suggest a radically different
account of the concept of truth in Aquinas. Kenny and Dewan, as noted in Ch. 1, are particularly critical of
this theological interpretation of Aquinas. See Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas and the Appearances of Bread’,
review of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 2001),
14; Lawrence Dewan, ‘On Milbank and Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas’, Nova et Vetera 1(1) (2003), 199–212.
55
  Robert Pasnau, in Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1999), p. xiii.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

88  aquinas and empiricism

appendix
Aquinas, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and
Representationalism
Interesting structural affinities can be found between Aquinas and ordinary language
arguments against representative realism. As a direct realist, Aquinas seems given to offering
Austinian-like responses—‘No, a dream image is just not like a perception!’ In opposition to
representationalism, with special reference to sense data positions, Aquinas seems aligned
with several ordinary-language philosophers. For example, Ryle wrote the following analysis
concerning problems with representative realism:
But it needs no prolonged argument to show (1) that there is no evidence for the existence of these
supposed mental proxies for independent realities, (2) that the assumption of them throws no light on
the problem (if there is one) how we can think about or know things, but only multiplies gratuitously
the number of things to be thought about or known; and (3) that it embodies a theory, implausible
in itself, which if true, would make knowledge or even probably opinion about independent realities
quite impossible.56

Like Ryle, Aquinas suggests that mental states themselves are not the direct object of ordinary
knowledge. Aquinas provides several interesting common-sense observations about the
ramifications of representationalism. Some philosophers, however, might maintain that he fails
to provide a philosophical refutation. In considering representationalism, Aquinas argues that
if mental states themselves are the direct object of knowledge, then two rather odd philosophical
conclusions follow:

(a) We could never know anything beyond our mental states; hence every academic disci-
pline would be nothing more than a psychological inquiry. This is similar to Ryle’s third
point above.
(b) If sensations themselves and not physical objects are the direct referent of mental acts,
then Protagoras’s maxim ‘Man is the measure of all things!’ philosophically becomes the
established epistemological norm.

Aquinas provides counterexamples to indicate what philosophically odd conclusions follow

from a theory that has for the direct object of mental acts the very mental states themselves. Put
differently, Aquinas suggested a reductio ad absurdum argument against representative realism.
In one sense, he is somewhat like Berkeley. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley held that if some
form of direct realism is not correct, then one cannot account for the apparent consistency that
the external world manifests. Like Ryle, Aquinas worried about the principal consequence of
representationalism: if it is impossible to get beyond the ‘mental state’, then it follows that it is
impossible to know the external world. This is the heart of both the realism/idealism issue and
the externalist/internalist division. In effect, Aquinas, like Austin and Ryle, emphasizes where
fundamental philosophical problems lie with representationalism.

56
 Gilbert Ryle, ‘John Locke on the Human Understanding’, in J. L. Stocks and Gilbert Ryle (eds),
Tercentenary Addresses on John Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); repr. in C. B. Martin and
D. M. Armstrong (eds), Locke and Berkeley (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 22.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

aquinas and empiricism  89

While some might rejoin that Aquinas did not provide a sufficient structural analysis of
representative realism, Aquinas, it appears, never considered that the representationalism
espoused by Locke or Descartes was prima facie plausible. For Aquinas as a direct realist,
colour is not equivalent to a mind-dependent secondary quality as understood by Locke
and Descartes. In the Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, Aquinas writes: ‘the visible, the
audible, exist outside the mind’ (no. 375). In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, he remarks:
‘so also colour does not mean the same as being seen’ (iii lec. 2). In the De Anima, Aquinas
writes: ‘light cannot actuate sight according to determinate species of colour unless these
colours are present to actuate sight’ (De Anima, q. 5), and in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas
states: ‘sensible things are found in act outside of the soul’ (I q. 79 a. 5 ad 1). Passages like
‘Nonetheless, the primary object (of a mental act) is the thing’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2)
occur frequently. This ‘thing consciousness’ language occurs over and over throughout the
philosophy of mind texts of Aquinas, and illustrates his commitment to epistemological
realism and externalism.
Aquinas argues that there is a real ontological ground or power present in the truncated
world, which is efficacious causally and in some way isomorphic with the sensation which the
atomists and early modern philosophers termed ‘secondary qualities’. This power is distinct
ontologically from the quantified being. In other words, there is a difference in kind between
a  ‘form’ of a secondary quality and a ‘form’ of a primary quality. This is a real ontological
distinction. This category difference would be unacceptable to Democritus and Lucretius, to
Locke and Descartes, and to Hume, Russell, and Ayer. Once again, Aquinas’s epistemological
realism endowed with externalism is central to these discussions.
Haldane agrees that the epistemological problems engendered by the new science appear not
to have bothered Aquinas. Writing on this difference, Haldane noted:
During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries psychology was no longer pursued in a unitary scho-
lastic fashion [. . . and] by that point a new agenda was developing in psychology as Hobbes and Descartes
tried in their very different ways (materialist and dualist, respectively) to relate the existence and nature
of the mind, conceived largely in terms of consciousness, to the human body, by then thought of as a
machine composed out of material elements whose intrinsic nature is geometrical—in effect, atoms in
the void.57

Aquinas was more than familiar with the atomists of antiquity, and he provided philosophical
refutations of their theories of sensation and perception. Nonetheless, representationalism
appears prima facie incomprehensible to him. He did not observe philosophical problems
compelling enough to force him into considering indirect realism and internalism as viable
epistemological accounts of perception. For the classical seventeenth-century representative
realists, on the other hand, there was no qualitative distinction between the causal factors for
the awareness of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In Descartes’s ontology of the
material world, for example, the extended quantified existents were the only things existing
formally in the truncated world. Extension is the essential property of material objects.
Aquinas, to the contrary, would not accept this quantified materialism in the truncated world.
His position on sense knowledge is classified as ‘objective relativism’. Not having faced the

57
  John Haldane, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.),
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 334.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

90  aquinas and empiricism

serious consequences for epistemology brought by the new science more than anything else, it
would appear, accounts for Aquinas’s abrupt dismissal of representative realism.
This discussion concerning Aquinas and representative realism is more significant than a
mere historical exegesis pertaining to the annals of medieval scholarship. Chapter 2 indicated
that contemporary students of epistemology provide differing accounts of intentionality
theory. This applies also to Brentano’s thesis of intentionality. Brentano was well versed in
medieval philosophy, and his thesis of intentionality offers structural similarities with Aquinas.
The previous chapter noted that Brentano remarked that ‘every mental phenomenon is
characterized by what the scholastics of the middle ages called the intentional or mental
inexistence of an object’. In view of this relationship, one way of interpreting Brentano’s theory
is by structural analysis of Aquinas’s position. Some contemporary philosophers suggest that
Aquinas’s theory is reducible to representationalism. The passages considered above, therefore,
serve as an important backdrop for any reconstruction of Aquinas’s account of sensation
and perception.
At this point in the discussion, it is useful to consider, albeit briefly, the claims by some
contemporary philosophers that Aquinas is in effect a foundationalist and an internalist in
his epistemology. By focusing mostly on a particular interpretation of Aquinas’s Commentary
on the Posterior Analytics, the claims of foundationalism are put forward along with its
correlate of internalism. Wolterstorff, for example, held: ‘Aquinas offers one classic version of
foundationalism.’58 Plantinga suggested that we can understand Aquinas’s epistemology
better ‘if we see [Aquinas] as accepting some version of classical foundationalism’.59 MacDonald
argues rather emphatically that Aquinas ‘quite explicitly commits himself to a strong version
of internalism’.60 The opposite position developed in this text argues that Aquinas adopts a
form of externalism together with an anti-foundationalist position. As noted earlier, the
thrust of this position explicating Aquinas’s philosophy of mind will rest on his Commentary
on Aristotle’s De Anima, augmented with texts from other works in which he provided an
explanation of cognitive processes rather than developing a foundationalist theory of
justification. A later Appendix will return to this set of issues.

58
 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1984), 30.
59
  Alvin Plantinga, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds), Faith
and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 48.
60
  Scott MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, in N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

4
Epistemological Dispositions
Causal Powers and the Human Person

Beginning with the middle sections of the Commentary, the present explicatio considers
Aquinas’s remarks on the fifth chapter of Book II of Aristotle’s On the Soul. In Aquinas’s
Commentary, this corresponds to Lectio 10, no. 350 and following. The discussions by
both Aristotle and Aquinas prior to the mid-parts of book II principally concern the
vegetative principles of the soul, which have little direct bearing on sensation and per-
ception and are not part of this inquiry.

The Empedoclean Principle

In the discussions about the principles of intentionality, the concepts of ‘act’ and
‘potency’ occurred frequently. Beginning with Lectio 10 in the Commentary, Aquinas
provides an elaborate analysis of these terms, indicating how they are used in various
contexts in the philosophy of mind. What emerges, interestingly enough, is the devel-
opment of a procedure with striking similarities to the ‘family resemblance’ talk com-
mon to mid-twentieth century ordinary-language philosophers. Aquinas lists the
various ‘uses’ of the concepts of ‘act’ and ‘potency’ in relation to the ‘logic’ of these two
concepts. He begins his discussion of act and potency by considering two proposi-
tions, which came down to him through various Aristotelian commentators in the
long history of philosophy:
(a) To sense is to be moved or acted upon in some way, for the act of sensation
involves a certain alteration of the subject. [. . .]
(b) It was the view of some inquiries that the passivity of sensation was an instance
of ‘like being acted upon by like’. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 350)
These two propositions, rooted in the epistemological principles Aristotle assumed
Empedocles to hold, are related to the act/potency distinction because both mention
an  ‘alteration’ or ‘being acted upon’. Act and potency apply analytically to the
Aristotelian notion of change or alteration: ‘Motion is the fulfilment [i.e. act] of
what exists potentially, insofar as it exists potentially’ (Physics, bk III, ch. 1). Hence,
both concepts of act and potency are central to any discussion of change. Moreover,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

92  Epistemological Dispositions

both of the propositions listed above consider perception as some form of change
or alteration.1

Aquinas’s Modification of ‘Like Knows Like’

In beginning his extended analysis, Aquinas considers the second proposition, rooted
historically in Empedocles but further developed in the Platonic tradition. He suggests
that this proposition, ‘Like knows like’, is central to any analysis of sensation and per-
ception. However, this principle must be interpreted in a radically different manner
from what Empedocles claimed. In this reinterpretation of ‘Like knows like’, Aquinas
begins his analysis of intentionality.
Historically, Empedocles argued that perception occurred because an identity holds
between objects within and without the knower. This isomorphism, moreover, is one
of strict formal identity. In the following brief passage taken from one of the few
surviving Empedoclean fragments, Empedocles discusses sight: ‘For it is with earth
that we see Earth, and Water with water; by air we see bright Air, by fire destroying
Fire. By love do we see Love, and Hate by grievous hate’ (Fragment 109). Empedocles
explained the possibility of knowledge through the actual presence in the knower of an
element identical to an element outside the mind. This is a mechanistic model, which
denies any significance to intentionality as an ontologically primitive characteristic
of knowers.2
Aquinas modifies Empedocles’s axiom. In effect, his modification attempts to rule
out the ‘frankly unbelievable’ status Smart attributed to sensations and perceptions.
Subsequent to Aristotle’s De Anima, this modification contributed to the development
of intentionality theory. Aquinas utilizes the act/potency distinction in this modifica-
tion of Empedocles’s principle. He claims that the sensitive soul, which in effect
grounds a perceptual disposition, contains its object only potentially and not actually.
Aquinas understands the rudimentary Empedoclean epistemology literally. He sug-
gests that Empedocles asserted that the ‘actual existence’ of the elements within the
knower accounted for the possibility of knowing those elements outside of the mind.
Aquinas evaluates critically this interpretation of ‘Like knows like’ in terms of an
‘immaterial’ reception of forms. In responding to Empedocles, in effect, Aquinas

1
  This proposition indicates what Nussbaum suggests about the incommensurability of ‘goods’ or ‘ends’
in Aristotle’s philosophical theories; an end is the completion of a potency, and there are as many kinds of
ends as there are distinct potencies.
2
  In contemporary philosophy-of-mind discussions, the theory of Empedocles appears reducible to a
kind of ‘physicalism’ similar to the materialist theory propounded by J. J. C. Smart and D. M. Armstrong,
among others. Known sometimes as the ‘Australian Theory’, physicalism, according to Smart, proposes the
following about the nature of mind: ‘The sciences of biology and psychology […] are an application of
physics and chemistry to natural history [… and] organisms are simply very complicated physico-chemical
mechanisms’: J. C. C. Smart, quoted in Jenny Teichman, Philosophy and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988),
13. Teichman notes that Smart once argued that ‘everything’ falls under the rubric of physical explanation,
‘except (Smart continues) the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  93

develops his own thesis of intentionality. If the sense faculties actually and materially
contained their objects, then, Aquinas suggests, any thesis of intentionality would
be undercut. He provides two reasons for this consequence, both serving as coun-
terexamples: (a) any knower would be able to sense her own sense faculties by
means of the faculty under consideration; (b) sensations could be had even though
the objects themselves were not present.
Proposition (b) is related directly to the general criticisms concerning representative
realism.3 Descartes articulated the philosophical problem that if representationalism
were correct, then a human knower might be locked in his own mind, which would
entail that ideas would never connect with the external world. Malebranche developed
this same set of epistemological problems, denying the basic ‘tending towards’ and
‘aboutness’ relation characteristic of the ontological state of intentionality.
Aquinas too suggests that if Empedocles’s theory is true, it follows that not only is it
a theory of representationalism, but it also suffers a principal defect of representation-
alism. Aquinas indicates that if a strict interpretation of the Empedoclean axiom is
accepted, then the objects of sensation would be contained materially—i.e. existen-
tially ‘fleshed out’—within the structure of the sense faculties themselves. If this were
correct, then it follows, so Aquinas suggests, that a perceiver could perceive her very
sense faculties. In this analysis, Aquinas implicitly utilizes the act/object distinction.
He does not deny that one can be aware of one’s own acts of awareness. In other words,
Aquinas does not deny the possibility that knowing beings, as beings capable of acts of
intentionality, have the ability, even at the perceptual level, of reflective self-awareness.
In fact, he suggests that the sensus communis is the faculty by which perceptual self-­
awareness occurs. Accordingly, in the above argument against a literal reading of the
Empedoclean axiom, Aquinas must be implying that the ‘sense faculty’ itself and not
the ‘act of awareness’ would become an object of perception. In other words, he is not
considering the mental act of the sense faculty. On the experiential level, Aquinas does
have a point. It is impossible to see one’s eyeball or hear one’s eardrum, and so forth.
Aquinas’s concern, then, is that if Empedocles’s axiom is viable, then given a theory of
perception following from this axiom, several odd conclusions follow.
The second consequence of a literal reading of the Empedoclean axiom is a counter-
example in favour of direct realism. In one sense, Aquinas simply restates what he means
by perception—i.e. an awareness of an object in the external world. His discussion
once again is characteristic of the strongly realistic overtone found throughout his the-
ory of sensation and perception. In a strict sense, one might claim that Aquinas begs
the question against Empedocles. On the other hand, Aquinas sees no compelling
reason or set of reasons for accepting representationalism. Put simply, if a theory of
perception either denies an awareness of the things found in the external world or
contains a structural component entailing such a denial, Aquinas considers this fact
alone sufficient for a reductio ad absurdum argument against the theory’s tenability.

  This is similar structurally to Descartes’s ‘dream problem’ in the First Meditation.

3
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

94  Epistemological Dispositions

Here he is strikingly similar to some mid-twentieth-century ordinary-language

philosophers, Ryle and Austin in particular. Of course, it does not follow that Aquinas
was an ordinary-language philosopher. Nonetheless, the common-sense dimensions
to several aporia articulated by Aquinas have similarities to issues central to the
­philosophy of mind in mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. These similarities
run through much of Aquinas’s writings.
In using the concept of ‘common-sense knowledge’ in this context, Aquinas
­suggests that his tenets regarding the philosophy of mind underwrite common-sense
realism; yet common sense is also a means of explicating the appropriateness of the
correct application of concepts as well as the assertion of true propositions that belong
to an Aristotelian account of scientific knowledge. In other words, Aquinas’s notion
of the philosophy of mind is not limited to an unreflective common-sense realism
about there being a public world of objects—although this certainly plays a role. The
philosophy of mind is the basis for common-sense knowledge, suggesting that there
is a world of primary substances of a natural kind. From this beginning, Aquinas
develops his philosophy of mind as a way of explaining how his attempt at under-
standing the world of primary substances is a better epistemological route upon
which to embark.
A literal reading of the Empedoclean principle, however, is not sufficient, Aquinas
suggests, to discard it completely from an analysis of sensation and perception. By
means of the act/potency distinction, both Aristotle and Aquinas provide a conceptual
rehabilitation of Empedocles’s principles.
Now since these problems are insurmountable if the sense faculty consists of its objects in their
actuality (as the early philosophers thought), Aristotle concludes that the sensible soul is clearly
not actually, but only potentially the sense object. That is why sensation will not occur without
an exterior sense-object, just as combustible material does not burn of itself, but needs to be
ignited by an exterior agent. Whereas if it were actually fire, it would burn simply of itself.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 354; emphasis added)

Aquinas amplifies these suggestions:

Aristotle shows how it follows from the above that the old theory that ‘like senses like’ cannot
be true. Everything potential, he says, is acted upon and moved by some active agent already
existing; its actualizing function makes the potential thing like itself. In some sense, then, a
thing is acted upon by both its like and its unlike. In the beginning, while the transforming
process is going on, there is dissimilarity. At the end, however, when the thing is transformed
and changed, there is similarity. And so it is between the sense faculty and its object. The early
philosophers [antiqui] went wrong because they missed this distinction. (no. 357)

Given this argument, Aquinas believes he has reconciled the principles of Empedocles
so that a viable philosophical analysis of sensation might follow. This rehabilitation is a
necessary condition for the development of a thesis of intentionality in Aquinas’s phi-
losophy of mind. Keeping the strict materialism inherent in Empedocles precludes,
Aquinas believes, the possibility of an intentionality theory.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  95

On Potency and Act

In probing Empedocles’s work, Aquinas interprets this principle in terms of potency
and act. The sense faculty is able to ‘become’ the object in the external world in an
immaterial, intentional manner. Empedocles’s physicalism, so Aquinas suggests, rules
out the possibility of an intentionality theory. In his On Spiritual Creatures, Aquinas
refers to Empedocles and the ‘Like knows like’ axiom:

The early philosophers asserted that the knowing subject should be of the same nature as the
thing known. Hence Empedocles said: ‘We know the earth through earth and the water through
water’. But to rule this out, Aristotle asserted that the knowing power in us, according as it is in
potency, is void of the nature of the things that can be known. Thus, the pupil of the eye, for
example, is void of colour. But yet the sense in act is the thing sensed in act, inasmuch as the
sense is put in act through being informed by the sensible species; and by the same reasoning,
the intellect in act is the thing understood in act, inasmuch as it is informed by the intelligible
species: ‘For a stone does not exist in the soul, but the species of a stone,’ as Aristotle himself
says. Now the reason why something is intelligible in act is that it is separated from matter. And
consequently, he says: ‘In those things which are without matter, the understanding subject and
the thing which is understood are the same.’ Therefore the understanding angel need not be the
same in substance as the understood angel, if they are immaterial. But the understanding of the
one must be informed by a likeness of the other. (On Spiritual Creatures, art. 8)

In this discussion, there appears to be a twofold problem noticed by Aquinas in

which the concepts of act and potency are used: (a) The mental act of direct aware-
ness itself; (b) the knowing faculty or power as a disposition. From the passages
quoted above, it appears that Aristotle and Aquinas consider both faculty and men-
tal act, whereas Empedocles considered only the mental act. The act/potency dis-
tinction, however, does pertain to knowing faculties or powers, which is the second
proposition. In that proposition, the knowing power is considered as a ‘disposition’
or ‘potency’ capable of ‘intentionally becoming’ another thing. However, this second
set of issues involving knowing faculties did not bother Empedocles; he appears to
have been concerned only with the mental act of sensation itself, not the mental faculty
of sensation. Early on in his Commentary, Aquinas, in responding to Empedocles,
offers the important distinction between the mental act of awareness, the sense organ,
and the knowing faculty. Empedocles does not distinguish the sense organ from the
sense faculty.
In regard to this passage, moreover, Aquinas and Aristotle suggest that ‘intentional
becoming’ is quite different from ‘material becoming’. If ‘Like knows like’ were only
another instance of ‘material becoming’, then this would rule out a priori any form of
‘intentional becoming’. Once again, Aquinas uses an intentionality theory to undercut
a physicalist account of mind. The two propositions are not in conflict. They do
indicate, moreover, that Aristotle and Aquinas were not only commenting upon a his-
torical position in sensation and perception theory. Rather, they elaborated upon and
developed their own theory. Therefore, in the analysis of ‘intentional becoming’, the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

96  Epistemological Dispositions

concepts of act and potency are used in two senses. The consideration of these uses
demand further analysis, which will be undertaken later in this chapter.

Conceptual Dispositions
Once finished with his discussion and analysis of the Empedoclean principle, Aquinas
next considers the first proposition expressed above. ‘To sense is to be moved or acted
upon in some way, for the act of sensation involves a certain alteration of the subject’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 350). This proposition asserts that sensation is an
instance of ‘being moved’ or ‘being acted upon’ in some manner or other. Once again,
the analysis of this proposition is in terms of the concepts of potency and act. This is
consistent with the Aristotelian definition of motion as found in the Physics. If sensa-
tion is motion in some way, then it too will utilize the concepts of act and potency as
required by the definition of motion. It is important to notice the ‘qualified’ remark
that sensation is an instance of motion. Note that part of the text of the proposition is
the following: ‘To sense is to be moved or acted upon in some way . . . ’. The phrase ‘in
some way’ is important for Aristotelian philosophy of mind. Both Aristotle and
Aquinas claim that knowledge is only analogous to a motion. It follows, therefore, that
knowledge is neither identical nor coextensive with a motion or an action. At any
length, one must note that knowledge is not reducible to motion. Hence, any reduction
of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind to atomism, materialism, physicalism, or any form of
a causal theory of perception as espoused by either the early modern philosophers or
contemporary physicalists, is a category mistake.
Following Aristotle’s procedure, Aquinas lists the various contexts in which the
terms ‘act’ and ‘potency’ are used in any philosophy of mind analysis of the first propo-
sition. Aquinas begins his analysis with a discussion of these concepts as applied to the
intellect, where both concept formation and concept exercise occur. This discussion is
germane to this inquiry because the analysis of the terms ‘act’ and ‘potency’, when used
in relation to the acquisitions of concepts, is modified so that it might apply equally to
instances of sensation and perception.
In explicating the concepts of potency and act, Aquinas uses a twofold approach
insofar as these concepts apply to the intellect. His first approach is to explain what
types or classifications of acts and potencies are used in epistemological contexts.
Secondly, he proposes an analysis for a potency being reduced to an act in the knowing
process. These two considerations are interrelated in that the first discussion pertains to
a description of what types of potencies or dispositions and acts or perfections are nec-
essary for a philosophy of mind analysis. The second discussion is concerned with the
development or process from a disposition to an actuality. These terms lead to a philoso-
phy of mind account of how a non-knower becomes a knower. ‘Non-knower’ is used in
this context to refer to a cognitive agent capable of knowing but not yet knowing. It does
not refer to a being incapable of knowing at all, for example, a table, a chair, or a beer can.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  97

The use of disposition in this context is important. By means of a disposition or

capacity, Aquinas argues that only certain kinds of existents are capable of knowing.
Simply put, it is by the gambit of intentional dispositions that Aquinas maintains that a
stone cannot form a concept (a ‘conceptus’) whereas a human being can. The discus-
sion of principles of intentionality affirmed this distinction. Aquinas, through the use
of a dispositional analysis, widens the philosophical gap between human knowers and
non-knowers rather than lessening this gap.4 By means of ontological dispositions,
Aquinas offers an elucidation of Chisholm’s reference to ‘that funny characteristic’
which all knowers possess. Kenny argued much the same way:
Again, rats can see, and discriminate between circles and triangles; but no amount of gazing at
diagrams will make a rat a student of geometry. The specifically human ability to acquire com-
plicated concepts from experience, and to grasp geometrical truths presented in diagrams, will
perhaps be what Aquinas has in mind when he speaks of the agent intellect.5

In regard to the first point—i.e. to explain the different types of dispositions used in an
epistemological analysis—Aquinas provides the following illustrations of various uses
of act and potency:
Aristotle distinguishes act and potency in the intellect in the following way:

(a) We speak, he says, in one sense of potency when we say that a person is able to be a
knower, referring to the natural capacity of the person for knowledge. Human beings,
we say, belong to that class of existents who know or have knowledge, meaning that this
nature can know and form habits of knowing.
(b) In another sense, however, we say of a person that she knows, meaning that she knows
certain definite things; thus we say of one who has the habit of some science—e. g.,
grammar—that the person is now one who knows. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 359)

Aquinas explicates further this difference:

Now, obviously, in both cases the capacities of the human person are implied by calling the
person a knower. But not in the same way in both cases.

(a) In the first case, a human person is said to be ‘able’ through belonging to a certain genus
or ‘matter’; i.e., the specific nature had a certain capacity that puts the person in this
genus. Thus, the person is in potency to knowledge as matter is to its form.

4
  Geach stressed this gap in Mental Acts, where his analysis is similar to what Aquinas argued; he
emphasizes the difference between animal knowledge and human knowledge. ‘What is at issue here
is not just the way the term “concept” is to be used, but the desirability of comparing these achieve-
ments of rats and dogs with the performances of human beings who possess a concept of triangle; the
psychologists I am criticizing want to play down the differences between human and animal perfor-
mances, and I want to stress them’: Peter T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1957), 17.
5
 Anthony Kenny, ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’, in Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 279.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

98  Epistemological Dispositions

(b) But the second person, with the acquired habit of knowing, is called ‘able’ because she
can, when she wishes, reflect on the knowledge attained—unless, of course, one is acci-
dentally prevented, for example, through exterior preoccupation or by some bodily
indisposition.
(c) A third case would be when a person is actually thinking about something here and now.
This person is the one who most properly and perfectly is a knower in any field; e.g.,
knowing the letter ‘A’, which belongs to the above-mentioned science of grammar. (nos
359, 360; emphasis added)

Aquinas next sums up nicely his position:

Of the three, then, the third knower is simply in act; the first knower is simply in potency; while
the second knower is in act as compared with the first, and in potency as compared with the
third. [. . .] Clearly then potentiality is taken in two senses (i.e., the first and second knower)
and actuality also in two senses (the second and the third knower). (no. 360)

In elucidating the logic of the concepts of act and potency, Aquinas suggests that epis-
temological dispositions (potencies or powers) and their corresponding perfections
(acts) can be used in at least two distinct senses. These passages suggest once again a
family resemblance methodology similar to the use theory of meaning. Aquinas denies
the possibility of a singular use or unified meaning for the concepts involved in his
philosophy of mind. On the contrary, these concepts have different senses and nuances
depending upon the ‘context’ in which they are being used. This is probably an addi-
tional use of Aquinas’s theory of analogy. For Aquinas, the concept of ‘being’ (ens) is an
analogous concept. Since the principal division of Being is ‘potency and act’, these
terms too have analogous uses in differing contexts.

A Revised Set of Terms

This analysis of the above passages in Aquinas’s Commentary offers new terminology,
which will assist in understanding Aquinas’s account of dispositional properties and
their corresponding perfections as used in his thesis of intentionality.
In reference to states of knowledge, the first sense of potency shall be called
‘Disposition-1’. Disposition-1 is the state in which any given potential knower finds
herself when she has the ability or capacity to know. This ability has not yet been
perfected or advanced in any manner. The development of the capacity is yet to be
realized. Furthermore, Disposition-1 is the basis for Aristotle’s claim that the intellect
is, in a sense, all things. Aquinas refers to this Aristotelian claim: ‘Aristotle writes that
the soul is in a manner all things’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 14 a. 1). The following pas-
sage from Aristotle’s On the Soul provides the historical referent for this claim: ‘The
mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until
it has thought. What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a
writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written. This is exactly what hap-
pens with the mind’ (On the Soul, no. 430a).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  99

Aquinas develops this Aristotelian insight in the following passage from his On the
Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists:
Likewise, if the nature of the things, which the intellect knows, for example, earth or water,
what is hot or cold, or anything of this kind, were intrinsic to the intellect, that nature within
the intellect would hinder and in some way prevent the intellect from knowing other things.
Because, therefore, the intellect knows all things, Aristotle concludes that ‘it cannot itself have
any nature’ which is determined by the sensible natures that it knows; ‘but it has this nature
alone, that it is possible’; that is, in potency to those things that it knows, so far as its own nature
is concerned. But it becomes those things in act during the time in which it actually knows
them. In a similar fashion, the sense in act becomes the sensible in act, as Aristotle had said
above in Book II of De Anima. Aristotle, therefore, concludes that the intellect ‘before it under-
stands (in act), is actually none of those things’. This is contrary to what the ancient philoso-
phers said, namely it is actually all things. (On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists,
ch. 1, sec. 21)

Aquinas next considers going from Disposition-1 to its corresponding act or perfec-
tion. Disposition-1 is actualized or perfected by means of the acquisition of what
Aquinas calls a habitus of knowledge, which is an acquired ‘habit’ or ‘skill’ in knowing.
More specifically, Aquinas refers to this type of habitus as an intellectual conceptus or
concept. By acquiring a habit of knowledge, a knower actualizes Disposition-1 and the
state of ‘Actuality-1’ is produced. This is the state in which the knower acquires a
knowledge disposition. This claim acknowledges a substantial difference, for example,
between a person who knows Hungarian—i.e. a person who has the developed habit
and has acquired the mastery of the Hungarian language—and a person who may have
an innate language ability or capacity to learn Slavic languages but who has yet to
embark on this study. For example, there is a difference between a professor of
Hungarian in a Slavic languages department and a first-year student who aspires to
learn Hungarian but who knows nothing yet of the Hungarian language. The existence
of Actuality-1, as an acquired disposition or knowing skill, is what distinguishes the
professor from the neophyte.
Actuality-1, however, when it refers to the habit of acquired mastery of a ‘piece of
knowledge’—a ‘concept—also may be used as a disposition. In this context, this will be
referred to as ‘Disposition-2’. This distinction is made because a knower may have the
acquired mastery of a parcel of knowledge but at a specific time not actually use this
ability. The professor of Hungarian language, for instance, might be watching a lacrosse
game with his daughter. Hence, he might be far removed from any situation in which
his ability to function well with Hungarian grammar and syntax could be used.
However, even though the language professor may not be here and now using his
acquired ability, it does not follow that he is on the same knowledge level as the first-
year student who knows nothing about the Hungarian language. In other words, the
professor of language has an acquired skill that he is not here and now exercising. The
first-year student, on the other hand, has only a disposition to acquire a further dispo-
sition. The acquired disposition of the language professor—Disposition-2—is one
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

100  Epistemological Dispositions

type of actuality. On the other hand, it is also a disposition or capacity in that it is not
always being exercised. Accordingly, Actuality-1 is identical with Disposition-2. This
can be referred to as ‘Disposition-2/Actuality-1’.6

Dispositions and Substantial Form

In the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas provides an in-depth
e­ lucidation of the concept of disposition, in the sense of ‘acquired disposition’. What
twentieth-century philosophers translate as ‘disposition’ Aquinas often rendered into
the Latin as ‘habitus’. Nonetheless, even though Aquinas did have the term dispositio in
his philosophical lexicon and used this term in his discussion of habitus, Kenny is
probably correct in interpreting dispositio as a ‘state’ rather than as an ‘acquired
­disposition’. Nonetheless, the meanings are commensurate.
Considering the example of the beginning student and the Hungarian language
professor, since both have Dispositions-1, both are alike essentially. As human beings,
they both generically differ from a slab of marble or an oak tree. Disposition-1, there-
fore, is a generic-level disposition whose function is to acquire further dispositions.
These further dispositions are instances of Disposition-2/Actuality-1. Therefore, the
possession of Disposition-1 level properties ultimately distinguishes knowers from
non-knowers at the ontological level. These generic dispositions permit the possibility
of knowledge for a human being and preclude such a possibility for an oak tree or a
marble slab. This distinction regarding knowers, however, only applies to the disposi-
tion to acquire conceptual capacities. Later in this chapter, the discussion of sensation
puts forward the claim that a sensation-disposition is an instance of Disposition-2/
Actuality-1. Since sensation is also a case of knowledge, the possession of Disposition-1
capacities in the cognitive or conceptual realm alone is what distinguishes human
knowers from other knowers. What Aquinas calls ‘brute animals’ lack this cognitive

6
  In considering Aquinas’s account of dispositions, Kenny comments: ‘The notion of disposition is best
approached via the notions of capacity and action. Human beings have many capacities which animals lack:
the capacity to learn languages, for instance, and the capacity for generosity. These capacities are realized
in action when particular human beings speak particular languages or perform generous actions. But
between capacity and action there is an intermediate state possible. When we say that a man can speak
French, we mean neither that he is actually speaking French, nor that his speaking French is a mere logical
possibility. When we call a man generous, we mean more than that he has a capacity for generosity in
common with the rest of the human race, but we need not mean that he is doing something generous at the
moment of our utterance. States such as knowing French and being generous are dispositions. A disposi-
tion, said St. Thomas, is halfway between a capacity and an action, between pure potentiality and full
actuality’. Kenny’s terminology differs slightly from the terminology used above. What this chapter calls
‘Disposition-1’, Kenny calls a ‘capacity’. What will be called ‘Actuality-2’ later, Kenny refers to as ‘an action’
or ‘full actuality.’ What is referred to here as ‘Disposition-2/Actuality-1’, Kenny calls a ‘disposition’. Despite
these minor differences in terminology, the meaning of the terms remains constant. See Anthony Kenny,
‘Introduction’, in Summa Theologiae, vol. 22: Dispositions for Human Acts (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode;
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. xxxi.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  101

capacity. Human beings are those knowers who have the innate ability to acquire
intellectual dispositions, which is another name for concepts. This is the ontological
characteristic that determines the possibility of intentionality at the conceptual level.
Hence, the possession of a set of generic-level dispositional properties of a
Disposition-1 nature distinguishes human knowers from other entities in the follow-
ing manner:
(a) from other knowers like dogs and raccoons, which have only sense
knowledge;
(b) from other living entities like oak trees and mushrooms, for which the acqui-
sition of any kind of knowledge is logically impossible;
(c) from non-living entities like marble slabs and chunks of coal, which lack any
foundation for what Aristotle would call the possession of a ‘soul’.
In human beings, Disposition-1 capacities constitute the principal content of a
substantial form; a substantial form is the ontological ground or foundation for
a generic set of dispositional properties, which accounts for nomic universal propo-
sitions. There is a synthetic necessary relation between those constitutive properties
and individuals classed under them. These are essence-determining sortal proper-
ties. The set of synthetic necessary properties accounts for the specific content of a
natural kind. One of these capacities is the Disposition-1 ability to acquire further
dispositions on a conceptual level. Hence, this dispositional property is a constitu-
tive cognitive capacity. It is a built-in ability to acquire a further ability. This ability is
complex in that it is further broken down into the intellectus agens and the intellectus
possibilis.7
In the foregoing analysis, Aquinas suggested a two-fold and dual level ontological
structure to the epistemological dispositions. Disposition-1 would be that disposi-
tional property which on the conceptual level generically distinguishes a knower
from a non-knower. Disposition-2/Actuality-1, on the other hand, is a type of dis-
positional property, which would distinguish various knowers from one another
insofar as each would have different acquired dispositions. For instance, while both
Smith and Jones are human beings, and a fortiori have the same set of Disposition-1
properties common to the substantial form of human nature, nonetheless Smith
may have mastered Riemannian geometry and Jones medieval French. Assuming
that Smith does not know medieval French nor Jones Riemannian geometry, each
person has an acquired disposition that the other lacks. In Aquinas’s terminology,
the acquired disposition—Disposition-1/Actuality-2—is a conceptus or habitus.8

7
  These categories in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind will be discussed in more detail later.
8
  A detailed analysis of an acquired disposition pertains to concept formation and the relation between
concept and phantasm. For an instructive account of Aquinas on concept formation, see Kenny, ‘Intellect
and Imagination in Aquinas’; Kenny also treats these issues in his later work on Thomas. See also the first
40 pages of Geach, Mental Acts.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

102  Epistemological Dispositions

The Importance of Dispositions

In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas considers the question whether acquired disposi-
tions are necessary for providing an analysis of human activity. Aquinas raises the
question in the following way: ‘Utrum sit necessarium esse habitum’? In response to
the  claim that powers or capacities alone—what has been referred to above as
Dispositions-1—are sufficient conditions for explaining human actions, Aquinas
offered the following remarks, indicating that both dispositions as capacities and dis-
positions as acquired are necessary conditions for an analysis of human action.
Some capacities can be realized in more than one way. Thus if they are to be realized or actual-
ized in one-way rather than another, it must be by something other than themselves. A capacity
or power, however, which can be realized only in one way needs no acquired disposition to
realize it. [. . .] For this reason, natural capacities or powers perform their activities without the
assistance of acquired dispositions. This is so because they are intrinsically capable of actualiza-
tion. (Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 49 a. 4 ad 3)

Where a capacity might be actualized in more than one way, as in the case of mastery of
Riemannian geometry and of medieval French, an acquired disposition is necessary to
provide a certain ease and facility in exercising the appropriate knowledge acts.
Aquinas comments: ‘But if a form, like the soul, is such that it can act in more than one
way, then it needs dispositions to bring it into the state appropriate to each action’
(Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 49 a. 4 ad 1).
Aquinas devotes an extended discussion to the need for acquired dispositions. He
suggests that an intermediate state between a natural capacity—i.e. Disposition-1, and
the actualization or realization of that capacity, which is Actuality-2—is necessary only
if three conditions are met. In other words, the necessary conditions requiring the pos-
iting of acquired dispositions are the following:
First, the possessor of the state must be distinct from the realization of the capacity, and must
stand to it in the relation of potentiality to actuality. There is no room for such a state or dispo-
sition, in a being whose nature is not made up of potentiality and actuality, and whose sub-
stance is identical with its action, and which has no goal but itself. This is obviously the case
with God.
Secondly, it must be possible for the subject to actualize its potentialities in more than one-
way, and with regard to more than one object. There is no room for states or dispositions in a
being, which though unactualized in a certain respect, can be actualized only in one way. Such
a subject already has by nature the appropriate relationship to the actuality in question.
(Omitted here is a discussion of heavenly bodies.)
Thirdly, there must be more than one element whose presence is necessary if the subject is to
actualize its potentiality in one of the several ways open to it. And it must be possible for these
elements to be combined in different positions which will affect the subject favourably or unfa-
vourably with regard to the form or operation in question. And so the simple qualities, which
belong to each of the four elements in a manner determined by their nature, are not called
‘states’ or ‘dispositions’ but just ‘simple qualities’. The kind of things which we call ‘states’ or
‘dispositions’ are health, beauty, and other similar qualities which involve a particular
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  103

­ roportion between elements which may be variously combined. This is why Aristotle [. . .]
p
suggests that a disposition is a state and that a state is a relation between the parts of a complex,
whether spatial, or potential, or specific.
Because, therefore, there are many beings whose natures and actions cannot be brought to
completion without the presence of many elements that can be combined in various propor-
tions, it follows that it is necessary that there should be such things as dispositions. (Summa
Theologiae, I–II q. 49 a. 4; emphasis added)

On Innate Cognitive Structures

The present discussion of acquired dispositions brings to the surface an important yet
somewhat tangential problem: whether Aquinas adopts innate ideas in his philosophy
of mind. Aquinas responds to this query: ‘But whereas a sense faculty is natural to every
animal—so that through the act of being generated, it acquires a sense faculty with its
own specific nature—the same does not hold for intellectual knowledge. Intellectual
knowledge is not naturally inborn in human beings. It has to be acquired through appli-
cation and discipline’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 373; emphasis added). This passage
indicates that innate ideas as traditionally defined are not components of Aquinas’s
account of mind. However, a distinction must be made between Disposition-1 and
Disposition-2. Aquinas suggests that there are no innate conceptual Dispositions-2.
In  other words, no human knower has inborn capacities—i.e. Disposition-2/
Actuality-1—for particular pieces of knowledge. In effect, it follows that there is no
epistemological entity that is an inborn or innate conceptus. Every specific concept, i.e.
every conceptus or habitus, must be acquired. The same holds for propositional knowl-
edge, which is constructed from concepts. The structural need for postulating the
intellectus agens is important for concept formation. Possession of a concept is knowl-
edge ‘of a sort’—that is, knowledge of why some sort of thing is that sort of thing
through its sortal properties. This is the foundation for sortal knowledge in Aquinas. If
one were to call the intellectus agens an innate cognitive structure, this ascription
would not disrupt Aquinas’s account of mind. His denial of the existence of innate
structures for human knowers refers only to Disposition-2. Aquinas asserts: ‘intel-
lectual knowledge is not naturally inborn in human beings. It must be acquired
through application and discipline.’9 For Aquinas, there are no innate capacities of a
Disposition-2/Actuality-1 nature.10 With his theory of innate ideas, Descartes held

9
  Of some philosophical interest is Aquinas’s consideration of knowledge in angels as compared
with human knowledge. With angels, the knowing situation is different. In the Summa Theologiae,
Aquinas spells out this difference: ‘In human beings, there are no dispositions natural either to the
species or to the individual that are wholly the work of nature. In angels, however, there can be such
dispositions, because angels, unlike human persons, have innate mental species (i.e. innate ideas)’ (Summa
Theologiae, I–II q. 51 a. 1). See Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes (New York: Philosophical Library,
1944), 179.
10
  Lest there be a misunderstanding on how ‘innate’ is being used in Aquinas, there is innateness insofar
as there is ‘a built-in ability to acquire a further ability’. A strict defender of innate ideas might distinguish
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

104  Epistemological Dispositions

for the opposite theory. Acquired dispositions in Aquinas, moreover, apply to the

intellectus possibilis:
[. . .] there are dispositions belonging to the intellectus possibilis. Acquired dispositions belong
to things, which have potencies or capacities capable of actualization or realization in more
than one way. The intellectus possibilis stands out among things of this kind. Therefore, it fol-
lows that mental dispositions (which are acquired) pertain to the intellectus possibilis.
Sometimes intelligible species are in the possible intellect only potentially, and then a human
being understands potentially and needs something to actualize her; this can be either teaching
or her own investigations. Sometimes, on the other hand, intelligible species are in the possible
intellect in a fully actual way, and then the human being actually understands. Sometimes,
however, the intelligible species are in the possible intellect in a way that is midway between
potency and act, that is, as a habit, and when this is so, a human being can actually understand
when she wishes to do so. And it is in this way that acquired intelligible species are in the pos-
sible intellect when someone is not actually understanding. (Questions on the Soul, q. 15)

Disposition-2/Actuality-1 capacities, therefore, belong to the intellectus possibilis as

acquired mental skills. In the following text, Aquinas refers to the ever-famous ‘tabula
rasa’: ‘It is the teaching of Aristotle, therefore, that the possible intellect is in potency
prior to learning or discovery, like a tablet on which nothing is yet written, but after
learning and discovery it is in act by the habit of science, thanks to which it can actuate
itself even though it is then in potency to actually considering’ (On the Unity of the
Intellect against the Averroists, ch. 4, no. 92). This Aristotelian concept of a tabula rasa
differs substantially from what empiricists like Locke offered. In the case of Aristotle, a
tabula rasa discusses how a certain kind of a potentiality is actualized. With Locke,
however, this indicates how ideas become items of conscious awareness.
Disposition-1 is an intrinsic capacity; to refer to this capacity as an innate idea is
misleading. Aquinas would accept this suggestion. In effect, this amounts to the
claim that a knower has a generic dispositional, primitive, cognitive property, which
differentiates the class of intellectual knowers from the class of non-intellectual
knowers. Of course, this is a difference referring to cognitive dispositions on the
conceptual level. On the other hand, it appears that in the above passage, Aquinas
considered only Disposition-2 when discussing innate ideas.11 However, he denies
that a human knower has innate capacities of a Disposition-2 variety. In his ontology,
only angels have innate Disposition-2/Actuality-1 knowledge. It should be noted
that the passage listed above also includes a reference to the innateness of sense faculties.
The structural analysis of this claim must await the direct consideration of the
external sensorium.

between innate ideas (i.e. concepts about what exists in rerum natura) and innate knowledge (i.e. truth
about what there is in rerum natura); Aquinas’s position is not reducible to either of these interpretations
of innate knowledge.
11
  Accordingly, one might argue that Aquinas has innate ideas insofar as he distinguished, in a manner
similar to Sartre, a pour-soi from an en-soi. Aquinas would appear to have no philosophical quarrel with
the principle behind the structure of Sartre’s distinction.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  105

Against Physicalism
Aquinas proceeds to consider the related question concerning the reduction of potencies
to acts, i.e. the reduction of a disposition to its corresponding perfection or realization.
Such an analysis will entail a twofold consideration. Aquinas maintains that an identical
reduction is not obtained with both Disposition-1 and Disposition-2.
[. . .] while in the first two cases, there is potential knowledge, and while potency is such that it
is able to be actualized, there is a difference, in respect of actualization, between a primary
[Disposition-1] and a secondary [Disposition-2/Actuality-2] potency.
It is the case that one in potency in the secondary sense—i.e. as already possessing the
habit—passes from the state of having sensations or knowledge, but not exercising them, into
the state of actually knowing something here and now. And this kind of actualization differs
from the other. (Commentary on the Soul, nos 362, 364)

Once this difference between these two types of reduction has been stated, the imme-
diate problem concerns whether such a reduction, in either or both cases, is an action
or a movement in the physical sense. This question has structural similarities with
contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind concerning the ‘action’ status of men-
tal acts. Both Aristotle and Aquinas were concerned about the ‘action status’ of an act
of knowledge. This Aristotelian discussion in the philosophy of mind is more than
merely of historical interest.12
Aquinas begins this discussion by distinguishing the various senses of ‘being acted
upon’. He does this in order to arrive at a clearer analysis of how these terms apply in
the knowing process. In this first passage, Aquinas considers physical or material
change.
Aristotle remarks that being acted upon has several meanings, like potency and act. In one
sense, it implies some kind of destruction caused by a contrary quality. For in the strict sense,
the state of being passive to action seems to connote, on the side of the patient, a loss of some-
thing proper to it through its being overcome by the agent. Moreover, this loss is a sort of
destruction, either absolutely, as when the patient loses its substantial form; or relatively, as in
the loss of an incidental form. This loss implies a contrariety in the agent, the imposition upon
the patient’s matter, or being, or a contrary form from outside. In the first and strict sense,
accordingly, ‘being acted upon’ means a destruction caused by a contrary agent. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 365)

12
  Nussbaum argues that the principal problems with physicalism were noted by Aristotle when he
suggested in criticizing the atomists that a thoroughgoing materialism eliminates discussion of intention-
ality: ‘The different types of cognition—perceiving, imagining, thinking—are all being cashed out in
exactly similar physiological terms, as the motions of certain sorts of atoms; the same is true of different
types of desiring . . . ’. She continues: ‘these […] intentional features of the animal are given the same treat-
ment as non-intentional items like blood-circulation and digestion. It is difficult to see how such an
account could make room for the richness that is in our ordinary talk, and easy to see that the atomist does
not much care about preserving that richness’: Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 271; ch. 9, ‘Rational Animals and the Explanation of Action’, is a fine
treatment of intentionality issues.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

106  Epistemological Dispositions

This passage develops the Aristotelian account of change. It is important to note, how-
ever, that in the next passage, Aquinas offers a wider sense of ‘being acted upon’ that is
different structurally from the reduction required for physical change; this passage
comments on intentional or cognitive change.
In another and looser sense, the term connotes any reception of something from the outside.
And as a receiver is to what it receives as a potency to its actuality; and as actuality is the per-
fection of what is potential; so being acted upon in this sense implies rather that a certain
preservation and perfection of a thing in potency is received from a thing in act. For only the
actual can perfect the potential; and actuality is not, as such, contrary to potency. Indeed the two
are really similar, for potency is nothing but a certain relationship to act. And without this
likeness, there could be no necessary correspondence between this act and this potency. Hence
potency in this sense is not actualized from contrary to contrary, but rather from like to like, in
the sense that potency resembles act. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 366; emphasis added)

This passage is important because it suggests that knowledge, although a reduction

from potency to actuality, is not in itself a physical activity. It follows that Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind is not reducible to physicalism. Of course, in this analysis Aquinas
works within the framework of an Aristotelian definition of motion. Aristotle’s account
of motion states analytically that to be moved is to undergo a reduction from a potenti-
ality to an actuality. Aquinas, however, stresses the following difference:

(a) an instance of knowing, which is a reduction of a knowing disposition (i.e.

either Disposition-1 or Disposition-2) to its appropriate perfection;
(b) an instance of a physical action, which is a reduction of a physical disposition
to its appropriate actualization.

The force of Aquinas’s argument depends upon his claims that an act of knowledge is
not contrary to its potency. Since there is an absence of contraries, it is impossible, on
the Aristotelian schema for causality, for physical movement to occur. With this dis-
tinction in mind, Aquinas suggests that there is a difference between a physical change,
for example, in cold water becoming hot water, and from the non-exercise of the
intellectual ability to speak Hungarian by the Slavic languages professor to his actual
exercise of the acquired capacity by here and now speaking Hungarian. In the former
sense, when the cold water becomes hot, Aquinas argues that there is a ‘destruction’ in
the physical substratum. Obviously, this is a much-amended use of ‘destruction’, for
what Aquinas means is that the cold water, when it is heated, is no longer cold. The
quality ‘being cold’, which in Aquinas’s ontology is an accidental or incidental form,
has been ‘destroyed’. A physical change of qualities always involves the destruction of
the contrary quality. In this analysis, the Aristotelian theory of opposites is evidently at
work. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle discusses four kinds of change, one substantial and
the other three the accidental or incidental changes of quantity, quality, and place:
Change is from opposite or from intermediate to opposite. But it does not occur from just any
opposite—a voice, after all, is not white—but only from contrary to contrary. There are four
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  107

kinds of change: change of what a thing is, change of quantity; and changes of quality or of place.
Change of what a thing is, is simple coming to be and perishing; change of quantity is growth
and diminution; change of affection is alteration; change of place is motion. In each case, the
change is into the appropriate contrary state. (Metaphysics, bk XII, ch. 2 (1069b5–15))

The reduction of one contrary to another is a necessary condition for physical change.
This claim serves as the basis upon which Aquinas argues that knowledge is not a phys-
ical activity or movement. This account of a reduction is rooted metaphysically in
Aristotelian hylomorphism.
A physical reduction in terms of act and potency entails that, when the water has
been heated, the act of being cold as a fact or state of affairs is no longer an existential
fact or state of affairs. Therefore, the fact, which was the water’s being cold, is no longer
a fact. In Aristotelian terminology, the ‘cold fact’ has been ‘destroyed’; it has ‘perished’.
Aquinas too suggests that any physical action requires a destruction or ‘perishing’ as a
necessary condition. This destruction is the process of transfer from an accidental
predicate to its contrary by means of some efficient agent. The passage from Aristotle’s
Metaphysics indicates that this ‘destruction’ occurs in both what is called ‘substantial
change’ and what is called ‘accidental or incidental change’. The former is when, for
example, a block of rock maple through an appropriate heating process becomes char-
coal. The latter is exemplified by the cold water/hot water example. That there are onto-
logical problems with the substantial/accidental property distinction is not to be
denied. What is important for this inquiry, however, is that, for their ontological analy-
sis, both kinds of physical change have a movement from a contrary state as a necessary
condition . On the other hand, instances of knowing encompassing sense perception,
concept formation, and concept exercise are not involved with a reduction to a con-
trary state. It is on this ground that Aquinas maintains his claim that knowledge is a
‘perfection’ rather than an action. This solution is grounded in Aristotelian categories
of explanation. Nonetheless, Aquinas was aware of this problem that has troubled con-
temporary philosophers. He moves beyond the limits of a materialist or a physicalist
philosophy of mind. This discussion is offered as a rejoinder to Sorabji, who, among
others, argues that Aristotle’s account of perception is reducible to physicalism.
In commenting on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, Haldane reminds us that the
background for understanding what Aquinas proposes is the metaphysics of Aristotle,
which includes an ontology of matter and form with the corresponding structuring
principles and ‘quantities of stuff given determinate natures by these principles’.13
Using these ontological categories rooted in Aristotelian theory conjoined with a the-
ory of the mind, Haldane comments: ‘[This is] a philosophy of mind that views the
intellect not as in Cartesian fashion, as an entity, but rather as a set of capacities charac-
teristic of substances possessed of a certain type of nature. On this account, thoughts
are exercises of these capacities; mental actions of the psychophysical individual.’14 In
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, the nature of the human person—what Stump and

  John Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989), 1–32.   

13 14
  Ibid.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

108  Epistemological Dispositions

Pasnau refer to as the ‘cognizer’—is an ontological entity characterized by sets of

powers or dispositions that are actualized.

Beyond Physicalism
If ‘being acted upon’ in a knowledge process is not to be taken in the sense of a physical
action in the Aristotelian framework, one might rightly ask about the ontological sta-
tus of the referent for this newly acquired phrase. Aquinas next considers the meaning
of ‘being acted upon’ in the two senses of disposition: Disposition-1 and Disposition-2.
This indicates how both can involve ‘being acted upon’ and yet not entail a physical
action. Aquinas begins this analysis by considering Disposition-2:
Aristotle discusses whether the actualization of already acquired knowledge involves a being
acted upon. And he first discusses the process of transit from secondary potentiality into fuller
actuality; [. . .] he asserts that this movement into actual thinking is not truly passively being
altered. For, as we have seen, no movement into act, as movement into act, is such. The term
applies, strictly, only to the alteration of a subject from one to the other of two mutually exclusive
qualities. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 367; emphasis added)

That such a reduction does not obtain in the process of going from Disposition-2/
Actuality-1 to Actuality-2 is indicated in the next passage:
But this is not what happens when a person begins to exercise her mind on knowledge she
already possesses. Rather she is developing a quality already possessed. As Aristotle remarks,
it is a ‘new perfection’ in her and an ‘increase in actuality’. For perfection increases with
actuality.
Accordingly, if one insists on using the terms ‘actuality’ and ‘being acted upon’, it is necessary
that they must be taken in a wider and less strict sense. In order to illustrate this point, he adds
that it is just as inept to speak of a thinker being ‘altered’ when she actually thinks as to say of a
builder that he is altered by building. (no. 367; emphasis added)

These discussions are central to Aquinas’s theory of mind. He holds that the exercise of
knowledge, which is the process of going from Disposition-2 to Actuality-2, is not an
instance of a physical action. Rather, it is a perfection or realization of a qualitative
becoming. Aquinas goes to great lengths to claim that the exercise of knowledge is not
an alteration or ‘being altered’. It cannot be an alteration because an alteration is a
change from a contrary to its opposite. He argues that in going from Disposition-2 to
Actuality-2, there is a complete absence of a movement or becoming from contraries.
There is, on the other hand, a further developing of a quality or perfection already
possessed. In reference to the ten Aristotelian categories, knowledge, for Aristotle and
Thomas, belongs to the category of quality and not to the category of action. This clas-
sification depends upon the exemplification of instances from the ten Aristotelian
categories.
In his Commentary on the Physics, however, Aquinas writes what might appear to
deny the above analysis:
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  109

From this Aristotle further concludes universally that alteration occurs in the external senses,
and in the sensibles, and in the whole sensitive part of the soul (which he says because of the
internal passions). But in no other part of the soul is there alteration, except per accidens.
(Commentary on the Physics, bk 7, lec. 6 (no. 925))

This passage is not, however, in opposition to the texts in the Commentary on the Soul.
In the Commentary on the Physics, Aquinas considers the physiological change of a
sensible object acting on a sense organ. While this is a necessary condition for an
awareness of sensation, it is not sensation itself; this will be discussed in the following
chapter.
In his On the Power of God, Aquinas, in considering how God affects change in the
world, discusses this issue. He argues that the ‘actualization of the sense organ’ is
distinct from the ‘act of the sensitive power’.
For this reason, the relation, which arises from the act of the mind, cannot be in that thing.
The same applies to sense and the sensible object. For although the sensible object by its own
action affects the organ of sense, and consequently bears a relation to it, just as other natural
agents have a relation to the things on which they act, nonetheless, it is not the alteration of
the organ that perfects the act of perception, but the act of the sensitive power. (On the Power
of God, bk III, q. 7)

This leads directly into the next issue, which considers the intensity of a perfection
within the sense power. This text indicates the difference between ‘sense organ’ and
‘sense faculty’.

The Intensity of a Perfection

In his Categories (8, 8b 26–10a 27), Aristotle lists four different kinds in the category of
quality. The first type consists of states and dispositions. This is where Aquinas, follow-
ing Aristotle, places instances of knowledge.15 The issue of not placing acts of knowing
within the category of actions appears to be centred on the question of intensity.
Actuality-2 is a more intense ‘having’ of a quality developed from a previously acquired
disposition. A piece of knowledge, when exercised, is (for example) when a mathe-
matician is here and now thinking about/teaching/demonstrating the Pythagorean
theorem. This is a quality possessed by a knower rather than an action performed by a
knower. This analysis is steeped in Aristotle’s account of motion, his definition of
change, and his account of the ten categories. Nonetheless, in light of contemporary
discussions concerning the philosophy of action in regard to knowledge states, it is
interesting philosophically to note that neither Aristotle nor Thomas ascribed the cat-
egory of action to mental states of knowing, either in sense knowledge or conceptual
knowledge.

15
  For an illustrative account of Aquinas’s position on the category of quality, see Anthony Kenny, ‘The
Four Types of Quality’, appendix 3, Summa Theologiae, vol. 22: Dispositions for Human Acts, 115–16.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

110  Epistemological Dispositions

Aquinas next considers the use of ‘being acted upon’ as applied to Disposition-1.

Then [. . .] Aristotle considers whether the transit from potency to act on one who acquires
completely fresh knowledge is an ‘alteration’ in the sense of ‘being acted upon’. He says that
when a learner, previously knowing only potentially, is instructed by a master already knowing
actually, one should either call this simply a case of alteration and being acted upon, or else
distinguish two kinds of alteration. (Commentary On the Soul, no. 369)

Aquinas offers an important distinction:

(a) The one kind is a ‘change to a condition of privation’, i.e. into qualities opposed to those
which the thing already has, and incompatible with these, and therefore until now
excluded by them.
(b) The other kind is ‘by change to a possession and maturity’, i.e. through receiving
habits and forms which perfect the thing’s nature and involve no loss of what it
already has.
It must be noted that the learner is ‘altered’ in this second sense, but not in the first. (no. 369)

The general concern is whether knowledge is an alteration; if it is an alteration, then

knowledge would be an instance of a physical activity. But here, as above with the actu-
alization of Disposition-1, Aquinas argues that this is not a strict sense of alteration
because this would imply a reduction from one contrary state to its opposite. Rather,
the acquisition of Disposition-2/Actuality-1 is a perfection of a knowing being. In
other words, a being capable of intentionality is perfected or further developed by the
acquisition of both Actuality-1 and Actuality-2. It does not lose any property or quality
when it perfects or develops Disposition-1 by acquiring habits of knowledge—i.e. the
acquisition of a conceptus.
In this context, it is important to note that Aquinas refers to the process of knowing
as an ‘immanent’ activity rather than as a ‘transient’ activity. In his terminology, the
root difference between the two is the following: Immanent activity consists essentially
in a qualitative perfection of the agent; transient activity, on the other hand, consists
essentially in the production of something beyond the agent—i.e. beyond the agent as
knower herself.
According to Aquinas, every physical change is an instance of transient action. On
the other hand, every intentional act is an immanent action. In the case of knowing, he
distinguishes between a transient action and an immanent action. A transient action is
a physical change, while an immanent action is intentional in character. The immanent
action remains within the agent while the transient action passes out to another thing.
It follows from this distinction that intentional acts are not esse naturale, because every
change bringing about an esse naturale would be a transient action. Furthermore,
every actio humana (e.g. thinking about Scotus on individuation) would be immanent,
while every actio hominis (a twitch of the face of the person) would be transient. In the
Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes: ‘Sentire et intelligere sunt actiones
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  111

immanentes.’16 Often this distinction is blurred and muddled in the early modern
­discussions of efficient causality as the sufficient condition for the occurrence of
perception.
Aquinas is concerned lest any confusion obtain in his denial that a movement from
contrary to contrary occurs in the process of knowing. With this concern, he raises the
linguistic question about a knower who goes from a state or condition of error to a
condition of having true knowledge. Thus, he considers the possibility that the process
of the acquisition of knowledge from a previous state of error might be considered
as an action. In other words, an acquisition of this kind might be construed as a
movement from a contrary state to its opposite—i.e. a process from error to truth. The
following passage is instructive of Aquinas’s philosophical method, as the linguistic
overtones and the close attention to language are evident.
Ignorance has two meanings. It can be purely negative: for example, when the ignorant person
neither knows the truth nor is involved in the opposite error. In this case, the person is simply
brought into actual knowledge, not changed by being rid of a contrary habit. On the other
hand, ignorance may imply the bad condition of being involved in error contrary to the truth.
Then to acquire knowledge, one must be changed by being delivered from the contrary habit.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 363)

Aquinas continues with this argument:

However, when one is brought from error to the knowledge of truth, there is indeed a certain
likeness to the change from one quality to its opposite. However, it is only a likeness. For where
there is true alteration, both the opposed qualities, which are the terms of the process, are nec-
essarily and essentially involved. For example, when something becomes white, this involves
not only white, but also black, or some intermediary color, which in relation to white is a sort
of blackness. But where knowledge is acquired, it is quite incidental that the learner was previ-
ously in error. She could learn without first being in error. Hence, it is not in the strict sense an
alteration. (no. 370; emphasis added)

Aquinas is satisfied that there is no important sense of ‘being acted upon’ which
applies to knowledge in the form of an action. Therefore, the process of acquiring
and exercising knowledge, i.e. either Actuality-1 or Actuality-2, is never reducible to
an alteration in the strict sense. On the other hand, such an acquisition or exercise of
knowledge is a perfection or an ‘increased intensity’ of the knower. As a perfection,
there is no ‘destruction’ of any function within the knower. Action in a physical
sense, therefore, is excluded from Aquinas’s account of concept formation and con-
cept exercise. At root level, this is an indication of ‘intentional’ becoming, which is
neither a physical change nor reducible to a physical change. This analysis explains

16
  For a comprehensive account of this distinction, see Francis Nugent, ‘Immanent Action in St. Thomas
and Aristotle’, New Scholasticism 37(2) (1963), 164–87. See also Anthony Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 210.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

112  Epistemological Dispositions

in some detail the development of the ontological principle needed for Aquinas’s
thesis of intentionality.17
Furthermore, it appears that intentionality is a primitive ontological predicate
within Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The conceptual elucidation of this primitive
character is in terms of a qualitative perfection rather than a reduction of potency to
act from contraries. Reduction through contraries entails a physical change. Reduction
without the contraries in the case of knowing is the ontological characteristic of inten-
tionality in its most generic sense. This is an important claim in Aristotelian philoso-
phy of mind. It teases out the significance of the primitive concept of ‘esse intentionale’,
which is the basis of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality. Nonetheless, he does claim that
not every case of reduction without contraries would be an intentional awareness. He
gives the example of the builder. The builder is not altered when undertaking the act of
building. ‘Building’, it would seem, is not completely reducible to intentional activity.
The precise difference here is unclear. Hence, reduction without contraries is a generic
class, of which one type is intentional activity. It may be the case that ‘building’ is an
instance of what both Aristotle and Aquinas call a kind of practical reason (phronesis),
which would be a practical art. This would be cognitive, of course, but also directed
towards the external effect. Theoretical understanding within the speculative realm,
however, always remains within as a perfection of the knower as cognitive agent.

Perceptual Dispositions
Aquinas next begins an analysis of the dispositions involved in perception. The dis-
tinctions engendered from the discussion of concept formation and concept exercise
are utilized in this discussion. In De Veritate, Aquinas considers the structure of a sense
faculty as a potency:
Sense is not an active but a passive power. Not every power that has an act, which is an opera-
tion, is called active, for then every faculty of the soul would be active. But a faculty that is
related to its object as an agent to a patient is called active, and that which is related to its object
as a patient to an agent is called passive. Now sense is related to the sensible thing as a patient
to an agent, because the sensible thing alters the sense [. . . .] Seeing, however, is accomplished
by the fact that the visible species is received in sight; and this is a sort of passivity or suffering.
Sense is, therefore, a passive power. (De Veritate, q. 26, no. 4; emphasis added)

Aquinas addresses the relation of potency to act in the intentional act of sensation.

[. . .] we must take into account that, as in the intellectual cognition, so too in sensation, potency
and act are each twofold. For what so far possesses no sense faculty but is due by nature to have
one, is in potency to sensation. And what has the sense faculty, but does not yet sense, is in
potency to actual sensation in the same way as we have seen in the case of acquired intellectual

17
  This analysis substantiates Haldane’s claim that there is no epistemology without ontology, especially
as articulated in the texts of Aristotle and Aquinas.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  113

knowledge. Now, as a subject moves from primary potency [Disposition-1] into primary actu-
ality [Disposition-2/Actuality-1] when it acquires knowledge through teaching, so too a sub-
ject’s primary potency to the possession of a sense-faculty is actualized by her birth. But whereas
a sense faculty is natural to every animal—so that in the act of being generated, it acquires a
sense faculty along with its own specific nature—the case is not the same with intellectual
knowledge. This is not naturally inborn in human beings. It must be acquired through application.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 373; emphasis added)

Referring back to Aristotle after denying the possibility of cognitive innate ideas,
Aquinas raises the following issues regarding the Disposition-2/Actuality-1 status of
sense faculties.
This is what he means by saying that ‘the first change in the sensitive being’ is caused by the
parent. The ‘first change’, he notes, is from sheer potency to the primary actuality. And it is due
to the parent, because there is a power in the semen to actualize the sensible soul with all its
capacities (including the cognitive capacities). Once an animal has been generated, it has its
senses in the same way as a human person who has been taught possesses knowledge. And when
it actually senses, it corresponds to the person who actually exercises her knowledge by think-
ing. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 374; emphasis added)

Aquinas stresses an important point, which will have a bearing on discussions about
the individual acts of the external sensorium. He asserts that an external sense faculty,
by the very fact that it exists as a functional faculty, is found in a state of Disposition-2/
Actuality-1. In other words, nothing more than the existence of the functional sense
faculty is necessary in order to have a sense faculty disposed adequately or rendered
properly ready to sense a particular type of object. Accordingly, the sense faculty, in its
very state of existing is in the state of Disposition-2/Actuality-1. In effect, this is the
structural reason why Aquinas will argue that the external sense faculties are ‘per se
infallible’ regarding their proper objects. This concerns only an awareness of the
proper or special sensibles in Aristotelian perception theory.
The above passage is important for understanding Aquinas’s theory of sensation and
perception. Here he provides the essential structural difference between sense knowl-
edge and concept-formation. This epistemological distinction consists in the fact that
different concepts are not innate to the knower but must be acquired dispositions of
the cognitive agent. On the other hand, the abilities or dispositions to have different
sensations—understanding the meaning of ‘sensation’ here to be the object of the act
of sensation and not the mental act of awareness itself—are structurally innate to the
human perceiver. These sensation dispositions or abilities are to be understood in
terms of a disposition to see colours, to hear sounds, to feel roughs and smooths, hots
and colds, and so forth. A perceiver, therefore, insofar as she exists and functions well
as a human person, by her very nature as a human being possesses Dispositions-2/
Actuality-1 type sense faculties. Possessing properly disposed sense faculties is part of
what it means to be a member of the natural kind of human persons. On the other
hand, regarding concepts a knower must acquire these Dispositions-2/Actuality-1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

114  Epistemological Dispositions

habits through experience by ‘application and discipline’. They are not innate. Aristotle
indicated this distinction in his Metaphysics: ‘All potencies are either innate (such as
the senses) or acquired by habit (such as the potency for playing the flute) or by learn-
ing (such as those involved in the arts)’ (Metaphysics, bk IX, ch. 5 (1047b31–4)).
In summary, therefore, the structural difference between sense knowledge and
concept formation is that perceptual dispositions are, by nature, innate at the level of
Disposition-2/Actuality-1 abilities. On the other hand, generic conceptual disposi-
tions, which are dispositions to acquire further dispositions, are by nature innate
only on the level of a Disposition-1 ability. From this it follows that the set of disposi-
tional properties, which makes up the substantial forms common to all human
beings, comprises both instances of Dispositions-1 and Dispositions-2. Aquinas
noted that a sense is ‘natural’ to every animal. This implies that it is a part of its nature
or essence. This is Aquinas’s notion of a natural kind. A human nature possesses the
following:
(a) dispositional properties, which are capacities that need acquired dispositions
to function well, e.g. the ability to know concepts—intellectual knowledge;
(b) dispositional properties, which are so constituted that they do not need further
acquired dispositions in order to function well, e.g. the ability or faculty to
sense—sense knowledge.
Aquinas denies the need for acquired dispositions for the senses. Yet it would appear
that one might ‘train the palate’, as it were, through courses in gourmet cooking, or
‘train the ear’ through music appreciation courses. Aquinas appears not to consider
such possibilities. These cases may pertain to an analysis of the vis cogitativa, which
occupies the latter part of this book.

The Need for the Intellectus Agens

Accordingly, this structural difference between the nature of a sense faculty and the
nature of the intellect provides Aquinas with the necessary ontological condition for
postulating the intellectus agens. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas sums up nicely the
differing relations of potency and act in a human person:
Sensible things are found in act outside the soul. And hence there is no need for an active sense.
Wherefore it is clear that in the nutritive part of a human person, all the powers are active,
whereas in the sensitive part all are passive. But in the intellectual part, there is something
active and something passive. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 79, a. 3, ad 1)

In other words, the intellectus agens by the process of abstraction forms a species intelli-
gibilis, which leads to the formation of a conceptus, which is the Disposition-2/
Actuality-1 state necessary for intellectual knowledge utilizing the intellectus possibilis.
The intellectus agens is postulated because, in Aquinas’s ontology, essences, which are
in some way the object of concept formation, do not exist reified as particular entities
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  115

outside the mind. Aquinas rejects the possibility of subsisting universalia ante rem.
Accordingly, there must be some means by which the mind can form concepts of these
essential properties found in the individuals of a natural kind.18 On the intellectual
level, therefore, the intellectus agens is that innate conceptual faculty by means of which
a knower goes from Disposition-1 to a state of Disposition-2/Actuality-1. It is that fac-
ulty which ‘makes’ or forms conditions necessary for the acquired cognitive disposi-
tions to be developed in the knower. The species intelligibilis, which is the ‘formal
ability’ of a substantial form to be known, is similar in structure and function to the
role of the species sensibilis, which is the ‘formal ability’ of a proper or common sensible
to be known through the process of external sensation. Thus, the species intelligibilis is
to the substantial form emmattered in a primary substance of a natural kind as the
species sensibilis is to the active power of a proper or common sensible existing as an
incidental form in the primary substance. The cognitive passive power of the sense
faculty exists and is rendered active by the species sensibilis. Since the substantial form
of the primary substance neither exists nor subsists as an essential property separated
from the primary substance, an active faculty is needed to render the species intelligibi-
lis which is existing intentionally in some way in potentiality in the inner sense of the
sense memory active so that it may act upon the intellectus possibilis in order to form a
concept. With the direct acquaintance of a universal form central to Platonic episte-
mology, there is no need for an intellectus agens. One must remember, however, that
this ‘making’ of a species intelligibilis is different cognitively from ‘forming’ and ‘know-
ing’ a concept. The intellectus agens is a purely formal, innate structure that ‘abstracts.’
The intellectus possibilis—what Kenny perspicuously refers to as the ‘receptive’
­intellect—is the cognitive faculty that ‘receives’ the species intelligibilis and then ‘knows’
the content of the concept.
Aquinas is cognizant of this causal function when he refers to the intellectus agens as a
kind of ‘efficient cause’. In particular, when analysing the notion of the intellectus agens in
the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas often refers to it as an efficient cause. In the Second
Book, Aquinas writes: ‘The other principle, having the role of efficient cause in the soul,
“is the intellect by which all things are made”, and this is the intellectus agens’ (Summa
Contra Gentiles, lib. 2 d. 78, n. 2); ‘There also is something, which, in the capacity of an
efficient cause, makes all in act—and this is called the intellectus agens’ (n. 4), and ‘For
Aristotle had already said that the intellectus agens is like an efficient cause . . . ’. (n. 8). It
follows that whatever the precise analysis of the mental act of abstraction undertaken by
the intellectus agens might be, it is not a simple act of direct acquaintance or intuitive
apprehension common to twentieth century philosophers. In offering an analysis of the
intellectus agens, Aristotelian philosophy of mind departs radically from its Platonic
forebears. Furthermore, Aquinas rejects Plato’s theory of recollection, which depends
upon the mind’s being ‘directly acquainted with’ the forms of objects prior to birth.

18
  Aquinas would disagree with 20th-c. philosophers like Russell and Moore who claimed that an indi-
vidual was ‘directly acquainted’ with universals.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

116  Epistemological Dispositions

The present account, in addition, reiterates Aquinas’s concerns about the Platonic
distinction between opinion and knowledge. Accordingly, it is natural and quite easy
for a perceiver to have perceptions. The life of the senses, however, can keep one within
the confines of the Platonic ‘cave’ discussed in the Seventh Book of the Republic; it is
difficult to acquire knowledge of concepts in the brilliance of the light of ‘truth’ beyond
the trappings of the cave; ‘. . . as a subject moves from primary potency into primary
actuality when it acquires knowledge through teaching, so too a subject’s primary
potency to the possession of a sense faculty is actualized by her birth’ (Commentary on
the Soul, #373). In other words, insofar as a human knower has functioning sense
organs and faculties, i.e., innate Dispositions-1/Actualities-2, she is guaranteed per-
ceptions. In concept formation, on the other hand, these Dispositions-2/Actualities-1
‘have to be acquired through application and discipline’. Whereas sense knowledge is
easily attainable, intellectual knowledge requires a contribution on the part of the
agent. With the intellectus agens as a necessary condition for concept formation,
Aquinas, much like Brentano, opts for a structured mental act position. This dimen-
sion of his philosophy of mind will be discussed later in this text.19
Once Aquinas distinguished between potency and act in both conception and per-
ception, he next considers the difference between the actual process of sensing and the
actual process of thinking:
Aristotle sets himself out to discriminate between actual sensations and thinking. And he finds
the first reason for distinguishing these activities in the difference between their objects, i.e.,
the sense objects and the intelligible objects, which are attained by actual sensation, and think-
ing respectively. The sense objects, which actuate sensitive activities—the visible, the audible,
etc.—exist outside the soul. The reason is that actual sensation attains to the individual things
that exist externally.
On the other hand, rational knowledge is of universals (essences), which exists somehow
within the soul. Whence it is clear that the person who already has scientific knowledge about
certain things does not need to seek such things outside of herself. Such a knower already has
them inwardly, and is able, unless prevented by some incidental cause, to reflect on them when-
ever one pleases. But a person cannot sense whenever one pleases; not possessing sense objects
inwardly, one is forced to receive them from the outside. (Commentary on the Soul, #375)

In this passage, Aquinas considers what in De Ente et Essentia he refers to as knowledge

of essences rather than knowledge of universals. The awareness of an essence is a ‘first
intention’ whose content is in principle isomorphic with the set of dispositional prop-
erties which comprise a substantial form instantiated with a piece of prime matter to
form a concretum or primary substance. The awareness of a universal is a ‘second
intention’ whose content is a mental relation produced by the mind in reflecting upon

19
  Jonathan Jacobs commented, referring to Plato’s ‘carver’ analogy in the Philebus, that by means of the
intellectus agens ‘the intellect carves the world at its joints’. The result is the species intelligibilis that is a
necessary condition for having concepts. See Jacobs, ‘Habits, Cognitions, and Realism’, in John Haldane
(ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Virtue in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 115.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  117

the content of a first intention. This is the relation of ‘one to many’, which is what
Aquinas calls the universal. These two passages are lucid expositions of the dichotomy
Aquinas accepts in regard to different objects of knowledge. The sense faculties are the
means by which a perceiver is aware of the proper and common sensibles found in the
individual concreta of the external world; however, the awareness of the individual
concretum itself as a primary substance is not part of this discussion. The intellectual
faculties, on the other hand, are the means by which the knower is aware of two kinds
of concepts:
(a) Essential properties, which are gleaned through the abstractive process of the
intellectus agens making a species intelligibilis for the intellectus possibilis; this
resulting concept is a first intention.
(b) Universals, which are mental constructs produced by a reflective mental act of
the intellectus possibilis on the concept itself producing the relation of ‘one to
many’; this is a second intention.
The intentional objects of both acts of the intellect, the first and the second intentions,
are mental existents. Neither exists as concreta in the external world. Through this
distinction between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge, Aquinas adopts
the Platonic dichotomy between objects of knowledge. His analysis of the objects of
knowledge, however, is far from Platonic. This present chapter suggests how this
bypassing of Platonism occurs.20 Jacobs perceptively put the matter this way; for
Aquinas ‘. . . the making of concepts is an activity occurring in natural beings and on
account of their relation to and interactions with things in the world’.21
So far, very little has been said about the objects of sensation and perception. The
next chapter begins the discussion of these objects of sensation. The latter chapters of
the book, beginning with an analysis of the vis cogitativa, will provide an analysis of the
objects of perception. It is through this distinction between distinct objects of sensation
and perception that Aquinas’s account of perception transcends the limits of classical
British empiricism. Sensation, for Aquinas, is the awareness of what he, following
Aristotle, calls the proper and the common sensibles. These are the colours, sounds,
tastes, shapes, figures, and so forth, of sense knowledge. Perception, on the other hand,
is analysed in terms of the awareness on the sense level of an individual as an individ-
ual. This awareness of an individual is beyond the limits of Berkeley and Hume, both
of whom reduce an individual more or less to a collection of sensible qualities. Like
Thomas Reid, Thomas Aquinas affirms the distinction between sensation and

20
  Aquinas developed the account of first and second intentions in De Ente et Essentia. Rooted in the
writings of Peter of Spain, among others, basically a first intention fundamentally is a mental concept
whose object is a thing outside the mind. On the other hand, a second intention has for its object another
thought. Simply put, a first intention is a ‘thought about a thing’, while a second intention is a ‘thought
about a thought’. This distinction is similar to what contemporary philosophers call ‘categorematic’ and
‘syncategorematic’ terms.
21
  Jacobs, ‘Habits, Cognition, and Realism’, 114.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

118  Epistemological Dispositions

perception. This distinction will be the principal topic for the discussion of the vis
cogitativa later in this book.

appendix
Kenny, Ryle, and Geach on Dispositional Properties
In Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy, Kenny contrasted Descartes’s position on ideas with the
concept of acquired dispositions as analysed by Aristotle and a fortiori Aquinas:
In a well-known passage of the De Anima, Aristotle observed that ‘when a man possesses knowledge as an
un-exercised disposition, he is still in a state of potentiality, thought not in the same way as before he learnt
what he knows’ (De Anima III, 429b, 6–10). For instance, a man may (1) not know French at all, (2) know
French but not be using his knowledge, or (3) be actually speaking French. In the first and second cases he
is still in ‘a state of potentiality’ in two different ways.
Descartes, with his disdain for the Aristotelian notion of potentiality, was unable to distinguish between
the unrealized capacity to acquire knowledge and the non-exercise of knowledge already acquired. There
seems no real room in his system for the concept of learning.22

There is considerable philosophical merit in elucidating the concept of acquired dispositions.

In his famous essay on the philosophy of education, ‘Teaching and Training’, Ryle considered
Aristotle’s notion of ‘habit’ and its unfortunate mishandling by more than one twentieth
century philosopher. Acquired skills are central to Ryle’s concept of ‘knowing how’, which can
be read as the mastery of a concept in Aristotle and Aquinas. Ryle wrote the following about
Aristotle’s position:
Skills, tastes and scruples are more than mere habits, and the disciplines and the self-disciplines, which
develop them, are more than mere rote-exercises.
His translators and commentators have been very unjust to Aristotle on this matter. Though he was the
first thinker and is still the best, systematically to study the notions of ability, skill, training, character,
learning, discipline, self-discipline, etc., the translators of his works nearly always render his key-ideas by
such terms as ‘habit’ and ‘habituation’—as if, for example, a person who has been trained and self-trained
to play the violin, or to behave scrupulously in his dealings with other people, acts from sheer habit, in the
way in which I do tie up my shoelaces quite automatically and without thinking what I am doing or how to
do it. Of course, Aristotle knew better than this, and the Greek words that he used are quite grossly mis-
translated when rendered merely by such words as ‘habit’ and ‘habituation’.23

The same can be said of Aquinas. Even though his analysis of acquired dispositions used the
Latin term, ‘habitus’, the English equivalent, ‘habit’, fails to capture the inner dynamism of an
acquired disposition. An acquired conceptual disposition, a Disposition-II/Actuality-I, is a
more sophisticated concept than reducible to a rote habit or rote memory. On this point,
Aristotle and Aquinas provide interesting suggestions suitable for contemporary philosophy of
mind. Kenny noted that the concept of disposition transcends the restrictive limits of Cartesian
philosophy of mind. Kenny’s point needs to be affirmed: without the possibility of acquired
dispositions, the concept of ‘learning’ is rendered vacuous. Ryle would have accepted this
consequence.

  Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), 103.
22

 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Teaching and Training’, in R. S. Peters (ed.), The Concept of Education (Atlantic
23

Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1967), 110.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Epistemological Dispositions  119

In his discussion of acquired dispositions in Mental Acts, Geach provided a detailed account
of concept-formation in terms of an acquired ability whose existence is manifested by the
mastery of a bit of linguistic usage:
A concept . . . is subjective—it is a mental capacity belonging to a particular person. . . . The ability to
express a judgment in words thus presupposes a number of capacities, previously acquired, for intelligently
using the several words and phrases that make up the sentence. I shall apply the old term ‘concepts’ to these
special capacities. . . . It will be a sufficient condition for James’s having the concept of so-and-so that he
should have mastered the intelligent use . . . of a word for so-and-so in some language.24

Geach’s use of ‘concept’ in Mental Acts is not reducible to what Frege called a ‘concept’, which is
how ‘Begriff ’ is usually translated. Like Russell in The Principles of Mathematics, Frege’s use of
concept referred to objective entities not belonging to a specific mind.25 Geach’s analysis of a
concept appears similar structurally to the account provided by Aquinas and Aristotle. In his
‘Form and Existence’, Geach once suggested that concept in Frege is much like substantial form
in Aquinas.26 In discussing the role of an acquired disposition in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind,
Haldane rendered the following comment noted earlier: ‘On (Aquinas’s) account, thoughts are
exercises of these capacities; mental actions of the psychophysical individual’.27 This claim is
commensurate with the analysis provided above.

24
 Geach, Mental Acts, 12–13.   25  Ibid., 14.
26
  Peter T. Geach, ‘Form and Existence’, in Kenny, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, 29–53.
27
  Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

5
Objects and Faculties
Teleology in Sensation

This chapter begins the structural analysis of Aquinas’s theory of sensation and per-
ception. It is divided into two sections: the first concerns the objects of sensation and
perception, and the second concerns the faculties of sensation and perception. The
previous chapter discussed Aquinas’s account of epistemological dispositions, and the
following chapter will consider the mental acts of sensation and perception. In his
analysis of sense knowledge, all four categories—dispositions, faculties, acts, and
objects—are necessary conditions for awareness.

The Priority of Object

The reason for this division between objects of sensation and faculties of sensation is
teleological in character: ‘Beginning then, he [Aristotle] observes that before we can
decide what the senses themselves are, we must discuss the objects of each sense. For
objects are prior to faculties’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 383); ‘The very essence and
definition of each sense consists in its being naturally fitted to be affected by some spe-
cial object proper to itself. The nature of each faculty consists in its relation to its proper
object’ (no. 387). A contemporary philosopher might reasonably remark that this is
nothing more than an archaic bit of teleology. This teleology, however, can be under-
stood in two senses, neither of which is overly disturbing philosophically. In the first
sense, this teleology is an instantiation of Aquinas’s principle that potencies are related
to acts. The knowing faculty is considered ontologically as a potency or a power.
Therefore, it is in some way related to its corresponding act: Aquinas affirms consist-
ently that a knowledge potency is what it is only because of its corresponding act.
Secondly, Aquinas exhibits a benign sense of teleology. He claims that each sense
­faculty has a particular object. Hence, different sense faculties do not have a cross-­
reference to different categories of sense objects. The faculty of sight is that sense power
by which perceivers are aware of colours. The faculty of hearing is that sense power by
which perceivers are aware of sounds and so forth. It is impossible for the eye to be
aware of the note B-flat. Equally, it is impossible for the ear to be aware of any shade of
red. In this instance, this teleological structure is nothing more than a philosophical
way of analysing a pre-philosophical datum of experience.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  121

Aquinas opts for what Chisholm called a ‘particularist’ approach in the metaphilo-
sophical issues of epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Chisholm distinguishes
between what he calls a ‘methodist’ and a ‘particularist’; both are different metaphilo-
sophical approaches to issues in epistemology theory. Chisholm claims that in criteria
for knowledge, two questions can be formulated:
(a)  What do we know? In other words, what is the extent of our knowledge?
(b) How do we decide whether we know that we know? In other words, what are
the criteria of knowledge?
Aquinas, like Reid, Moore, and several ordinary-language philosophers, would be a
‘particularist’.1 Aquinas establishes entities necessary to explicate his ontology, and
only then proceeds to build an epistemology and a theory of mind necessary to account
for an intentional awareness of those entities. Put differently, Aquinas, like Chisholm,
is concerned with the objects of knowledge. Using Chisholm’s positions, a ‘methodist’
is concerned with establishing a method by means of which a knower establishes a cri-
terion by which to distinguish different pieces of knowledge. Many British empiricists
are, Chisholm suggests, adopting the criterial practices of methodism. Aquinas begins
by acknowledging the primacy of primary substances in his ontology, and then pro-
ceeds to explain how a knowledge of these particular objects is possible.

Teleology and Metaphysics

The first use of teleology—i.e. that potencies are related to acts—is rooted fundamen-
tally in Aquinas’s metaphysics. To reject this teleological structure entails refuting the
act/potency dichotomy; this is a metaphysical use, which is an account of what a power
or potency does. The power to do A is merely ‘the power to do A’. Accordingly, if one is
to understand the power, one must understand the act—and also the object of the act.
Given Aristotelian metaphysics, what is central to that ontological realist account is
the act/potency distinction. In refuting teleology in matters of the philosophy of mind,
it is not teleology alone that one rejects but the entire ontological scheme articulated by
Aristotle and Aquinas. Put differently, this use of teleology is connected intricately
with Aquinas’s metaphysical system. Hence, he explains his teleological account of
sense faculties, mental acts, and objects only in the context of his metaphysical scheme
as a whole. His claims regarding the ontological structure of the sense faculties, in
effect, are consistent with the propositions of Aristotelian ontology. The following pas-
sage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics illustrates this point:
It is clear that actuality is prior to potency; and I mean not merely that it is prior to that definite
potency that is described as a source or principle of change in something else or in itself qua
something else, but that it is prior in general to every principle of movement and rest [ . . . ] That

1
 Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press,
1973), 12–14.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

122  objects and faculties

it is prior in definition is evident, for it is only because there is a possibility of its being actual
that what is potential in the primary sense is potential; for instance, what is capable of building
is what can build, what is capable of seeing is what can see, and what is visible is what can be
seen. The same argument applies to everything else, so that the definition of the actual must
precede that of the potential, and knowledge of it must precede knowledge of the potential.
(Metaphysics, bk IX, ch. 1 (1049b12–18))

This passage from Aristotle suggests that ontologically actuality is prior to potency. If
the sensation faculties are potencies, that which will render them ‘in act’ is prior to the
potency itself. Thus, the objects of sensation—the reds, the C-sharps, and the sweets of
the world—must be considered first. It is only because of them that perception poten-
cies are what they are. One cannot consider the faculties of perception unless one
knows what is in act, which will in turn actualize these potencies. With this ontological
commitment to the priority of actuality to potency, in attempting to explain the
­possibility of sensation, Aquinas considers it necessary to treat first the sensible object-
in-act. This statement, therefore, is an instantiation of his general philosophical maxim
that acts are prior to potencies. This analysis is grounded in the account of principle (b)
above. Furthermore, this example illustrates again the centrality of the explanatory
method in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
In discussing the role of object in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, Pilsner writes that
Aquinas provided the Latin term ‘propria objecta’ for Aristotle’s ‘ta idia’.2 ‘Propria
objecta’ appears to have been part of the philosophical coin of the realm in the middle
thirteenth century. Pilsner also emphasizes that Aquinas refers to both a formal and a
material aspect of a sensible object. This distinction is often overlooked by commenta-
tors on Aquinas’s account of sensation. In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus,
Aquinas renders an account of how this distinction holds for sensation. He distin-
guishes between the formal aspect of the sensible object and the primary substance—
the hoc aliquid—in which the sensible object belongs as an accidental or incidental
quality. This important text illustrates the difference between proper sensibles and the
individual primary substance.
In the sensible object, there is one thing considered as formal and another considered as mate-
rial. What is formal in the object is that according to which the object is referred to the sensible
power or habit; the material aspect on the other hand, is that in which this formal aspect is
founded or grounded; in other words, if we speak of the object of the power of vision, its formal
object is colour, because insofar as something is coloured, it is visible. On the other hand, what
is material in the object is that body in which the colour is found. From this it is clear that a
power or habit is referred to the formal aspect [formalis ratio] of the object per se, and to that
which is material in the object per accidens. And since what is per accidens does not differenti-
ate something but only what is per se, it follows therefore that the material diversity of an object

2
 Pilsner suggests that Aquinas appropriated this terminology from the translation of William of
Moerbeke, who in 1268 provided Thomas with a translation of Aristotle’s De Anima in what one might call
‘transliterated’ Greek. See Joseph Pilsner, The Specification of Human Actions in St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 93–4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  123

does not diversify the power or habit; this differentiation, however, is accomplished only by the
formal aspect. For the visual power by which we see stones, men, and the heavens is one,
because this diversity of objects is material, and not according to the formal aspect [formalis
ratio] of the visible. (Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus, q. 2 a. 4)

In this text, Aquinas considers both the sensible quality and the primary substance in
which the accidental, sensible quality is found. The sensible power of sight—the power
of vision—is determined by the colour existing in the primary substance; the primary
substance is only the placeholder, as it were, for the sensible quality. Yet the unanswered
question in this text is how the primary substance—the individual hoc aliquid—might
be known on the perceptual level.3 In the passage from the Quaestiones Disputatae de
Virtutibus quoted above, the three substances—stones, men, and ‘heavens’—are each
known by sight because each has the incidental quality of colour.4 Nothing is said
about how an individual person—Megan or Elin, for example—or a specific stone is
perceived as an individual primary substance and not as a ‘cluster’ or ‘heap’ of proper
and common sensibles.

Objects of Sensation
In his discussion of the objects of sensation, Aquinas follows the threefold Aristotelian
division: (a) the proper or special sensibles; (b) the common sensibles; (c) the inciden-
tal objects of sense. In every classification where Aquinas considers sense knowledge,
he adopts this threefold division of sense objects: ‘Now the term sense-object is used in
three ways, one way incidentally [per accidens] and in two ways essentially or abso-
lutely [per se]. Of the latter, we use one if referring to the special objects proper to each
sense, and the other in referring to the objects that are common to more than one sense
in all sentient beings’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 383). Aquinas claims that the
objects of sensation are not to be rendered significant in a univocal way. On the con-
trary, there appears to be a type of a hierarchy for these objects of sense knowledge; this
hierarchical classification will become clearer as the present discussion unfolds.5 For
Aquinas, there are two generic kinds of sensible objects:
those that are perceived directly—the proper sensibles and the common
(a) 
sensibles.
those that are perceived only in conjunction with the directly perceivable
(b) 
­sensibles—the incidental object of sense. In other words, one perceives the ‘son

3
  The last three chapters focus attention on the structured mental act of the vis cogitativa as a means to
accomplish this act of perception of the individual thing.
4
  One needs to cut Aquinas a little slack with his example of ‘the heavens’. He probably means the vari-
ous objects that are observable in the heavens—stars, planets, etc.
5
  Aquinas is more complex in discussing objects of perception than are e.g. Moore and other early ana-
lytic philosophers, who wrote about sense data constituting the only category for an object of sensation.
British empiricists like Berkeley, Hume, and Mill also appear to have one general category for sense
qualities.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

124  objects and faculties

of Diares’ (an incidental object of sense) directly, but qua coloured object since
the son of Diares is neither a proper nor a common sensible.
From the outset, one begins to notice a difference between Aristotle and Aquinas on
the one hand and the classical British empiricists on the other, especially on the matter
of the sense object that is ‘perceived indirectly.6
In order to provide a fuller development of the various categories of objects of sensa-
tion, several passages from the Commentary require discussion and analysis. Aquinas
first considers the ‘proper’ or what are sometimes called the ‘special’ sensibles:
Aristotle explains the members of the division, and first what he means by a special [proper]
sense object. He says that he means by this term what is perceived by one sense and by no other,
and in respect of which the perceiving sense cannot err. Accordingly, it is proper to sight to
know colour, to hearing to know sound, to taste to know flavour or savour. Touch, however, has
several objects proper to itself: heat and moisture, cold and dryness, the heavy and the light,
etc. Each sense judges the objects proper to itself and is not mistaken about these, e.g. sight
with regard to such and such a colour or hearing with regard to sound. (Commentary on the
Soul, no. 384)

In the Quaestiones Quodlibetales, Aquinas writes about the relation between the sensi-
ble object and the awareness of that object: ‘External sense knowledge [cognition] is
attained solely by the modification of the sense faculty by the sensible. Therefore, it is
by means of the form which is impressed by the sensible object that sensation takes
place’ (Quaestiones Quodlibetales V, q. 5 a. 2 ad 3). This passage firmly claims that
externalism is central to Aquinas’s account.
Aquinas next considers the common sensibles:
Considering the second member of the division, he remarks that the common sense objects are
five: movement, rest, number, shape and size. These are not proper to any one sense but are
common to all. We must not take this to mean that all these are common to all the senses, but
that some of them, i.e. number, movement, and rest are common to all. Touch and sight,
­however, perceive all five. It is clear now what are the sense-objects that are such in themselves
or absolutely. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 386)

6
  Pasnau, to the contrary, reduces Aquinas’s perception theory into a ‘third thing’ or ‘representationalist’
position; he argues that in addition to a knowing disposition or power and a suitable external object, each
mental act of sense knowledge for Aquinas requires an intentional species, which Pasnau suggests is a ‘ter-
tium quid’ between the mental act and the object known. See Robert Pasnau, Cognitive Theory in the Later
Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). There are two responses to Pasnau’s claim
forcing Aquinas into representationalism. (a) Aquinas adopts the ‘id quod’ versus the ‘a quo’ distinction,
suggesting that the object of knowledge—what is known—is distinct from the means by which the object is
known. The various species in direct perception are ‘a quo’ epistemological means and not ‘id quod’ objects
of knowing. (b) John P. O’Callaghan offers the following retort to Pasnau: Aquinas distinguishes between
efficient cause and formal cause. Pasnau appears to reduce a cognitive species to an efficient cause whereas
it is, according to Aquinas, a formal cause. In discussing concept formation and knowing, O’Callaghan
writes: ‘We conceive, and in our conceiving we grasp things other than our conceiving’: Thomistic Realism
and the Linguistic Turn (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 169; O’Callaghan further
suggests that Pasnau is confused because he reads Aquinas through Ockham’s eyes. An analysis of the differ-
ing roles played by efficient and formal causes in Aquinas’s account occurs later.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  125

Thirdly, what will become Aristotle and Aquinas’s unique contribution to the philoso-
phy of perception, the incidental object of sense, is discussed: ‘when the likeness of a
human person is in sight; she is not there because she is a human person, but because
she is a coloured object [sed in quantum huic colorata accidit esse hominem]’ (Summa
Theologiae, Ia q. 17 a. 2).
In these passages, ‘sense’ is used to refer both to the external senses, when consider-
ing the proper and the common sensibles, and to the internal senses, when discussing
the incidental object of sense. The internal senses, in addition to the vis cogitativa, are
the imagination (vis imaginativa) and the sense memory (vis memorativa). Hence, the
internal sense faculties have a more complex function than providing an awareness
only of the incidental object of sense. Accordingly, Aquinas distinguished three generic
kinds of objects of perception: (a) the proper or special sensibles; (b) the common sen-
sibles; (c) the incidental objects of sense.
In his consideration of the proper sensibles, Pasnau remarks that Aquinas does not
reduce this sense object to the category of secondary qualities: he notes correctly, ‘most
such strategies would not have been acceptable to Aquinas.’7 In principle, Aquinas rejects
all sense data accounts, because the objects of sensation for him are identified with exter-
nal objects. Pasnau continues this analysis with the following remarks, with which Kenny
and Putnam would agree: ‘Aquinas resists appealing to inner conscious experience. The
position Aquinas instead embraced is that the primary (proper) sensibles are basic and
objective features of the external world, irreducible to quantifiable properties (the com-
mon sensibles) or to anything else.’8 These passages suggest again the thrust of ontologi-
cal realism and epistemological realism with which Aquinas articulates his philosophy of
mind. A modern empiricist certainly Aquinas is not!9 In discussing the significance of
Aquinas’s realism, Haldane comments: ‘[This] is a serious attempt to develop a philo-
sophical theory of cognitive psychology, consistent with the assumption of epistemolog-
ical realism; and [it] offers important insights for those who would attempt such a task
today.’10 The thrust of this study is congruent with Haldane’s suggestion.
In addition, Aquinas introduces an important distinction: (a) the external senses
and the external sensorium; and (b) the internal senses and the internal sensorium. The
external and internal sense division is based upon the physiological locus of the sense
organ in question—is it in the extremities of the body or it is ‘in the head’, as it were?
The external and internal sensorium dichotomy depends on whether the sense faculty
requires a phantasm in order to function. The internal sense faculty of the sensus com-
munis will not require a phantasm; hence, it is an internal sense faculty that is part of
the external sensorium.
Aquinas argues furthermore that the internal sensorium—the imagination, the vis
cogitativa, and the sense memory—has a distinct set of functions and objects. He dis-

7
 Pasnau, Cognitive Theory, 185.   8  Ibid.
9
  Pasnau, however, proposes a role for a ‘tertium quid’ in every mental act. It is unclear how this direc-
tion towards even a modest form of representationalism squares with externalism.
10
  John Haldane, ‘Aquinas on Sense-Perception’, Philosophical Review 92(2) (1983), 234.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

126  objects and faculties

tinguishes several types of mental activity, each of which is peculiar and distinct to
itself. Each mental act will depend on a particular kind of object. Regarding the activi-
ties of the internal sensorium, Aquinas offers the ‘phantasm’ as the vehicle by which
mental acts of the internal sensorium are distinguished from the mental acts of the
external sensorium. The introduction of phantasms further complicates and expands
an already complex structure of sense knowledge. Accordingly, the rather simplistic
sense data position on perception is opposed structurally to Aquinas’s theory.

The Directly Perceivable and the Indirectly Perceivable

In considering the objects of sensation, it was noted above that Aquinas offers two
generic types of such objects.
(a) the objects that are directly perceived, which are the proper and the common
sensibles;
(b) the objects that are accidentally perceived, which are the incidental objects of
sense.
In the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae, we find a discussion about the distinc-
tion between the ‘directly perceptible’ and the ‘indirectly perceptible’ articulated in
some detail.11 Of course, the concepts of ‘directly perceivable and ‘indirectly perceiva-
ble’ require explication and analysis. At first glance, one might suggest that Aquinas
uses this distinction between the directly perceivable and the indirectly perceivable in
order to refer to two types of awareness. One kind would be an awareness of an object
known only by means of an inference.
At this point, moreover, another distinction is necessary in sorting out Aquinas’s
account of sense knowledge. So far the terms ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’ have been
used almost interchangeably. Textually, in fact, Aquinas seems not to propose a dis-
tinction either between these two terms or between the respective mental acts to which
they refer and their respective objects. By applying the above terminology—the
directly perceivable and the indirectly perceivable—a distinction between sensation
and perception can be offered. In Aristotle and Aquinas, the directly perceivable
objects are the proper sensibles and the common sensibles. The indirectly perceivable
objects, on the other hand, are the incidental objects of sensation. Aquinas considers
both these categories to be mental acts of sensation because neither makes use of first
or second intentions at the level of concept formation or the awareness of universals.
The indirectly sensible, while not an object of the external sensorium, is still not the
object of a conceptus of the intellect. Rather, this category of sensibles is known through
one of the mental acts of one of the faculties of the internal sensorium. The mental acts
of the external senses are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the mental acts of
the internal sensorium. This is the basis for Aquinas’s distinction between the direct

11
  This text occurs later in this chapter (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 92 a. 2).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  127

and indirect object of sensation, and for his distinction between sensation and
perception.
In summary form, therefore, ‘sensation’ refers to the workings of the external senso-
rium. ‘Perception’ refers to the workings of the vis cogitativa, which has for its object
the incidental object of sense, the Aristotelian primary substance; these are the par-
ticular instances of substantial things that exist in Aquinas’s world. Nonetheless, it is
through the distinction between the external senses and the awareness by the vis cogi-
tativa that Aquinas can affirm the distinction between sensation and perception. This
is also his way of offering a more nuanced analysis than Thomas Reid provides for the
same set of issues.

Sensation as a Generic Term

In Aquinas’s texts, sensation is a generic term, which can be referred to as ‘Sensation-I’. The
intentional characteristics of the acts of awareness of Sensation-I are all an awareness of
the objects of the external world, i.e. incidental qualities of the particular concreta or pri-
mary substances in which the incidental properties inhere. Sensation-I is not connected
with the awareness of essences or universals—i.e. either first-intention concept formation
and exercise or second-intention universal formation; sensation-I is never reducible to
intellectual knowledge. However, there are two types of Sensation-I mental act, and each
type of Sensation-I is a direct awareness aligned in some way with the external senses and
with specific objects. The sense objects will be the directly perceivable objects, which also
might be termed ‘Objects of Sensation-Ia’. These objects are the proper and the common
sensibles. The second type of Sensation-I is the mental act of the internal sensorium fac-
ulty of the vis cogitativa. This is the mental awareness that has for its object the indirectly
perceivable; these might be termed ‘Objects of Sensation-Ib’. This class of Sensation-Ib
objects is determined by phantasms through the mental act of the vis cogitativa.
Structurally, the objects of Sensation-Ia—the directly perceivable objects—are
known only by the external senses. Accordingly, it is the objects of Sensation-Ia which
are the objects of direct sensation. The objects of Sensation-Ib—the indirectly perceiva-
ble objects—are known only through the workings of an internal sense. Yet both types
of awareness are in some way awareness of particular qualities or things which exist in
the external world. It is for this reason that the term ‘Sensation-I’ has been introduced as
a generic notion which has subsumed under it Sensation-Ia—direct sensation with the
external senses—and Sensation-Ib—perception by means of the internal sense of the
vis cogitativa. It is important to realize that there is no role for inference with Sensation-Ib
awareness.12 Aquinas does not use an inferential process to account for Sensation-Ib

12
  Moore considered ‘indirect awareness’ as an inferential process, which is how he proceeds from the
directly perceivable sense datum to the indirectly perceivable material object, which in some unexplained
way ‘underlies’ the sense data. Cyrille Michon argues, however, that the mental act of the vis cogitativa in
Aquinas is an example of a ‘proto-judgement’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

128  objects and faculties

mental acts and objects. The indirectly perceivable object in Aquinas is neither identical
nor coextensive with what many twentieth-century philosophers called the indirectly
perceivable object. Furthermore, contrary to Michon, Aquinas does not appeal to any
‘inference’ in discussing how the incidental object of sense is perceived.
Comments from several twentieth-century philosophers are useful in considering
how Aquinas’s philosophy of mind might play out in contemporary discussions.
Aquinas’s Sensation-Ib object reminds one, as Kerr writes, of both Putnam’s and
McDowell’s claims that there is no need to ‘bridge the supposed gap between mind and
world [ . . . because] there is no such gap—though much effort needs to go into liberat-
ing philosophers from assuming that there is’.13 For Aquinas, the object of a mental act
is an ‘aliquid extraneum’, which instantiates the externalist thesis. McDowell com-
ments: ‘We need to stand firm on the idea that the structure of elements that constitute
a thought, and the structure of elements that constitute something that is the case can
be the very same thing.’14 Haldane notes that McDowell’s claim ‘is as close as makes no
substantive difference to the old orthodoxy of Thomist metaphysical realism’.15 Kerr
comments on Putnam’s recent work:
Over the years, especially recently, Putnam has been working towards what he now calls ‘natu-
ral realism’, the truth that we do, after all, perceive the world directly. Thomas can be enlisted as
an ally in the struggle, which is still central in modern philosophy, to liberate philosophers
from the notion that the knower can have nothing better than indirect knowledge of anything,
which means (in Kantian terms) that the world is as it appears may not be the world as it really
is—at least for all we know. Putnam is now quite happy to agree that ‘Aristotelian realism’ is
very much what he wants.16

Sensation-Ia objects, accordingly, are the objects of what one normally calls sensation.
Sensation-Ib objects using the vis cogitativa are the objects of what one calls perception.
The objects of sensation are the proper and the common sensibles. These properties are
analogous with but not reducible to the primary and secondary qualities of the British
empiricists. The object of perception is the incidental object of sense, which is the individ-
ual primary substance—the individual thing or concretum—in Aquinas’s metaphysics.
There is no analogue for the incidental object of sense in mainstream British empiricism
nor, until recently, in much twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind.

Non-veridical Awareness
A brief consideration of Aquinas’s account of perceptual error regarding sense objects
is in order. A discussion of non-veridical perception, albeit brief, is needed here

13
  Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘Thomistica III’, New Blackfriars 85(1000) (2004), 629–41.
14
  John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), as quoted in
Fergus Kerr, OP, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 29.
15
  John Haldane, ‘On Coming Home to Metaphysical Realism’, Philosophy 71 (1986), 287–96.
16
  Kerr, ‘Thomistica III’, 637.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  129

because Aquinas considers perceptual error in regard to both the mental act itself and
the object of the mental act. The distinctions he develops regarding non-veridical sen-
sation and perception depend upon the categories of objects of sensation and percep-
tion. Aquinas admits non-veridical awareness of objects regarding objects of sensation
or perception in only two of the three categories of objects. On the other hand, he
admits the possibility of a non-veridical awareness into each category of mental act.
Accordingly, if ‘to be aware of ’ is taken to be a ‘success term’, Aquinas argues that in all
three categories of mental acts themselves, the function of the mental act may not be
successful:
(a) Regarding the objects, there can be a non-veridical awareness of an object of
sense knowledge in only two categories of these objects: the common sensible
and the incidental object of sense.
(b) Regarding the mental acts themselves, however, there can be non-veridical,
unsuccessful awareness in all three categories of awareness: the awareness of a
proper sensible, the awareness of a common sensible, and the awareness of an
incidental object of sense.17
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas considers non-veridical sensation: ‘Expect to
find error in the senses to no greater extent than truth. Truth is in the senses not
because they can know what truth is, but because they have a true perception of sensi-
ble objects. Similarly error enters when the senses apprehend and judge things to be
other than they are’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 17 a. 2). He explains what is necessary for
a ‘true perception of a sensible object’:
Sense knows things from being impressed with their likeness. Now this likeness can be taken
at three stages:
First, immediately and directly [primo et per se], as when the likeness of colour is in the
sight. [ . . . ]
Secondly, directly, but not immediately [per se sed non primo], as when the likeness of bodily
shape or size is in the sight. [ . . . ]
Thirdly, neither immediately nor directly but indirectly [nec primo nec per se, sed per accidens],
as when the likeness of a human person is in sight. She is not there because she is a human
person, but because she is a coloured object [sed in quantum huic colorata accidit esse h­ ominem].
(Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 17 a. 2; emphasis added)

Aquinas concludes this analysis by considering error regarding the objects of

sensation:
Now to apply this distinction. We say that the senses are not deceived regarding their proper
sense objects, except by interference, in abnormal cases, and when the sense organ is impaired.

17
  This is a hint that Aquinas argues for a structured mental act in perception rather than opting for the
‘diaphanous arrow of consciousness’ so prevalent in the early analytic work of Russell and Moore. Plato also
accepts a diaphanous mental act in his theory of recollection that is structurally similar to Russell’s ‘principle
of acquaintance’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

130  objects and faculties

Regarding the common sensibles and incidental objects of sense, however, there can be errone-
ous sensations even in a healthy sense. For the sense is not immediately related to them, but
only incidentally, namely, in consequence of their being involved in its primary function.
(Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 17 a. 2)

In Aquinas’s view, non-veridical awareness with sense objects can occur with the com-
mon sensibles and the incidental object of sense. But it must be noted that this discus-
sion concerns only error regarding objects of sensation; it does not concern the
possibility of error regarding the mental act itself. This is why in the above passage
Aquinas mentions that the proper sensibles are always perceived veridically except in
the cases when there is ‘interference and [ . . . ] when the sense organ is impaired’. When
the act of perception is analysed, this discussion will be further elucidated. It is not too
early, however, to mention that ‘interference’ refers to the ‘medium’ needed for each act
of sensation, and ‘impaired sense organ’ refers to the ‘adequately disposed sense organ’.
In the Commentary as in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas regards non-veridical sensa-
tion regarding objects as being possible only in two categories of sensible objects and
not with the proper sensibles:
First, about its proper object, sense is always true or only slightly false. Natural powers are not
unable to perform their proper activities, except in the minority of cases on account of illness
or injury. So the senses are not deficient in judging their proper objects, except sometimes
because of impaired organs, as when the ill-disposed tongue of a feverish patient makes what
is sweet taste bitter. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 661)

Aquinas further elaborates his position:

But the senses can be deceived both about objects only incidentally sensible and about objects
common to several senses. Thus sight would prove fallible were one to attempt to judge what a
coloured thing was or where it was. And hearing likewise if one tried to determine by hearing
alone what was causing a sound. Such then are the special or proper objects of each sense.
(no. 385)

Aquinas next treats the common sensibles: ‘A sense also has to deal with the common
sensibles. [ . . . ] Size, for instance, and motion are common sensibles of bodies. This
judgement might vary according to the differences of distance and misjudgement is easy’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 663). Lastly, Aquinas offers his account of the incidental
object of sense: ‘A sense has to deal with what is incidentally sensible, and here it may be
deceived. In seeing white the sense may be deceived as to whether it be snow or flour or
something of the sort. Mistakes are especially easy with regard to strange or distant
objects’ (no. 662).18 These texts express clearly Aquinas’s position that non-veridical

18
  In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas spells out how error might occur with a proper sensible: ‘For sense
is not deceived in its proper object, as sight in regard to colour, unless accidentally through some hindrance
occurring to the sense organ—for example, the taste of a fever-stricken person judges a sweet thing to be
bitter, through his tongue being vitiated by ill humours. Sense, however, may be deceived as regards com-
mon sensible objects, as size or figure; when, for example, it judges the sun to be only a foot in diameter,
whereas in reality it exceeds the earth in size. Much more is sense deceived concerning incidental sensible
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  131

s­ ensation in regard to objects is possible structurally only within two categories of

objects; only the object of sensation is being considered and not the act itself. Even
though Aquinas affirms that the perceiver is never wrong—i.e. never non-veridically
perceiving—regarding the proper sensibles, he immediately qualifies this statement
insofar as the perceiver is what a contemporary philosopher might call a ‘normal’
perceiver under ‘normal perceptual conditions’.
Two contemporary philosophers have commented on this set of issues. Kenny
writes: ‘The traditional impossibility of mistaken sense-perception was restricted to
such sense-objects as sounds and colours; it did not extend to the natures of the events
or objects which were the causes or bearers of the sounds or colours.’19 Pasnau suggests
that Aquinas handles the cases of ‘sensory infallibility [. . .] by carefully qualifying the
scope of the infallibility’.20 This furthers the analysis noted above in the discussion
indicating the necessary conditions for ‘sensory infallibility’ regarding the proper
sensibles: (a) the sense organ is in its proper functioning condition; and (b) there exists
no impediment to the possibility of the organ’s reception of the proper sensible. Pasnau
suggests the following about the justification for this set of claims by Aquinas: ‘Jointly,
these two restrictive conditions block all the obvious counterexamples to the alleged
infallibility of the senses. [And this] amounts to the claim that in ideal circumstances,
functioning as they should, the senses do not make mistakes about sensible qualities.’21
An evolutionary and ecological psychologist like Gibson could argue that in order to
survive, the senses have been developed ‘by nature’ to be reliable instruments for
the awareness of proper sensibles; this enables the animal or human to make its way
successfully around the environment. This is a limited but probably correct account
of what Aquinas holds about the teleological structure of the sense faculties. The
structural similarity with Gibson’s account of perception is striking.

The Common Sensible and the Incidental

Object of Sense
A second problem emerges when the ‘common sensibles’ are contrasted with what
both Aristotle and Aquinas refer to as the ‘incidental object of sense’. In the previous
analysis, both the proper and the common sensibles were classified as Sensation-Ia
objects, and the incidental object of sense was classified as a Sensation-Ib object. This
distinction separates the directly sensed objects and the indirectly perceivable objects.
The problem arises when one wonders why the common sensible is a Sensation-Ia

objects, as when it judges that vinegar is honey by reason of the colour being the same. The reason of this
is evident; for every sense faculty, as such, is “per se” directed to its proper object; and things of this kind
are always the same. Hence, as long as the faculty exists, its judgment concerning its own proper object
does not fail’ (Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 85 a. 6).
19
  Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 100.
20
 Pasnau, Cognitive Theory, 188.   21  Ibid., 188–9 (emphasis original).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

132  objects and faculties

rather than a Sensation-Ib object. In other words, both Aristotle and Aquinas claim
that each sense faculty is directly ordered to a proper sensible. How, then, is it possible
that the common sensible is also a Sensation-Ia object? To explicate this issue, both the
incidental object of sense and the common sensible itself must be considered in detail.
In On the Soul, Aristotle offers a pithy remark concerning the incidental object of
sense; he spends little time offering an analysis of this sense object. Aquinas develops
this analysis in more subtle and detailed ways. ‘We speak of an incidental object of
sense where, e.g. the white object, which we see, is the son of Diares here because
“being the son of Diares” is incidental to the directly visible white patch; we speak of
the son of Diares as being (incidentally) perceived or seen by us. Because this is only
incidentally an object of sense, it in no way as such affects the senses’ (On the Soul,
418a20). The incidental object of sense, Aristotle suggests, appears to be the particular
or individual thing existing in the external world—a primary substance. There is an
awareness of an individual as an individual and not as a colour patch or a bundle of
sensations. In De Veritate, Aquinas writes: ‘For a human person exemplifying a colour
and a stone exemplifying a colour are perceived by the same sensitive faculty, since it is
incidental to the sensible object in so far as it is a sensible object [i.e. a proper sensible],
to be a human or a stone’ (De Veritate II, 1, 15). Aquinas comments on this Aristotelian
passage:

We might, he says, call Diares or Socrates incidentally a sense object because each happens to
be white: what is sensed incidentally [sentitur per accidens] which happens to belong to what is
sensed absolutely [sentitur per se]. It is accidental [i.e. incidental] to the white object, which is
sensed absolutely, that it should be Diares; hence Diares is a sense object incidentally. He does
not, as such, act upon the sense at all. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 387)

The important note emerging from these texts is that the incidental object of sense is
not directly apprehended per se by the external senses. The incidental object of sense
is not a Sensation-Ia but rather a Sensation-Ib object. But it must also be noted that
the lack of direct apprehension of the incidental object of sense refers explicitly to the
external senses. This will be quite important in a later discussion when Aquinas
argues that the vis cogitativa is the faculty by means of which a perceiver is directly
aware of an individual concretum. Aquinas is not proposing representationalism; he is
only denying that the external senses alone are the means by which a perceiver is
directly aware of an individual as a concretum and not as a mere bundle of sensations.
This is a further indication that the mental acts of the internal sensorium are con-
nected structurally with Aquinas’s account of perception. He appears concerned
about the paucity of the Aristotelian account of the incidental object of sense and how
this object is related to the common sensibles. In the following passage, Aquinas
attempts to explain how the proper sensibles determine the external sense faculties.
This explanation is important as a structural foundation upon which to clarify the
difference between the incidental object of sense and the common sensible. It was
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  133

indicated earlier that the proper sensibles and the common sensibles are placed in the
category of Sensation-Ia objects. Structurally, the common sensible is distinct belongs
to a different category from the incidental object of sense, which object is a
Sensation-Ib object. Aquinas comments on this issue:
While it is true, however, that both common and proper sense-objects are all absolutely or by
and of themselves perceptible for a sense, yet, strictly speaking, only the special or proper sense
objects are directly perceived [proprie per se sensibilia], for the very essence and definition of
each sense consists in its being naturally fitted to be affected by some such special object proper
to itself. The nature of each faculty consists in its relation to its proper object. (Commentary on
the Soul, no. 387)

This passage brings to light the problem under consideration. The distinction men-
tioned in the preceding passage suggesting that the proper sensibles are the only
objects that are directly perceived creates a philosophical difficulty. Quite possibly,
both the common sensibles and the incidental objects of sense are equally only ‘inci-
dentally sensible’. Aquinas denies this possibility when he argues for the inclusion of
the common sensibles into the category of Sensation-Ia objects.
We have seen that sensation is a ‘being acted upon’ and ‘altered’ in some way. Whatever, then,
affects the faculty in, and so makes a difference to, its own proper reaction and modification
has an intrinsic relation to that faculty and can be called a sense-object in itself or absolutely
[Sensation Ia objects]. But whatever makes no difference to the immediate modification of the
faculty we call an incidental object [Sensation Ib objects]. Hence, the Philosopher says explic-
itly that the senses are not affected at all by the incidental object of sense as such. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 393; emphasis added)

The Summa Theologiae texts noted above consider the different ways in which the
three sensible objects affect the sense organs: (a) the proper sensible directly and imme-
diately; (b) the common sensible directly, but not immediately; (c) the incidental object
of sense neither directly nor immediately but incidentally. These three categories indi-
cate the different uses of cause regarding sensation and perception. It should be noted
that some commentators on Aristotle—and this is extended to Aquinas—argue that the
common sensibles are the sense objects of the sensus communis (what is often trans-
lated as the ‘common sense’), and are perceived by the external senses only through
the efficacy of the sensus communis.22 Furthermore, this is not Aquinas’s position, as he
makes clear in his Commentary on the Soul. However, in his Summa de Homine (35.4),
his Dominican mentor, Albertus Magnus, appears to have held this position on the
common sensibles.

22
  Stephen Everson makes this claim: Aristotle on Perception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 148–57.
Turnbull often asserted this position; moreover, according to Taylor, Smit held that ‘the common sense
generates the forms for the common sensibles’: Richard Taylor and Max Herrera, ‘Aquinas’s Naturalized
Epistemology’, in Social Justice: Its Theory and Practice: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 79 (2005), 86. Pasnau notes that this is a controversial reading of Aristotle.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

134  objects and faculties

Causality of ‘Kind’ and Causality of ‘Mode’

Aquinas further explains this distinction between the specific causality exercised with
the proper sensibles and the causality exercised by the common sensibles. He argues
that there are two ways in which a sense faculty can ‘be acted upon’ or ‘affected’:
Now an object may affect the faculty’s immediate reaction in two ways. One way is with respect
to the kind of agent causing this reaction; and in this way the immediate objects of sensation
differentiate sense experience, inasmuch as one such object is colour, another sound, another
white, another black, and so on. For the various kinds of stimulant of sensation are, in their
actuality as such, precisely the special [proper] sense objects themselves. And to the proper
sensibles, the sense faculty [as a whole] is by nature adapted; so that precisely by their differ-
ences is sensation itself differentiated. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 394)

This appears to be a type distinction. There is, however, another manner in which the
object can act upon or affect the sense faculty:
On the other hand, there are objects that differentiate sensation with respect, not to the kind of
agent, but to the mode of its activity. Insofar as sense qualities affect the senses corporeally and
locally, they do so in different ways; for example, if they are qualities of large or small bodies or
are diversely situated, i.e. near or far, or together or apart. Moreover, it is in this way that the
common sensibles differentiate sensation. Obviously, size and position vary for all the five
senses. And because they are not related to sensation as variations in the immediate factors,
which bring the sense to act, they do not properly differentiate the sense faculties; they remain
common to several faculties at once [hence ‘common sensibles’]. (no. 394)

Aquinas attempts to explicate the causal characteristics of both the proper and the
common sensibles so that both might be classified as Sensation-Ia objects. He claims
that what is directly perceived can affect, influence, or act upon the sense faculty or
disposition in either of two ways. In the first, the affectation is according to the kind of
agent which is doing the ‘affecting’. In the second, the affectation is not proportionate
to the kind of agent but rather is directly related to the mode or manner in which the
agent ‘affecting’ the sense faculty or disposition is found. In the first division, the kind
of agent refers to the proper sensible. The coloured object as such—i.e. insofar as the
thing has a colour-producing power—is considered as a kind of agent in that it reacts
directly and proportionately with a sense faculty. In the case of sight, the object, which
is colour, reacts in some causal way directly with the faculty of sight. The result is the
mental awareness of seeing; this assumes, of course, that the other requisite conditions
hold. The same structural account in terms of kinds or types is given for the other
proper sensibles.
The common sensibles, on the other hand, do not affect the sense faculty directly as
a specific kind of agent. Rather, their ‘affectation’ is in the manner or a way or mode of
acting. Mode seems to be the manner in which a perceiver is aware of the common
sensible. Thus, a perceiver can ‘see shape’ and ‘feel shape’. The mode seems to refer to a
complex causal disposition, which is capable of affecting more than one faculty.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  135

Aquinas is somewhat sketchy as to the positive analysis of how a mode functions with
the common sensibles. Nonetheless, this kind/mode distinction may be an example of
a token distinction rather than a type distinction.
In the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae, Thomas sorts out the difference
between how a proper sensible affects the sense faculty and how a common sensible
affects a sense faculty:
I suggest that a thing is perceptible to the senses of the body in two ways: (a) directly (as a
kind), and (b) indirectly (as a mode). A thing is perceptible directly if it can act directly on the
bodily senses. And a thing can act directly either (a) on sense as such or (b) on a particular
sense as such. That which acts directly in this second way on a sense is called a proper sensible,
for instance, colour in relation to the sight, and sound in relation to the hearing. Because as
sense as such makes use of a bodily organ, nothing can be received therein except corporeally,
since whatever is received into a thing is therein after the mode of the recipient. Hence, all
sensibles act on the sense as such, according to their magnitude: and consequently magnitude
and all its consequences, such as movement, rest, number, and the like, are called common
sensibles, and yet they are direct objects of sense. (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 92 a. 2;
emphasis added)

In the Commentary, Aquinas discusses the role of magnitude in awareness:

In considering ‘the primary sensitive part’, Aristotle concludes about the organ of sense. Since
from his teaching that sense receives forms into cognition immaterially (intentionally), which
is true of the intellect also, one might be led to suppose that sense was an incorporeal faculty
like the intellect; to preclude this error, Aristotle assigns to sense an organ, observing that the
‘primary sensitive part’, i.e. organ of sense, is that in which a power of this sort resides, namely,
which is a capacity to receive forms without matter. For a sense organ, e.g. the eye, shares the
same being with the faculty or power itself, though it differs in essence or definition, the faculty
being as it were the form of the organ [ . . . ] Aristotle goes on to say ‘an extended magnitude, i.e.
a bodily organ, is ‘what receives sensation’, i.e. is the subject of the sense faculty, as matter is
subject of form; and yet the magnitude and the sensitivity or sense differ by definition, the
sense being a certain ratio, i.e. proportion and form and capacity, of the magnitude.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 555)

Combining what is suggested in the Commentary about ‘kind’ and ‘mode’ together
with the discussion of the role of ‘magnitude’ in the Supplement to the Summa
Theologiae, one might propose that the function of ‘magnitude’ is the mode by which
all sensibles act upon a sense organ. A sense organ is a bodily, ‘corporeal’ organ, and
can be affected or acted on only with another bodily entity. Each sensible, proper or
common, has a bodily, material component. Hence, all the sensibles are ‘common’. Yet
there is a subset of sensibles that react directly and proportionately with a specific
organ and faculty; these are the ‘proper or special sensibles’. They affect an organ by the
‘kind’ of agent they are—colour, sound, heat, and so on. Put differently, the common
sensibles are sensed only through the medium of the proper sensibles—colour, sound,
etc. For Aquinas, the proper sensibles as active causal powers exist outside of the mind;
hence red and blue and sweet and sour are not mind-dependent. Because these proper
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

136  objects and faculties

sensibles exist in matter, it follows that they exist in some way in a mode of quantity or
magnitude. Accordingly, it is by colour, which exists as extended, that the common
sensibles of shape and size are perceived.23
The incidental object of sense, however, works in a completely different manner. The
second section of the above text from the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae con-
siders this issue:
An indirect [incidental] object of sense is that which does not act on the sense, neither as sense
nor as a particular sense, but is annexed to those things that act on sense directly. For instance,
Socrates, the son of Diares, a friend, and the like which are the direct object of the intellect’s
knowledge in the universal, but in the particular are the object of the vis cogitativa in human
beings, and of the vis aestimativa in other animals. The external sense is said to perceive things
of this kind, although indirectly, when the apprehensive power—the vis cogitativa (whose
province it is to know directly this thing known), from that which is sensed directly, appre-
hends them at once and without any doubt or discourse (thus we see that a person is alive from
the fact that he speaks); otherwise the sense is not said to perceive it even indirectly.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 555)

These passages explain the difference between the causality of the proper and of the
common sensibles. Both are Sensation-Ia objects. The incidental object of sense is very
different, and this is why it is a Sensation-Ib object.
Rather than providing a positive account of the structure of a mode and its corre-
sponding function, other than as a ‘magnitude’, which he should have done, Aquinas
provides a twofold reductio ad absurdum argument indicating that the common sensi-
bles and the proper sensibles cannot be identical. To begin, he argues that if the com-
mon sensibles directly affected the sense faculty as a kind of agent, this would
structurally necessitate that a perceiver would need additional sense faculties in order
to grasp each of the common sensibles. Aquinas then responds to this type of state-
ment. In the first case, he argues that de facto a human perceiver only has five senses. If
a perceiver is to apprehend directly the common sensibles as a ‘kind’ of agent, then this
perceiver would have to possess as many faculties and organs as there are both proper
and common sensibles. Aquinas here appeals to a ‘common sense position’ in that a
human perceiver only has five external sense organs and faculties. This suggests, so he
claims, that the common sensibles cannot be analysed structurally as causal powers in
a manner identical with the proper sensibles. This is another instance of the naturalism
in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
Secondly, Aquinas indicates that the common sensibles can be known by, or are the
objects of awareness of, more than one sense. In effect, this is his principal reason for
calling them ‘common sensibles’: they are ‘common’ to more than one sense. Appealing
once again to ordinary sense experience, Aquinas suggests that a pre-analytic datum is
accounted for by the common sensibles. In other words, human perceivers do in fact

23
 The interested reader might consult Timothy Suttor’s commentary, Summa Theologiae vol. 11
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), (Ia q. 75–83), 134–5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  137

perceive the common sensibles with more than one sense; e.g. both the eye and the
sense of touch are the means by which a perceiver determines the common sensible of
shape. It follows, Aquinas suggests, that both the common and the proper sensibles
cannot be direct objects of perception as a kind of agent. This would entail that only
one sense faculty could know each of them. In the end, therefore, his distinction
between ‘kind’ and ‘mode’ seems to be grounded in the fact that the proper sensibles
are fitted to one sense faculty in the external sensorium while more than one faculty of
this sensorium can perceive the common sensibles. Moreover, it appears that a mode
can best be understood ontologically as a complex causal disposition, which is such
that it can affect two or more different sense powers. This is in terms of magnitude. The
‘complex causal disposition’, as an instance of magnitude, is the best analysis so far for
unpacking Aquinas’s distinction between ‘mode’ and ‘kind’. Admittedly, this distinc-
tion and its explication by Aquinas are only modestly satisfactory. Nonetheless, it is his
attempt to offer an explanation of the pre-analytic data about the external senses.

Organ and Faculty

Aquinas distinguishes between the sense organ and the sense faculty. The sense organ
is the bodily part which houses, as it were, the sensory machinery, which is a necessary
condition for sensation to occur. With visual sensation, this would be the pupil of
the eye. Aristotle often referred to this as the ‘eye jelly’. Within the pupil is the sense
faculty, which in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is the means by which the actual sen-
sible object is known. The faculty is the sensible power that is capable of receiving a
sensible form without matter, which is, of course, Aquinas’s basic ‘principle of inten-
tionality’. He writes frequently that ‘the sense faculty is always the function of a bodily
organ’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 377), and notes explicitly this distinction
between organ and faculty: ‘for the principle of vision is not the sense of sight only,
but the eye consisting of pupil and the faculty of seeing. But it needs a body objec-
tively, as the sight needs the wall on which is found the colour’ (On the Power of God,
bk I, q. 3 a. 9 rp. 22). In his Commentary Aquinas discusses the difference between
organ and faculty:24 what follows are primary texts in which Aquinas discusses this
organ/faculty distinction. In his long discussion against the followers of Averroes,
Aquinas wrote: ‘Sense is proportioned to its organ and is in a way akin to it in nature;
hence with the immutation of the organ the operation of sense too is changed. It is
thus then that the phrase, “is not mixed with body”, should be understood: intellect
does not have an organ as sense does’ (On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists,

24
  A shortened version appears here: ‘Aristotle assigns to sense an organ, observing that the “primary
sensitive part”, i.e. the eye, shares the same being with the faculty or power itself, though it differs in essence
or definition, the faculty being as it were the form of the organ [. . .].’ He goes on to say that ‘an extended
magnitude’, i.e. a bodily organ, is ‘what receives sensation’, i.e. is the subject of the sense faculty, as matter is
subject of form; and yet the magnitude and the sensitivity or sense differ by definition, the sense being a
certain ratio, i.e. proportion, form and capacity, of the magnitude’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 555).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

138  objects and faculties

ch. 1, no. 23). In the Compendium of Theology, Aquinas discussed organ and faculty in
the following manner:
There are other powers whose operations do not transcend the limits of bodies and yet extend
to the species of bodies, receiving them without their accompanying matter. This is the case
with all the powers of the sensitive soul. For sense is capable of receiving species without mat-
ter, as the Philosopher says. But such [sense] faculties, although they are receptive of the forms
of things in a sort of immaterial [intentional] way, do not receive them without a bodily organ.
If procession takes place within these powers of the soul, that which proceeds will not be some-
thing corporeal, nor will it be distinct or joined to that faculty whence it proceeds in a corpo-
real way, but in a certain incorporeal and immaterial [intentional] fashion, although not
entirely without the help of a bodily organ. Thus the representations of things imagined, which
exist in the imagination not as a body in a body, but in a certain spiritual [intentional] way,
proceed in animals. This is why imaginary vision is called spiritual by Augustine. (Compendium
of Theology, pt I, ch. 52)

This passage indicates that Aquinas is not a reductive materialist. Moreover, this claim
of ‘the sense being a certain ratio’ occurs often in Aquinas’s texts on the philosophy of
mind. In medieval philosophy, ‘ratio’ indicates the structure or form of an object.
Hence, the faculty or power, as form, is the intentional structure of the sense organ that
enables it to receive the sensible object intentionally. This is analogous to Chisholm’s
‘funny characteristic’ discussed earlier. The organ is the ‘matter’ or the physical place-
holder for the faculty. Yet the organ too, as a disposed power or potency, has a ‘ratio’ in
terms of its physical apparatus. It is this use of ‘ratio’ that Aquinas appeals to in these
texts. Aquinas, following Aristotle, then repeats his claim that an excessively strong
sensible object can disrupt the sense organ:
Aristotle explains why excess in the object destroys the sense organ; for, if sensation is to take
place there must pre-exist in the organ of sense ‘a certain ratio’ or, as we have termed it, propor-
tion. But if the impact of the sense object is stronger than what the organ is naturally able to
bear, the proportion is destroyed and the sense itself, which precisely consists, as has been said,
in the formal proportion of the organ, is neutralized. It is just as though one were to twang
cords too violently, destroying the tone and harmony of the instrument, which consists in a
certain proportion. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 556)25

Later in the Commentary, Aquinas reiterates this claim: ‘For a very strong sense object
can stun the faculty of sense. One can be deafened by great sounds, blinded by strong
colours, made powerless to smell anything by overpowering odours; and this because
the organ in each case is injured’ (no. 688).
The role of this ‘proportion’ or ‘ratio’ is discussed within a long passage in the texts,
albeit abbreviated here, with Aquinas expressing his disagreement with the Latin
Averroists: ‘The sense is proportioned to its organ and in some way is assimilated to its

25
  Because this organ/faculty distinction is central to Aquinas’s account of sense knowledge, several
texts from different treatises—many of which are not usually considered by Aquinas commentators—are
included here.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  139

nature. Therefore, the operation [the act of mental awareness] is changed even accord-
ing to the change of the organ. And [. . .] the intellect does not have an organ as the
sense does’ (On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists, ch. 1, sec. 23). In the
Compendium of Theology, one finds the following account of this issue, with emphasis
on the intentionality of sense knowledge.26
There are knowing powers whose acts of awareness do not transcend the limits of bodies, and
yet they extend to the species of other bodies, receiving them without their accompanying
matter. This is the case with all the powers of the sensitive soul. For sense is capable of receiving
species without matter, as the Philosopher says. But such faculties, although they are receptive
of the forms of things in a sort of immaterial [intentional] way, do not receive them without a
bodily organ [. . .] and not entirely without the help of a bodily organ. (Compendium of Theology,
pt I, ch. 52)

Both the external senses and the internal senses require both faculties and organs,
which the following passage indicates:
Avicenna has reasonably shown that the faculties [i.e. of imagination and memory] are distinct.
Since sensitive faculties are acts of physical organs, it is necessary that the reception of sensible
forms, which pertains to the external senses, and their conservation, which belongs to the
imagination [or phantasia] pertain to distinct faculties. As we note in physical things, (a) recep-
tion pertains to one principle, and (b) conservation to another. [Aquinas gives the example that
humid things are quite receptive, but dry and hard things are less receptive.]
In a similar manner, it pertains to one principle to receive a form, to another to conserve the
form received by the senses, and to still another to perceive some signification not apprehended
by the senses. The vis aestimativa perceives the meaning [i.e. that not apprehended by the
external senses] [. . .] and the vis memorativa retains this meaning. The vis memorativa func-
tions by remembering a thing, not absolutely, but as it was apprehended in the past by the
senses or the intellect. (Sententia Libri De Memoria et Reminiscentia, lesson 2, no. 321)27

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas discusses the need for sense organ and sense
faculty:
Different senses are receptive of different sensibles, sight, for instance, of colours, hearing of
sounds. Now this difference clearly arises from the different dispositions of the organs: for the
organ of sight needs to be in potentiality to all colours, and the organ of hearing to all sounds.
But if this reception took place without any corporeal organ, the same faculty would be recep-
tive of all sensible objects. (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 82)

What is one to make of all of this? One needs to begin with the sensible object in the
external world, for example, a red apple. The ‘red’ is an ‘active power’ in the primary
substance, which primary substance would be an instance of this particular Jonathan
apple. This ‘red’ is an accidental or incidental form of the apple. As a ‘proper sensible’,
26
  This passage notes that Aquinas, in opposition to Sellars, holds for intentionality pertaining to sense
as well as intellectual knowledge
27
  This ‘reception’/‘conservation’ distinction will be discussed later when an analysis of the vis imagina-
tiva is offered.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

140  objects and faculties

red functions as a ‘kind’ of agent which will interact with the eye; a common sensible
will interact as a ‘mode’ of activity. The active power is causally efficacious and can act
with the eye to produce an awareness of the colour of red.
The eye is both organ and faculty. It is a ‘passive power’, which means it functions in
the role of a ‘patient’ and the ‘colour’ is the agent or ‘active power’. The organ is a bodily
capacity to be affected in a material way. But, Aquinas insists, against contemporary
physicalists and the atomists of his day, sensation involves more than a bodily interac-
tion. He appeals to a matter/form analogy, as he and Aristotle do so often, to explain
this distinction between organ and faculty. The faculty is the ability to receive the sen-
sible form without its matter. The faculty is the ‘form’ of the organ, and the organ itself
serves as the ‘matter’ for sensation. This means that the faculty as form is a disposition
to receive the form of the sensible, but in an intentional manner. This is where the ‘esse
intentionale’ comes into play for sensation: ‘Every subject of passion receives the action
of the agent according to its mode. Accordingly, if there is a thing that is naturally
adapted to be altered by an active principle, with both a natural and a spiritual [i.e.
intentional] alteration [. . .] natural alteration precedes spiritual [intentional] altera-
tion, just as natural precedes intentional being’ (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III, q. 82
a. 3 ad 2). In this text, it is unclear whether both the organ and the faculty are ‘ratios’ or
just the organ itself; nonetheless it would appear that both have some kind of structure.
Aquinas speaks about the ‘ratio’ of the organ, which can be impaired by too strong and
intense a sensible—too bright a colour for the eye, too harsh a sound for the ear, too hot
a sensation of heat for the touch, and so forth. Yet the sense faculty appears to be a kind
of ratio too insofar as it is directed teleologically to one kind of proper sensible rather
than another. Nonetheless, Aquinas notes in the Compendium that a change in the
sense organ produces some indirect modification in the sense faculty. One wishes
Aquinas were clearer on this causal relation. ‘All the powers of the sensitive part of our
soul, whether they are apprehensive or appetitive, are the acts of certain bodily organs.
If these undergo modification, the faculties themselves must, indirectly, undergo some
change’ (Compendium of Theology, pt I, ch. 128). All of this is important in explicating
Aquinas’s account of direct sensation. This is how Aquinas becomes a ‘direct realist’
and still maintains a form of a correspondence theory of truth.
In order to avoid the classic problems in sensing with representationalism, Aquinas
argues for the ‘identity’ of the sensible faculty with the sensible object itself. Both the
primary substance and the sense faculty or power exemplify the incidental quality; one
exemplification is material (esse naturale) and the other exemplification is intentional
(esse intentionale). Aquinas takes his cue from Aristotle, who suggested that when sens-
ing, the faculty is like the saw sawing. Take the case of ‘seeing red’: the act of the faculty is
the exemplification of the form of the proper sensible, red, impressed on the sense fac-
ulty. This is the same form, exemplified in the particular material object, which is a
Jonathan apple. In seeing red, the faculty has an intentional existence of the form—i.e.
the form is realized intentionally—which is the same form as the form in the apple. The
act of seeing is the sensible object. In other words, seeing without colour is never seeing.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  141

Here Aquinas, following Aristotle, identifies the act with the object, but the identifica-
tion is through his unique theory of intentionality. The esse intentionale and esse natu-
rale distinction is critically important. The object thought of and the thought are the
same form exemplified in different subjects and different manners of existing. As
Martin writes: ‘Thus when my thought has a match [adequatio] with the world, it is in
virtue of two individualisations of the same form, in two different subjects, with two
different manners of existence.’28 Once again, the force of the intentionality thesis is par-
amount. This use of form with the possibility of the two modes of exemplification justi-
fies both the ontological realism and the epistemological realism in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind. In this way, Aquinas sidesteps the classical problem with rep-
resentationalism. What is known is the form of the object in the world, not a ‘copy’ of
the form in the world. There is no ‘tertium quid’. Kenny often suggests that this is the
important insight in Aquinas’s theory of intentionality. This is the basis, in addition, for
Aquinas’s distinction between the ‘id quod’ and the ‘a quo’ aspects of sensation. The
sensible species in the faculty is the ‘a quo’—the ‘that by which’ or ‘through which’ we
sense something. It is not the object (the id quod) of direct sensation. Aquinas writes:
‘However, the sensible species or likeness [similitudo] is not what is perceived, but rather
that by which the sense perceives (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2, sed contra). He contin-
ues: ‘Hence, that by which the sight sees is the likeness of the visible thing [. . .] the like-
ness of a sensible thing is the form of the sense in act.’ The likeness—the sensible species
(i.e. the similitudo)—is not the ‘id quod’—the ‘that which is known’ in sensation, but
rather the ‘a quo’, the ‘that by which’ or ‘through which’ something is known.
In his De Veritate, Aquinas offers a precise distinction between the ‘a quo’ and the
‘id quod’ aspects of sensation: ‘It is by bodily sight that one sees a body itself; one does
not see the likeness of the body. However, it must be noted that one sees through a
likeness of the body’ (De Veritate II, q. 10 a. 8). The ‘id quod’ is the colour exemplified
in the primary substance found in the external world. This colour is only sensed when
the sense faculty has been impressed with the active power of the colour in the thing.
The ‘impression’, however, is not what is known; it is the means by which human per-
ceivers are able to have sense knowledge of the world.29 It is through the sense impres-
sion in the faculty that the sense faculty ‘becomes’ the sense object in the external
world, but immaterially or intentionally. The same form is exemplified ‘intentionally’
in the faculty and ‘existentially’ in the object; this is the Aristotelian insight further
enhanced by Aquinas. There is an identity of form, one in esse intentionale and the
other in esse naturale, indicating the two modes of exemplification utilized. Without
this identity of structure rendered possible by the two modes of exemplification, the
isomorphism of mind and reality in Aristotelian ontology and philosophy of mind
would be impossible.

28
  Christopher Martin, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Introductory Readings (London: Routledge,
1988), 120.
29
  Aquinas and Hume part company radically on this point.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

142  objects and faculties

Organ as Vehicle
In offering an analysis of Aquinas on sensation and perception, both Kenny and
Haldane discuss the concept of ‘vehicle’. Both philosophers seek to articulate the differ-
ences between what this chapter refers to as a disposition, its exercise or actuality, and
the person serving as the ground for this cognitive ability. Kenny writes: ‘In addition to
an ability and its exercise and its possessor, we may introduce the notion of the vehicle
of an ability.’30 It appears that what Kenny signifies with the term ‘vehicle’ is what this
chapter has identified as the organ of the faculty. Kenny continues: ‘The vehicle of an
ability is the physical ingredient or structure in virtue of which the possessor of an
ability possesses the ability and is able to exercise it.’31 In a more recent essay, ‘Cognitive
Scientism’, Kenny offers the following account of a vehicle: ‘The vehicle of a power is
the abiding actuality in virtue of which a substance possesses a potentiality that finds
expression in transitory exercises. This underlying actuality may be an ingredient, or a
property or a structure.’32 Kenny suggests that Aquinas does not make this distinction.
Kenny then offers a somewhat conflated observation on this set of issues: ‘([Aquinas]
frequently distinguishes between an ability and its organ, which is a particular kind of
vehicle: roughly speaking, a part of a vehicle subject to voluntary control.’ It is unclear
how a sense organ, as a kind of vehicle, is under a perceiver’s voluntary control. As
Berkeley once noted, when a person opens his eye, he cannot but see what is directly in
front. Kenny also discusses this concept in his The Metaphysics of Mind:33 ‘A vehicle is
something concrete, something that can be weighted and measured. An ability, on the
other hand, has neither length nor breadth nor location. This does not mean that an
ability is something ghostly: my front door key’s ability to open my front door is not a
concrete object, but it is not a spirit either.’34 This passage too appears to suggest that
there is a material grounding for a sense faculty, which this analytic study offers as the
category difference between an organ and a faculty.35 Certainly, every case of a sense
faculty, both external and internal, requires a vehicle that is the material grounding for
the faculty’s ability to exercise its proper function. A Cartesian immaterial spiritual res

30
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 156.    31  Ibid.
32
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Cognitive Scientism’, in Kenny (ed.), From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical
Essays in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 155–66.
33
  Kenny remarks that the history of philosophy has indicated that philosophers, in discussing disposi-
tions, too often fall into what he calls ‘two temptations’. One is reductive: either to reduce the disposition to
its exercise—Kenny suggests that Hume did this—or to reduce a disposition to the vehicle (and Kenny here
suggests that Descartes got befuddled on this issue); the other temptation is to attribute ‘excessive substan-
tiality’ to the dispositions.
34
 Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind, 72.
35
  While in substantial agreement with Kenny, Haldane is concerned that Kenny omits the possibility
that the intellectus possibilis may not have a vehicle; thus Kenny is inconsistent with other aspects of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. Haldane offers a possible way around this difficulty for Kenny, but the mat-
ter is unresolved: John Haldane, ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’, in John Cottingham and
Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2010), 131–3. Since this study is directed towards sensation and perception, one need not be con-
cerned here about the exact relationship between a vehicle and the intellectus possibilis.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  143

cogitans and Aquinas’s person are neither identical nor coextensive. One recalls
Aquinas’s significant non-Cartesian passage discussing the nature of a human person:
‘Anima mea non est ego.’ This material embodiment of the human anima—the sub-
stantial form as the structure—cannot function independently of a material ground-
ing. This is the import of the vehicle as this material grounding for sense organs.

The Incidental Object of Sense and the Vis Cogitativa

Having argued that both the common and the proper sensibles are Sensation-Ia objects,
Aquinas next embarks on a discussion concerning how these objects—Sensation-Ia
objects—differ from the incidental object of sensation, which is a Sensation-Ib object.
Having seen how we should speak of the absolute or essential sense objects, both common and
special [proper], it remains to be seen how anything is a sense object ‘incidentally’. Now for an
object to be a sense object incidentally: (a) it must first be connected accidentally with an
essential sense object; as a human person, for instance, may happen to be white, or a white
thing may happen to be sweet. Secondly, (b) the one who is sensing must perceive it; if it were
connected with the sense object but not itself being perceived, then it could not be said to be
sensed incidentally. But this implies that with respect to some cognitive faculty of the one sens-
ing it, it is known, not incidentally, but absolutely. Now this latter faculty must be either another
sense faculty, or the intellect, or the cogitative faculty, or natural instinct. I submit that it must
be another sense faculty, meaning that sweetness is incidentally visible inasmuch as a white
thing seen is in fact sweet, the sweetness being directly perceptible by another sense, i.e. taste.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 395)

The vis cogitativa will be discussed here only briefly; a later chapter provides a thor-
ough analysis of this important inner sense faculty. Nonetheless, whenever an object
is sensed, it follows that there must be a faculty by which the perceiver is directly
related to that object. Human perceivers have the faculty of sight in order to be aware
of colour, and so on for the rest of the proper sensibles. Aquinas realizes that one
pre-analytic datum of  ordinary experience is that at times a human perceiver is
aware of an individual person or thing precisely as that individual person or thing,
and not as a colour patch or shaped object or any mere Berkeleyan bundle of sensa-
tions. Philosophers like Chisholm, among others, referred to this pre-analytic datum
as ‘thing consciousness’. In Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, if the above data of experi-
ence is to be analysed—and he is convinced that human perceivers are directly aware
of individuals as individual things—then he is committed structurally to postulating
a separate sense faculty in order to account for this different type or species of aware-
ness. This is another example of Aquinas’s instantiation of Principle C from Chapter
2—‘A potency of any ‘X’ must be specified or properly disposed in order to receive
any given act’—suggesting that a disposition is related directly to an act. In the pres-
ent case, the act is the awareness of an individual as an individual thing. This act
needs a requisite disposition or sense power, which Aquinas calls the vis ­cogitativa.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

144  objects and faculties

In effect, as will become evident in the following texts, Aquinas proposes that the vis
cogitativa is that faculty or cognitive disposition or power by which a perceiver is
directly aware of an individual as an individual thing—e.g. the son of Diares as such.
Diares would be an instance of a primary substance in Aquinas’s ontology. ‘If this
apprehension is of something individual, as when seeing this particular coloured
thing, I perceive this particular human person or particular beast, then the cogita-
tive faculty (in the case of human knowers, at least) is at work, the power that is also
called the “particular reason” because it correlates individualized awarenesses just as
the “universal reason” correlates universal ideas’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 396).
In brief, the vis cogitativa is that faculty of the internal sensorium by means of which
a perceiver is directly aware of an individual precisely as an individual. Nonetheless,
even in a preliminary way the vis cogitativa appears to have two functions: the recog-
nition of an individual as an individual thing; and the recognition of an individual as
a member of a certain natural kind. A fuller analysis comes later in this book.
Aquinas argues that the mental act of the vis cogitativa enables a distinction to be
made between the sensation of Sensation-1a objects and perception of Sensation-1b
primary substances. The vis cogitativa through an internal cognitive structure per-
mits an individual primary substance to be perceived as such an individual and not
merely as a collection or bundle of sensations. Like Thomas Reid, Aquinas gets
beyond Hume’s psychological atomism.
Now that the objects of sensation have been discussed, the next chapter begins the
explication of the acts of awareness appropriate to sensation. This is a further instance
of Aquinas’s teleology—the object determines the act, and the act determines the fac-
ulty. This analysis is similar to that proposed by ecological naturalists like Gibson, who
suggest that human perceptual abilities developed in order to assist human perceivers
make their way successfully around the environment. There is a similarity in conclu-
sions between Aquinas and Gibson. This is not a claim of isomorphism of arguments,
however, but rather a roadmap pointing to a form of cognitive naturalism found in
both scholars developing a position on sensation and perception.

appendix 1
On Doing Philosophy with Thomas Aquinas
A significant philosophical query concerns sorting out the metaphilosophy adopted by
Aquinas. Like many medieval philosophers, Aquinas built his epistemology and his theory of
mind only after he had established his ontology. His methodology is the opposite of most early
modern philosophers, notably Descartes. The structure of the Cartesian Meditations entails
that Descartes asks the epistemological question first. Only after that question is posed and
resolved does he begin to build his ontology. Scott MacDonald raised this issue:
Aquinas does not build his philosophical system around a theory of knowledge. In fact the reverse is true:
he builds his epistemology on the basis provided by other parts of his system, in particular, his metaphysics
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  145

and psychology. To examine what we can recognize as a distinct and systematic theory of knowledge, then,
we need to extract his strictly epistemological claims from the metaphysical and psychological discussions
in which they are embedded.36

The structure of the Cartesian Meditations entails that a specific metaphilosophical procedure
should be used rooted in Descartes’s foundationalist epistemology. Aquinas also assumes a
specific metaphilosophical procedure, but he begins his philosophy of mind from a basis in his
Aristotelian realist metaphysics. These metaphilosophical differences are never to be
underestimated when discussing issues in the philosophy of mind. Aquinas establishes his
ontology first. It is only then that he builds his epistemological and philosophy-of-mind
machinery, which is capable of knowing the objects found in that ontology. Aquinas intends to
explain how knowledge is possible, not to offer a justification of knowing in a foundationalist
sense. Stump also argues against the claim that Aquinas is a foundationalist. She suggests that
the best way to consider Aquinas’s epistemology is as ‘a species of externalism, with reliabilist
elements’.37 Stump reminds us that both Wolterstorff and Plantinga independently claim that
Aquinas opts for a form of foundationalism.38
The philosophical work of Everett J. Nelson, in providing an account of synthetic necessary
connections of causality and substance, would also be an instance of metaphilosophical
realism. Several interesting connections exist between Nelson’s account of synthetic
necessary properties and Aquinas’s ontology of substantial form. Nelson realized that one
could not account for the world of everyday experience nor for the regularity demanded for
inductive knowledge unless one postulated, as necessary conditions for that experience, the
real extra-mental existence of the synthetic a priori categories of causality and substance.
Only after Nelson postulated these ontological categories did he worry about how we were
aware of them.39 In the end, he proposes the possibility of a direct intuition of these synthetic
a priori categories. The adequacy of his ontological analysis is not the issue to be considered
at the moment, nor his intuitionist position of direct acquaintance of synthetic necessary
properties. What is important is that he built his ontology first.40 In some interesting
foundational respects, the ontologies of Nelson and Aquinas are similar structurally. Of
course, there are differences. But the concept of a synthetic a priori causal connection is
similar to Aquinas’s account of a formal cause determining the structure of a natural kind.
After the ontology is constructed to explain the pre-philosophical or pre-analytic data, then
one builds an epistemology and a theory of mind to account for whatever entities have been
postulated. The emphasis is on what we know rather than on whether we know that we know.
This is what Haldane referred to as the approach of explaining rather than the approach of

36
  Scott MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, in N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 160. Haldane too argues for a
similar metaphilosophy for understanding Thomas.
37
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 234.
38
  Ibid., 217; Stump argues later that Irwin’s view that Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics is an internalist
probably will not hold for Aquinas.
39
  Everett J. Nelson, ‘Metaphysical Presuppositions of Induction’, in Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association, 1966–68 (Yellow Springs, OH, 1967), 19–33.
40
  For an interesting discussion and analysis of Nelson’s ontology and epistemology, see Morris Weitz,
‘The Grounds of Sense: The Philosophy of Everett J. Nelson’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
33(4) (1973), 455–71.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

146  objects and faculties

justifying. The chasm between Aquinas and Descartes on metaphilosophical presuppositions

is wide indeed. This is a further instance of Haldane’s maxim: ‘There is no epistemology
without ontology.’

appendix 2
Common Sensibles and Primary Qualities
In his analysis of the common sensibles, Aquinas offers an ontological suggestion about this
category of objects of sensation which is remarkably similar to the position advocated by some
early modern philosophers in their attempts to make philosophy square with the quantitative
claims of the rising new science. Aquinas proposes the reducibility of the common sensibles to the
category of quantity or ‘magnitude’. At first glance, this suggestion is close to Descartes’s position in
which material substance possessed only the primary qualities, which were modifications of an
extended basic substratum. For Descartes, ‘extension’ is the essential property of any material
object; a material object must be ‘spread out’, as it were, over some spatial dimension.
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas suggests the reduction of the common sensibles to
quantity. ‘Quantity’ refers to the category of quantity in the Aristotelian listing of the ten
categories. Following Aristotle, Aquinas holds that quantity is characterized by a thing having
‘part outside of part’, which implies that the thing is ‘extended’.
Size, shape and the like, which are called common sensibles, are midway between the incidental object of
sense, and the proper sensibles, which are the objects of the senses. For the proper sensibles first, and of
their very nature, affect the senses, since they are qualities that cause alteration. But the common sensibles
are all reducible to quantity. As to size and number, it is clear that they are species of quantity. Shape is a
quality about quantity, since the nature of shape consists in fixing the bounds of magnitude. Movement and
rest are sensed according as the subject is affected on one or more ways in the magnitude of the subject or
of its local distance, as in the movement of growth or of locomotion, or again, according as it is affected in
some sensible qualities, as in the movement or alteration; and thus to sense or be aware of movement and
rest is, in a way, to sense one thing and many. (Summa Theologiae I, q. 78 a. 3; emphasis added)

Aquinas proceeds to consider the role of quantity directly:

Now quantity is the proximate subject of the qualities that cause alteration, as surface is of colour. Therefore,
the common sensibles do not move the sense first of their own nature, but by reason of some sensible
quality; as the surface by reason of its colour. Yet they are not accidental or incidental sensibles, for they
produce a certain diversity in the immutation of the senses. For sense is immuted [impressed] differently
by a large and by a small surface; accordingly, whiteness itself is said to be great or small, and therefore is
divided according to its proper object. (Summa Theologiae I, q. 78 a. 3)

These two passages address basically the problem discussed in this chapter concerning how
both the proper and common sensibles can be classified as Sensation-Ia objects. The two
passages just quoted constitute a response to an objection considered by Aquinas. The original
objection centred on the classification of proper and common sensibles:
Further, magnitude and shape, and the other so-called common sensibles, are not sensibles by accident,
but are contradistinguished from them by the Philosopher. Now since the diversity of the proper objects
diversifies the powers, thus magnitude and shape are further from colour than sound is; furthermore, it
seems that there is much more need for another sensitive power that can grasp magnitude or shape than
for that which grasps colour or sound. (Summa Theologiae I, q. 78 a. 3 obj. 2).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

objects and faculties  147

The interesting structural point about the response to this objection, however, concerns not
what Aquinas attempts to prove but rather the way in which he suggests his proof. In the
response, Aquinas asserts his position that all of the common sensibles are reduced to quantity.
Ontologically, this is the same structural move Locke and Descartes offered in regard to the
primary qualities. That the common sensibles of Aquinas are similar to the primary qualities of
Locke is obvious from a reading of the following passage from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding:
Qualities thus considered in bodies are, first, such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in which estate
soever it be such as [ . . . ] sense constantly finds in every particle of matter, which has bulk enough to be
perceived, and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself
singly be perceived by our senses [ . . . ] For, division [ . . . ] can never take away either solidity, extension,
figure, or mobility from any body [ . . . ] These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we
may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz, solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.
(Essay, bk II, ch. 8)

In this passage from his Essay, it is important to note that Locke asserts that the primary
qualities are reducible as modifications of the basic material substratum of the external
world. This basic substratum of the material world essentially is quantified or ‘spread out’
over a certain spatial volume. Descartes, moreover, makes it clear that the essential property
of material substance is extension: ‘Of this class of entities is corporeal nature in general and
its extension, including the shape of extended things, their quantity, or size and number,
and  also the place where they are, the time that measures their duration and so forth’
(Meditations, bk I).
Interestingly enough, there appears to be an ontological similarity between Locke and
Descartes on the one hand and Aquinas on the other. Aquinas claimed that what is quantified—
i.e. what is extended, or has magnitude as quantity, is defined as that which has ‘part outside of
part’—is the ontological foundation for the common sensibles. This is also the same ontological
claim put forward by Locke and Descartes. In other words, if ‘extension’ were eliminated from
the Cartesian or Lockean ontology, then so go the rest of the primary qualities. Likewise for
Aquinas: if quantity or magnitude were taken away, likewise there would be no foundation for
the common sensibles or the proper sensibles. Yet Aquinas offers the distinction between ‘kind’
and ‘mode’ to which neither Locke nor Descartes adheres.41
One final fascinating point is to compare the listing of the common sensibles of Aquinas
with the listing of the primary qualities of Locke. This listing renders quite explicitly striking
structural similarities:

Aquinas Locke
Movement Motion
Rest Rest
Number Number
Shape Figure
Size Solidity
Extension
41
  This present discussion is a further instance of the claim made by Gilson many years ago that probably
Locke and Descartes are not as separated from the traditional medieval philosophical synthesis as many
historians of philosophy, who laud them as the fathers of modern philosophy, are wont to assume.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

148  objects and faculties

Aquinas:  ‘The common sense objects are five: movement, rest, number, shape and size’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 386).
Locke:  ‘These I call original or primary qualities: solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest,
and number’ (Essay, bk II, ch. 7)

It is to be noted that Locke includes ‘extension’ in his listing. Aquinas does not. But it must be
remembered that Aquinas, in the passage quoted from the Summa Theologiae, reduced all five
common sensibles to quantity or magnitude. Quantity, furthermore, is defined as the accidental
characteristic in the ten categories of Aristotle that denotes an extension of ‘part outside of
part’. Accordingly, quantity, as both Aristotle and Aquinas intended the term to be used in their
ontologies, denotes extension. There are both textual and ontological similarities between the
common sensibles and the primary qualities as Aquinas and the early modern philosophers, in
particular Locke and Descartes, use these categories. Admittedly, this discussion points out
only a textual similarity. What else plays into the historical fray between thirteenth-century
Aristotelian science and the seventeenth-century rise of modern philosophy and its connection
with the new science is beyond the limits of this inquiry.42

42
  A reviewer of this manuscript suggested that this discussion of the role and significance that Aquinas
ascribed to quantity might be quite important. This discussion might provide a reply to critics who insist
that, while perhaps some elements of Aquinas’s philosophical thought can be appreciated by certain
branches of contemporary science, nonetheless the naturalism of his position is very limited in its rele-
vance to the modern understanding of the world. This aspect of Aquinas’s thought is one reason for seeing
that his thought cannot be dismissed as pre-scientific or as a form of uselessly anachronistic science. To be
sure, he was not anticipating modern science, but neither can modern science be pointed to as rendering
his thought irrelevant. There are aspects of Aquinas’s conceptualization and understanding of natural enti-
ties, accordingly, that should not be summarily ignored as irrelevant. In many of his writings, the late
William A. Wallace, OP, argued for a similar position regarding the importance of Aquinas’s thought.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

6
Preconditions of Visual Awareness
Object and Medium

With the discussion of the objects and the faculties of sensation completed, the next item is
to consider the mental acts of sensation. This will be a twofold analysis: the first part pertains
to the mental acts proper to the external sensorium—the external senses and the sensus
communis; the second pertains to the mental acts proper to the internal s­ ensorium—the
three internal senses of the imagination (vis imaginativa), the vis cogitativa, and the sense
memory (vis memorativa). The analysis directly below of the medium in sensation is one of
the more difficult aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.

Sight and Its Object

The following analysis specifically considers the sense of sight. However, all the acts of
sensation, which all belong to the category of Sensation-Ia, are the same structurally.
A careful reading of the texts in the Commentary reveals Aquinas’s complete structural
position on sensation and perception. In these texts, he is more detailed, lucid, and
specific about perception than in any other works considered for this study. On the
other hand, Kenny comments: ‘The senses are not, for Aquinas, part of the mind.
Nonetheless, the best place to begin the consideration of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind
is question seventy-eight of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae, in which Aquinas
treats of the senses.’1 Pasnau appears to both exult in and raise objections to the philo-
sophical impact of Thomas’s Commentary. In his Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature,
he makes much the same argument as Kenny, suggesting that the Commentary on the
Soul includes ‘a great deal of material that we would now regard as scientific, and of
primary interest to historians of science’ and ‘contains many excursus that by our lights
are not philosophical at all’.2 Pasnau mentions several scientific themes discussed by
Aquinas. Nonetheless, in the Introduction to his translation of the Commentary, he
writes that Aquinas there give his best analysis of several philosophy-of-mind issues.3

1
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 31.
2
  Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a
75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–13.
3
  Robert Pasnau (trans.), Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1999), p. xiii.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

150  preconditions of visual awareness

The argument of this study is that, while disregarding outmoded science is a necessary
condition for unravelling the substance of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, nonetheless
Aquinas develops his best account of sensation and perception within this Aristotelian
Commentary.
This position on external sensation will be discussed as a three-term necessary rela-
tion. This relation serves as the set of necessary conditions for perception. In addition,
this relational analysis serves as the basis for a later analysis of that critical yet illusive
concept, the phantasm. Furthermore, the externalist and realist thrust of Aquinas’s
analysis is prevalent in these discussions on visual awareness. In discussing the con-
nection of Aquinas with recent analytic philosophy, Kerr writes:4
Second only to the realism/anti-realism debate in analytic philosophy there is this dispute with
the philosophy of mind, dividing those who defend some form of externalism (the mind as
situate in the world) and those who advocate some kind of representationalism (minds have no
immediate knowledge of the world). Clearly these disputes are interconnected, with the first
occupying the traditional ground of metaphysics and the second the field of epistemology.
Far from there being an unbridgeable gap between the philosophical assumptions of
Thomism and analytic philosophy, then, the truth is that, under the heading of intentionality—
that what our understanding grasps primarily and most readily is the specific nature of mate-
rial things—one of Thomas’s most distinctive assumptions has been central all along.5

Aquinas next begins his detailed analysis of the act of perception with a discussion of
the sense of sight. Continuing with the Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas focuses
attention on the role of colour:
Aristotle states that [. . .] since the proper sense object is that which each sense perceives of itself
exclusively, the sense-object of which the special recipient is sight is the visible. Now in the
visible, two things are included; for colour is both a visible and also something else, which can
be described in speech, but has no proper name; which visible belongs to things which can be
seen by night, such as glow-worms and certain fungi on oak trees and the like, concerning
which the course of this treatise will inform us more clearly as we gain a deeper understanding
of the visible; however, we have to start from colour which is the more obvious. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 399)

This passage is interesting for several reasons. First, Aquinas suggests that colour is the
visible. This becomes the proper object of the sense of sight. This is not, however, an
analytic a priori definition. Secondly, he provides evidence for a basic empirical

4
  Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘Aquinas and Analytic Philosophy: Natural Allies?’, Modern Theology 20(1) (2004),
127. Kerr also decries the lack of influence classical Thomism has had on the ‘realism/anti-realism’ and
‘externalist/internalist’ debates in contemporary analytic philosophy: ‘While Thomists are (or should be!)
realists, the realist/anti-realist debate in analytic philosophy owes nothing to them, even indirectly’
(p. 126). Kerr is, sadly, correct in this judgement.
5
  Haldane has attempted to remedy this lacuna bemoaned by Kerr by incorporating insights from
Aquinas on esse intentionale; Haldane addresses weaknesses in Putnam’s rejection of Brentano’s thesis of
intentionality. See John Haldane, ‘Putnam on Intentionality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
52(3) (1992), 671–82.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  151

f­ oundation for his discussion of ‘perceiving the visible’. Granting that by sight a person
is aware of an object of sensation—which in the case of human persons requires as a
necessary condition at least both a colour and a sufficient amount of light—Aquinas
also is concerned about those objects which appear to ‘be seen’ in the dark. If this is the
case, then there must be at least two categories of the visible: one that is colour, and one
different from colour. Aquinas claims that colour can only be perceived under the con-
ditions of sufficient light. Nonetheless, his principal interest is with colour, as this is
what he takes to be the proper object of human visual sensation. Like most philoso-
phers, he is interested fundamentally in human sensation and perception and not that
of other animals.6 Furthermore, like most major philosophers in the tradition of the
history of Western philosophy, Aquinas pays more attention to the sense of sight than
to the other sensibles; however, he considers all five objects of the external senses.
Nonetheless, sight plays a special role in his discussion, as this text from his
Commentary on the Metaphysics suggests:
Aristotle establishes his thesis by means of an example. Since our senses serve us in two
respects: in knowing things and in meeting the needs of life, we love them for themselves inas-
much as they enable us to know and also assist us to live. This is evident from the fact that all
persons take the greatest delight in that sense which is most knowing, i.e. the sense of sight,
which we value not merely in order to do something, but even when we are not required to act
at all. The reason is that this sense—i.e. sight—is the most knowing of all our senses and makes
us aware of many differences between things.
In this part, Aristotle gives two reasons why sight is superior to the other senses in knowing.
The first is that it knows in a more perfect way; and this belongs to it because it is the most
spiritual of all the senses. For the more immaterial a power is, the more perfectly it knows. And
evidently sight is a more immaterial sense. [. . .] Hence sight is aware of sensible objects in a
more certain and perfect way than the other senses.
The other reason that Aristotle gives for the superiority of sight is that it gives us more infor-
mation about things. This is attributable to the nature of its object, for touch and taste, and
likewise smell and hearing, perceive those accidents by which lower bodies are distinguished
from higher ones. But sight perceives those accidents that lower bodies have in common with
higher ones. For a thing is actually visible by means of light, which is common both to lower
and to higher bodies, as is said in Book II of De Anima; hence the celestial bodies are percepti-
ble only by means of sight.
There is also another reason. Sight informs us of many differences between things, for we
seem to know sensible things best by means of sight and touch, but especially by means of
sight. (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk I, lec. 1, secs 5–8)

The above passages do not provide arguments but rather indicate that Aquinas judged
the faculty of sight to hold a pre-eminent place in the scheme of the external ­sensorium.

6
  A striking contrast is Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the
Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), which seeks epistemological continuities between human awareness
and animal awareness, especially that illustrated by dolphins.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

152  preconditions of visual awareness

On this issue, he of course follows closely the procedure adopted by Aristotle, who also
began his discussion on sensation with sight.7
Both Aristotle and Aquinas would fit under the umbrella of Armstrong’s suggestion
in Bodily Sensations. Aquinas often writes about the superiority of the sense of sight in
comparison with the other faculties of the external sensorium: ‘Now sight, which is
without natural immutation either in its organ or in its object, is the most spiritual, the
most perfect, and the most universal of the senses’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3).
Nonetheless, there are passages in which the sense of touch appears to be designated as
the primary sense faculty. ‘[Touch] is the first and in a way the root and foundation of
all senses [. . .] This power is attributed to the sense of touch not as a proper sense, but
because it is the foundation of all senses and the closest to the fontal root of all senses,
which is the sensus communis’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 602). This distinction
between sight and touch may be made from two different perspectives. Aquinas does
state that the sense of sight in seeing is more like the act of the intellect insofar as seeing
is an intensely immaterial act of awareness. On the other hand, the physical basis by
magnitude for the sense organ in sensing appears to be more related to the sense of
touch.

Colour as Essentially Visible

Aquinas considers colour as being essentially visible: ‘First of all, then, he says that,
colour being visible, it is visible of itself, for colour as such is essentially visible’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 400). An immediate problem for any philosopher con-
cerned with philosophical analysis: what does Aquinas mean by the use of the term
‘essentially’? If the term is to have any value, Aquinas must accept some kind of neces-
sary relation between colour and visible. It appears, however, that this necessary prop-
osition cannot be reduced to an analytic a priori definition. This follows because
Aquinas has already entertained the possibility that there are visible objects that are
perceived in the dark. These ‘other’ objects of sight, which have to be visible in some
sense, cannot be coloured, because colour is not manifested without some form of
light. Therefore, it appears that for Aquinas, ‘being visible’ and ‘being coloured’ are
neither related analytically nor coextensive.
Aquinas pursues this point through an attempt to explicate the different senses in
which ‘essentially’ can be taken:

7
  Commenting on Aristotle’s approach regarding the faculty of sight, Johansen wrote: ‘Aristotle also may
seem liable to a charge that has been raised against Western philosophers from Plato to Husserl. The charge
is that they base their theories of perception (if not entire philosophies of mind) on the model of vision’:
T. K. Johansen, Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21. D. M.
Armstrong wrote: ‘When we think of sense-perception, we have a strong impulse to think of sight’: Bodily
Sensations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 118. An exception to this trend is Edward Lee, ‘The
Sense of an Object: Epicurus on Seeing and Hearing’, in P. K. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull (eds), Studies
in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1978), 27–59.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  153

‘Essentially’ [per se] is said in two ways.

In one way, when the predicate of a proposition falls within the definition of the subject, e.g.
‘Human is an animal’; for animal enters into the definition of human. And since that which
falls within the definition of anything is in some way the cause of it, in cases such as these the
predicate is said to be the cause of the subject.
In another way, on the contrary, when the subject of the proposition falls within the defini-
tion of the predicate, as when it is said that a nose is snub or a number is even; for snubness is
nothing but a quality of a nose, and evenness of a number which can be halved. And in these
cases the subject is a cause of the predicate. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 401; emphasis added)

Aquinas continues this analysis:

Now colour is essentially visible in this second manner, not in the first. For visibility is a quality,
as being snub is a quality of a nose. And this is why he says that colour is visible ‘essentially’ but
not ‘by definition’; that is to say, not because visibility is placed in its definition, but because it
possessed of itself the reason why it should be visible, as a subject possesses in itself the reason
for its own peculiar qualities. (no. 402)

These are interesting passages in which Aquinas distinguishes two categories of

­necessary propositions. Using a venue from later philosophy, it appears that Aquinas
attempts to distinguish synthetic necessary propositions from analytic necessary
propositions. In order to make this point clear, he provides two distinctions regarding
propositions. His remarks regarding an essential relation between subject and predi-
cate are twofold. First, an essential relation holds if the predicate ‘falls within the defi-
nition of the subject’. Aquinas gives as an example the following propositions: ‘Human
is an animal.’ In this case, it appears that Aquinas claims that ‘animal’ is a part of the
definition of ‘human’. Accordingly, this is an analytic a priori definition.8
In the second case, Aquinas claims that the ‘subject falls within the definition of the
predicate’. As examples of such a relation between subject and predicate he offers the
following propositions: ‘Nose is snub’ and ‘Number is even’. In these cases, the predi-
cate is not a part of the definition of the subject; rather it is a quality of a number, which
can be halved, or of a nose, which is of a certain shape. In this discussion, he considers
the issue of necessary qualities. Snub and evenness are related necessarily to their sub-
jects.9 Both the above cases consider the concept of necessity. The first case is an exam-
ple of an analytic a priori definition. In other words, ‘animal’ as a predicate is part of the
definition of what a human being is. Accordingly, the property of ‘being an animal’ is a

8
  In reading the texts of Aquinas, as with the work of many medieval philosophers, sometimes it is dif-
ficult to place propositions into the categories of analytic necessary and synthetic necessary. For the
moment, this analysis of Aquinas’s texts is not rendered insignificant for the reason that the two necessary
propositions do not fit nicely into these linguistic categories. At times, in using the ‘rational animal’ predi-
cation, Aquinas considers a synthetic necessary set of properties related to the substantial form that deter-
mines a natural kind.
9
  Parenthetically, this discussion offers evidence that in an ontological analysis of individuality, Aquinas
would argue against Berkeley, Hume, Bradley, and Bosanquet, and often Russell, all of whom held that a
subject or individual is nothing more than a collection or set of universal or particular qualities. The qual-
ities considered in the second sense above are not part of the ‘definition’ of the individual.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

154  preconditions of visual awareness

necessary condition for ‘being a human’. This aspect of necessary condition is what
Aquinas refers to when he asserts that the predicate is the cause of the subject. This
conception of cause is not an efficient cause, but in the Aristotelian analysis it is a for-
mal cause. In the final analysis, therefore, part of the definition of human is the predi-
cate ‘animal’.
In the second case, the predicate is not a part of the definition of the subject. Rather,
it is a quality of the subject. However, it is not an accidental property but an empirically
necessary property. Certain subjects are so structured that they have the property in
question and only those subjects possess that property. Aquinas brings out this aspect
when he claims that ‘a subject possesses in itself the reason for its own peculiar quali-
ties’. Not just any quality is considered here, but only a quality that is ‘peculiar’ to the
subject. This is, therefore, an empirically necessary property. Aquinas does not claim
that a quality must belong to a subject essentially. Rather, he claims that certain quali-
ties inhere with certain subjects and only those subjects. His example of ‘number is
even’ illustrates this point, when he suggests that evenness is a quality by which a num-
ber can be halved. This quality is only what it is, however, because the subject has cer-
tain other qualities or dispositions. In the end, such a property is related necessarily to
the subject because the subject is so structured that it is never found without that par-
ticular quality.10
In summary, therefore, regarding colour, the proposition ‘colour is visible’ is not an
analytic a priori definition. Rather, ‘being visible’ is an empirically necessary disposi-
tional property of colour. In other words, being visible is a necessary property or
quality of colour. However, from the example found in the passage from the
Commentary concerning ‘glow-worms and certain fungi on oak trees’, not everything
that is visible is coloured or seen by means of its colour. Accordingly, the two senses of
essential predicates mentioned in the passage under consideration are distinguisha-
ble into the categories of formally necessary (i.e. a formal cause) and empirically
­necessary propositions. In fine, therefore, ‘visible’ is related to ‘colour’ by means of an
empirically necessary relation of predication and not through a formal definition of
colour.11

Colour and Sight

In commenting upon Aristotle’s theory of sensation, Aquinas needs to explain how
colour actually affects sight: ‘Aristotle says that we are now clear that what is seen in

10
  It follows, therefore, that this structured subject is a denial of any ontology of individuals common to
much British empiricism, later British idealism, and even at times found in Russell, where an individual is
nothing more than a collection or set of qualities, commonly referred to as the ‘heap theory’ of substance.
Following Aristotle, Aquinas adopted a theory of individual substance of a natural kind, which he calls a
‘primary substance’ or ‘hoc aliquid’.
11
  What follows in the Commentary is an extended discussion and analysis of ‘light and the diaphanum.’
While historically interesting, it is not particularly relevant to an understanding of sensation and percep-
tion; hence it is omitted from this study.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  155

light is colour, and that colour is invisible without light and this because, as has been
explained, colour of its nature acts upon a transparent medium, and it does this in vir-
tue of light, which is the latter’s actuality. Hence light is necessary if colour is to be seen’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 431). Aquinas continues with his analysis:
An indication of this is the actual fact that if a coloured body is placed upon the organ of sight,
it cannot be seen. For then there remains no transparent medium to be affected by the colour.
The pupil of the eye is indeed some such medium, but so long as the coloured body remains
placed upon it, it lacks actual transparency. There has to be a medium, for example, air or
something of the kind, which, being actualized by colour, itself acts upon the organ of sight as
upon a body continuous with itself. For bodies only affect one another through actual contact.
(no. 432; emphasis added)

The above passage indicates that a diaphanous medium between the object and the
perceiving organ itself is a necessary condition for any visual awareness. This diapha-
nous medium, however, is not a vacuum in the manner postulated by Democritus with
his theory of atomism, which reduced all entities to material particles moving in the
vacuum or void. Both Aristotle and Aquinas seem aware of this likely interpretation.
Accordingly, both philosophers reject any identification of their theory of sensation
with the atomism of Democritus. This is, moreover, conclusive evidence that Aquinas
is not an atomist in his theory of perception.
Next in order, Aristotle sets aside an erroneous view. The atomists were wrong in thinking that
if the medium between the eye and the thing seen were a vacuum, any object, however small,
would be visible at a distance; e.g. an ant in the sky. This cannot be. For if anything is to be seen,
it must actually affect the organ of sight. Now it has been shown that this organ as such is not
affected by an immediate object—such as an object placed upon the eye. Hence, there must be
a medium between organ and object. But a vacuum is not a medium; it cannot receive or trans-
mit effects from the object. Through a vacuum, therefore, nothing would be seen at all. (no. 433;
emphasis added)

In the following passage, Aquinas criticizes further the position defended by

Democritus and the cohort of atomists because their theory of perception depends on
the postulation of a void:
Democritus went wrong because he thought that the reason why distance diminished visibility
was that the medium is of itself an impediment to the action of the visible object upon sight.
But it is not so. The transparent medium as such is not in the least incompatible with luminos-
ity or colour. On the contrary, it is proximately disposed to their reception; a sign of which is
that it is illumined or coloured instantaneously. (no. 434)

Here Aquinas rejects atomism on the grounds that it would admit a vacuum into his
ontology. Aquinas, following Aristotle, refused to admit the existence of a vacuum.
While arguing against atomism, however, he does not reject a causal theory of percep-
tion. His unequivocal rejection of atomism including the reference to Democritus is
important considering the contrary account found in Hamlyn’s Sensation and
Perception. Hamlyn affirms rather than denies that a structural affinity exists between
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

156  preconditions of visual awareness

the theories of sensation and perception developed by Democritus and by Thomas.

Hamlyn proposed the similarity of Thomas with the atomist account of perception:
‘The Thomist theory [of sensation and perception] looks like a combination of the
Aristotelian point of view with one such as that put forward by the Atomists. Aquinas
makes frequent reference to Democritus.’12 The passages from Aquinas’s Commentary
on the Soul provide substantial evidence refuting Hamlyn’s interpretation of Aquinas.
While Aquinas makes frequent reference to Democritus, these passages often criticize
the atomist position on sensation rather than endorsing atomism as a plausible foun-
dation for perception theory. Aquinas utilizes a theory of formal causation in his the-
ory of intentionality, for both sensation and intelligence. He does not accept the
efficient causal analysis characteristic of theoretical classical atomism as a sufficient
condition for explaining sensation and perception.13 In contemporary perception
­discussions, Putnam appears to be in a quandary as to how one would determine the
specific efficient cause with an individual idea or concept. In Realism and Reason, he
writes:
Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts (as that some cor-
respondence intrinsically just is reference) the epistemological problems that accompany such
a view seem insuperable. For assuming a world of mind-independent, discourse-independent
entities, [. . .] there are [. . .] many different ‘correspondences’ which represent possible or can-
didate reference relations.14

In this treatise, Putnam seems to defer to an anti-realist account of intentionality. In

an analysis of Putnam’s argument, Haldane counters with the proposition that an
intentionality theory as proposed by Brentano and strengthened with suggestions
from Aquinas can meet Putnam’s anti-realist thrust.15 Putnam’s concerns lead
Haldane to emphasize the importance of formal cause in understanding how human
persons perceive the world veridically. Haldane also responds to Putnam’s analysis in
terms of requiring a realist background in order to render coherent an intentionality
theory.16 Haldane, in the end, suggests that Putnam rejects ontological realism in too
facile a manner, and that an intentionality theory rooted in Aristotelian formal cau-
sality renders a coherent position of realist metaphysics. Formal cause is the ‘meta-
physical skull’.

12
  Hamlyn appears to assume that because Aquinas adopts a causal theory of perception, it must follow
that Aquinas is an atomist: D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of
Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 47.
13
  McDowell and Haldane reject the reduction of causality in perception to efficient cause alone. See
John Haldane, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, Ratio 11(3) (1998), 253–77.
14
  Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, vol. 3: Realism and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 47–8.
15
  John Haldane, ‘Putnam on Intentionality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52(3) (1992),
671–82.
16
  John Haldane, ‘Realism with a Metaphysical Skull’ (with response by Hilary Putnam), in J. Conant
and Urszula Zeglen (eds), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2002).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  157

The Need for a Medium

The discussion of an appropriate medium as a necessary condition for visual
­perception is illustrated by similar accounts developed by Aquinas of the faculties of
hearing and smelling in the external sensorium. Taste and touch, however, are
analysed somewhat differently; nonetheless, in this text it appears that some type of
medium is a necessary condition for all the faculties of the external senses. Yet taste
and touch inherently are different from sight, hearing, and taste. In the following
passage, Aquinas begins his discussion of the role the medium plays for the faculties
of the external sensorium:
Aristotle shows how the case of the other senses is similar to sight. No sound or odour, for
example, is perceived if there is immediate contact with the organ in question. There must be a
medium affected by sound or odour, which itself then affects our sense of hearing or of smell. A
sounding or odorous body placed upon the organ is not perceived as such. The same is true
even of touch and taste, though, for a reason to be given later, this is less evident. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 437; emphasis added)

Aquinas continues this discussion:17

Finally, he states what is the medium in hearing and smelling. That of hearing is air, and that
of smelling is something common to air and water—just as both of these provide a medium
for colour insofar as each is a transparency. There indeed is no name for the quality in air and
water, which provides the medium for odour; but it certainly is not transparency. And that
both air and water are conductors of smell he shows from the fact that marine animals have
a sense of smell. A human person, however, and other animals that walk and breathe, only
smell by breathing; this proves that air is the medium of smell. This fact will be explained
later. (no. 438)

Regarding sound, he writes that ‘the actuality of sound involves the medium and the
faculty of hearing’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 441). In discussing sound, he makes
an important distinction about the ‘actuality’ of sense objects:
The actuality of sound involves the medium and the faculty of hearing. For we can speak of a
sense object as actual in two ways:
So far as the object is actually being sensed, i.e. when its likeness is affecting the sense organ.
In this way, a sound is actual when it is heard.
So far as the object actually is such that it can be sensed, but is such simply in its own objec-
tive being, outside the senses.
And in this way, the other sense objects, colour, odour, savour, etc., exist actually in coloured,
or odorous or savourable bodies. But not so sound; for in a sound-producing body, there is
sound only potentially: actual sound exists only when the medium is affected by a disturbance

17
  Because this present inquiry is limited to the act of visual sensation, the above passage is included for
the sake of informative completeness rather than for analysis. Aquinas, therefore, views the concept of a
medium as a necessary ontological structure for an act of awareness with at least three sense organs and
faculties of the external sensorium. Nonetheless, all of the sense organs require a medium.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

158  preconditions of visual awareness

from that body. Therefore the act of sound exists, he says, in the medium and in the hearing,
but not in the audible body. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 441)

This is Aquinas’s method for avoiding Berkeley’s aporia regarding the old philosophi-
cal chestnut about ‘the tree falling in the forest’. It also again indicates the epistemolog-
ical realism rooted in Aquinas’s account of sensation.
On the question of the need for a medium for the three faculties of sense awareness
considered above, a discrepancy exists when comparing the texts of his Commentary
with Aquinas’s treatment of sensation in the Summa Theologiae. In the Summa
Theologiae, Aquinas asserts that a medium is not needed for all the external sense fac-
ulties. The following text illustrates this discrepancy:
Sight, which is without natural immutation [abseque immutatione naturali] either in its organ
or its object, is the most spiritual, the most perfect, and the most universal of all the senses.
After this comes the hearing and then the sense of smell, which require a natural immutation
on the part of the object; while local motion is more perfect than, and naturally prior to, the
motion of alteration, as the Philosopher proves. (Physics, VIII, 7–260a28)
Touch and taste are the most material of all. [. . .] Hence, it is that the three other senses are not
exercised through a medium united to them, which makes unnecessary any natural immutation
in their organ, which happens in regard to these two senses. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3;
emphasis added)

Aquinas writes that Aristotle ‘observes that the origin of smell is affected by the odor-
ous through a medium, i.e. air or water’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 491). Later in the
Commentary, Aquinas writes: ‘the tasteable is something tangible, i.e. discerned by
touch [and] that is why it is not sensed through a medium extraneous to the body’ (no.
502). Also, ‘touch does not perceive through an extraneous medium, but through one
that is conjoined with the subject, i.e. through flesh’ (no. 502). But later still, apparently
to the contrary, he writes that ‘we perceive all sense objects through an extraneous
medium’ (no. 542). He then notes that ‘this is not noticeable in taste and touch’ (no.
542). There is no apparent resolution for this discrepancy of theory on the need for a
medium between that found in the Summa Theologiae and that articulated in the
Commentary on the Soul. This may be an instance illustrating that Aquinas at times is
somewhat careless in keeping all of his philosophical arguments straight.
The next chapter spells out in some detail the necessary conditions for sensation
using the external senses, especially involving a proper sensible. This is analysed in the
venue of a three-term necessary relation involving the object, the medium, and the
faculty. All three of these terms refer to real relations that are necessary conditions for
the act of sensation. An alteration in any of the terms entails a differing awareness. This
theory may offer an alternative to the standard ‘arrow of consciousness’ mode first
articulated by Moore and later adopted by several twentieth-century philosophers.
Hints of this ‘arrow of consciousness’ mode are found in Plato’s texts and in the writ-
ings of some of the early modern philosophers. Appendix 1 discusses in some detail
the role of light, colour, and the medium. This is an aspect of medieval science that may
not be necessary in coming to terms with Aquinas on sensation and perception; but it
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  159

is important for seeing how Aquinas develops his position while rooted in Aristotle’s
De Anima. A second appendix indicates how Aquinas treated the tenets found in clas-
sical atomism.

appendix 1
Light and Colour: The Commentary versus
the Summa Theologiae
In the Commentary following a discussion of the ontological aspects of light, Aquinas considers
in some detail the relation between colour and light:
With regard to the third point [i.e. the necessity of light for seeing], note that it has been the opinion of
some that not merely seeing, but the object of seeing, i.e. colour as such, presupposed the presence of light;
the colour as such had no power to affect a transparent medium; that it does this only through light. An
indication of this was, they said, that one who stands in the shadow could see what is in the light, but one
who stands in the light cannot see what is in the shadow. The cause of this fact, they said, lay in a corre-
spondence between sight and its object: because seeing is a single act, so it must bear on an object formally
single; this would not be the case if colour were visible of itself—not in virtue of light—and light also were
visible of itself. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 423)

According to this position expressed in the Commentary, which Aquinas will reject, colour
lacks any causal power in itself. In other words, it is light that actualizes colour. If this were the
case, then colour would not actualize the transparent medium, because it would have no active
power of its own. In the Commentary, Aquinas rejects this position:
Now this view is clearly contrary to what Aristotle says here, ‘and [. . .] [colour] has in itself the cause of
being visible’. Thus, following Aristotle’s opinion, I say that light is necessary for seeing, not because of
colour, in that it actualizes colours (which some say are in potency only so long as they are in darkness),
but because of the transparent medium which light renders actual, as the text states. (no. 424; emphasis
added)

Accordingly, in the Commentary, Aquinas maintains that light per se actualizes the diaphanum
or medium and not colour. In proof of this claim, he offers the following ontological account:
Note that every form is, as such, a principle of effects resembling itself. Colour, being a form, has therefore
of itself the power to impress its likeness on the medium. But note also that there is this difference between
the form with a complete and the form with an incomplete power to act, that the former is able not merely
to impress its likeness on matter, but even to dispose matter to fit it for this likeness; which is beyond the
power of the latter. Now the active power of colour is of the latter sort; for it is, in fact, only a kind of light
somehow dimmed by admixture of opaque matter. Hence it lacks the power to render the medium fully
disposed to receive colour; but this, pure light can do. (no. 425)

Aquinas continues : ‘Whence it is also clear that, as light is, in a certain way, the very substance
of colour, all visible objects as such share in the same nature; nor does colour require to be
made visible by some other extrinsic light. That colours in light are visible to one standing in
the shade is due to the medium’s having been sufficiently illumined’ (no. 426). He claims that a
necessary condition for sight is that there be an illumined or transparent medium. In other
words, without this medium, there would be no visual sensation. This medium is important
insofar as colour itself actually affects the medium, which has been illumined by light. The
relation between the transparent medium and colour is considered in the following passage: ‘It
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

160  preconditions of visual awareness

is clear from the foregoing that the transparent medium is receptive of colour; for colour, we
have seen, acts upon it. Now what is receptive of colour must itself be colourless, as what
receives sound must be soundless, for nothing receives what it already has. The transparent
medium is therefore colourless’ (no. 427). In offering an analysis of these passages, it appears
that Aquinas offers a twofold causal account:

(a) The light acts causally upon the diaphanum or medium, and this causal influence
makes the diaphanum or medium luminous.
(b) The coloured object acts upon the now luminous diaphanum or medium in order to
render it coloured.
What is non-coloured becomes coloured by the force of the coloured object. The coloured
object acts as a causal power. This analysis of causal sequence is important in justifying the
claim that Aquinas is an ‘objective relativist’ in his theory of sensation and perception. This
discussion continues with Aquinas using ‘diaphanum’ for ‘medium’:
Since bodies are visible by their colours, the transparent medium must itself be invisible. However, since
one and the same power apprehends contrary qualities, it follows that sight, which apprehends light, also
apprehends darkness. Hence, although the transparent medium of itself possesses neither light nor colour,
being receptive of both, and is thus not of itself visible in the way that things bright or coloured are visible,
it can, all the same, be called visible in the same sort of way as dark things and scarcely visible things are so
called. The diaphanum is therefore a kind of darkness, so long as it is not actually but only potentially
transparent: the same thing is the subject, sometimes of darkness, sometimes of light. Thus the diaphanum,
while it lacks luminosity and is only potentially transparent, is in a state of darkness. (no. 428; emphasis
added)

The structural point emphasized repeatedly in the Commentary notes that the diaphanum
receives colour in some way. In other words, colour, as an act, affects the diaphanum, which
functions as a disposed capacity—in this case, Disposition-2/Actuality-1. Colour is a causal
factor.
Before discussing the next issue, which is a quandary over light and causality articulated in
the Summa Theologiae, it will be worthwhile to reflect briefly on what Aquinas has written in
the Commentary. The formal aspect of the physical object necessary for vision to occur is an
instance of colour. But the role of light is also a necessary condition, and light in terms of a
formal condition. Are there now two formal conditions for the sensation of an instance of
colour to occur? Pilsner writes that for Aquinas, light is considered as ‘the formal aspect of
colour, just as colour acts as the formal aspect for that body in which the colour is founded’.18
In the Commentary on the Sentences, Aquinas writes: ‘sicut lux perficit colorem, et color perficit
superficiem et superficies corpus, cujus terminus est’19 (Commentary on the Sentences, II d. 27 q.
1 a. 2). Pilsner argues, in considering these two senses of formality, that Aquinas assumes that
whenever two things are together in some aspect of unity, one will be formal regarding the
status of the other. Furthermore, the aspect of being more active determines how one discerns

18
  Joseph Pilsner, The Specification of Human Actions in St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 97; in this extensive and thoughtful analysis of objects and acts, Pilsner provides an illuminat-
ing account of the roles of light, colour, and the medium.
19
  ‘just as light perfects colour, so also colour perfects the surface together with the surface of the body,
which is the terminal point of this active ray of light.’
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  161

which aspect is the formal and which the material. In the situation of light and colour, Aquinas
argues (so Pilsner suggests) that light is what is active, and one reason is that an instance of
colour cannot be seen in the absence of light. Hence, light and colour function as a unity
‘constituting that single object which is visible per se’.20 Incorporating aspects taken from
modern physics, Pilsner provides an illuminating commentary of the role of light in seeing a
colour. It is worth quoting his exposition at length.21
Aquinas requires a medium between the sensible object and the sense organ and faculty
because insofar as sensing is an ‘act’, it needs a physical medium through which to travel. Like
his fellow medieval philosophers, Aquinas did not understand the possibility of ‘action at a
distance’. Furthermore, the form of colour that is transported, as it were, through the diaphanum
or medium is the sensible species in a kind of immaterial mode. This is, however, not knowledge,
because the medium is not a cognitive power adequately disposed to receive a sensible species
in a cognitive, intentional fashion. This twofold role of the non-material exemplifications of the
form—in the transparent medium and in the sense faculty—of the active power of the proper
sensible will be discussed in the next chapter.

A Quandary in the Summa Theologiae

Textually, it appears that Aquinas is committed to this position on causality in the Commentary
on the Soul. In his Summa Theologiae, however, he hedges rather dramatically on accepting this
position. The following passage notes this ambiguity; in these texts Aquinas discusses the
nature of the active intellect as analogous to either position considering how colour affects the
diaphanum; Aquinas writes:
There are two opinions as to the effect of light:
For some say that light is required for sight, in order to make colours actually visible [here Aquinas has a
reference to Avempace and Averroes]. And according to this, the agent intellect is required for understand-
ing in like manner and for the same reason as light is required for seeing.
But in the opinion of others, light is required for sight, not for the colours to become actually visible, but
in order that the medium may become actually luminous, as the Commentator says in De Anima [another

20
  Ibid., 98–9.
21
  ‘How does light play an active role in the perception of colour? If Aquinas’s Commentary on De Anima
is reflective of his thinking on this topic, then his understanding of light’s role in perception is markedly
different from our own. We think of light as possessing wavelike qualities. When light reflects off a surface,
its frequency is changed, and this alteration is sensed and then interpreted by our minds in such a way that
it leads to our perception of colour. In the scheme of Aristotle and Aquinas, however, colour is not a per-
ception of such a frequency; colour is light itself in so far as it has been obscured by its mixture with some-
thing opaque. […] Now Thomas believes that all light travels through a transparent or diaphanous medium,
such as air, water, the heavenly spheres (through which starlight travels), and even some material bodies
like glass or crystal. Because colour is light, it has the power itself of moving the transparent medium, and
needs no external assistance from other light. […] But because the motive power of colour is not as strong
as pure light, it can only effect a change if the diaphanous medium has been made ready for colour by
having been moved from potency to act by light. Thus, light is, in a certain sense, formal to the coloured
body in the sense that it enables something which is visible in potency to be visible in act; it is not formal,
however, in the sense that it “activates” the colour, for its only service is to render the medium capable of
receiving colour’: ibid., 98, n. 75.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

162  preconditions of visual awareness

reference to Averroes]. And according to this, Aristotle’s comparison of the agent intellect to light is veri-
fied in this, that as it is required for understanding, so is light required for seeing. But not for the same
reason. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 79 a. 3 ad 2; emphasis added)

It is apparent that in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas does not commit himself to one
position rather than another. This ambivalence in the Summa Theologiae is odd, especially
given that he renders a decisive position in the Commentary. Of course, one might suggest
that in the Commentary, essentially Aquinas reiterated and elaborated upon what he took to
be Aristotle’s position. In nos 423 and 424, he does claim that ‘this view is clearly contrary
to what Aristotle says here’, which is the position that ‘colour as such had no power to affect
a transparent medium [and] that it does this only through light’. If this were the case, then
one would expect Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae to explain his differences with Aristotle.
The differences between the explication in the Commentary and the explication in the
Summa Theologiae remain puzzling. Quite possibly this is another instance where one
observes the influences of the Arabian philosophers on Aquinas’s philosophy of science and
philosophy of mind.
In the earlier Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima, which Torrell suggests was written in 1265–6,22
Aquinas writes the following account concerning the two interpretations found in the texts of
Averroes:
As the Commentator [i.e. Averroes] writes in Book II of the De Anima, there are two theories about
light. For there are those who say that light is necessary for seeing because light gives to colours the
power to be able to move the sense of sight, as if colour were not visible of itself but only because of
light. Aristotle seems to reject this position when he states, in Book III of the De Anima, that colour is
essentially visible, and this would not be so if colour possessed visibility solely because of light. On the
other hand, others offer what seems to be a better interpretation, namely, that light is necessary for
seeing insofar as light actuates what is transparent, causing it to be actually luminous. Hence, the
Philosopher [i.e. Aristotle] writes, in Book II of De Anima, that colour has the power of setting in
motion what is actually transparent. Nor can it be objected that those who are in the dark can see things
which are in the light and not vice versa. This happens because it is necessary that the transparent,
which surrounds the things to be seen, be illuminated in order that it might receive the species of the
visible thing. Now a species remains visible just as far as action of light which illuminates the transpar-
ent extends its influence, even though the closer the light is, the more perfectly it illuminates, and the
farther away it is, the more weakly it illuminates the transparent. Therefore, the comparison between
light and the intellectus agens is not valid from every point of view, since the intellectus agens is necessary
to make potential intelligible objects to become actually intelligible. And this is what Aristotle means in
Book III of the De Anima when he said that the intellectus agens is somehow like light. (Quaestiones
Disputatae de Anima, q. 4 lec. 4)

In the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes: ‘Light and colour are received into
a transparent object, light being to colour as form is to matter’ (Summa Theologiae, Supp. to III,
q. 92 a. 1). This passage is ambiguous on the present quandary, as it could support either
interpretation.

22
  Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 335; Torrell writes that this text of the
Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima was written before Prima Pars, qq. 75–89, which is where Thomas dis-
cusses human knowledge.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  163

Nonetheless, in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas in one place articulates
a position similar to what he affirmed in the Commentary on the Soul: ‘Corporeal light is
necessary regarding external sight, because it makes the medium actually transparent, and
thus susceptible of colour.’ Moreover, in his Commentary on the Metaphysics, Aquinas offers
a  similar interpretation: ‘The further an agent’s power is extended when it acts, the more
imperfect is its effect. [ . . . ] For this reason, the colour of a perfect sensible body does not
change that part of the transparent medium, which is far away from it as completely as it
changes that part which is close to it’ (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk IV, lec. 14, no. 695;
emphasis added). However, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, one finds the following passage:
‘Colours which light has made actually visible, without fail, impress their likeness on the
diaphanous body and consequently on the sight’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 76;
emphasis added).
This ambivalence regarding positions is additionally puzzling in that both of the texts in
which Aquinas treats sensation and perception, the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae and
the Commentary on the Soul, were written and completed at a similar date. Earlier it was noted
that Gauthier’s recent research suggests that Aquinas completed the Commentary as late as
1268. Furthermore, most scholars of the texts of Aquinas suggest that the Prima Pars of the
Summa Theologiae, which is the section in which the passages under consideration appear, also
was completed in 1268. Accordingly, no time span appears to exist between the completion of
the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae and this Aristotelian Commentary on sensation and
perception. Gauthier, in particular, suggests that Aquinas worked on both the Prima Pars and
the Commentary on the Soul at the same time. The appearance of William of Moerbeke’s new
transliteration of a translation of Aristotle’s text facilitated Aquinas’s concurrent work on these
two monumental philosophy projects. Tugwell, following Gauthier, notes the following about
the structural connection between sections of the Summa Theologiae and several of the
Aristotelian commentaries:
Also towards the end of his time in Rome, Thomas composed what may have been his first fully developed
Aristotelian commentary, on the De Anima, and it is not unreasonable to postulate a connection between
this commentary and the fact that Thomas was writing about the soul in the first part of the Summa. In the
same way the commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, at least in its final form, seems to be related to the compo-
sition of the second part of the Summa.23

Therefore, while the affirmation of one position in the Commentary appears strange when
contrasted with the obvious noncommittal nature articulated in the texts from the Summa
Theologiae, nonetheless one must take this philosophical wavering in context. Aquinas was
never known for his work in science. It took Russell, for example, only two years to go from the
‘over-populated universe’ of his Principles of Mathematics (1903)24 to the less demanding
ontology articulated in his famous ‘Theory of Descriptions’ found in ‘On Denoting’ (1905).25 A
little historical perspective usually stems the tide of impatience when dealing with apparent
inconsistencies found in the writings of major figures in Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this

23
  Simon Tugwell, Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 256.
24
  Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1903).
25
  Bertrand Russell, ‘On Denoting’ (1905), repr. in Logic and Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1956).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

164  preconditions of visual awareness

ambiguity is prima facie baffling, and its resolution is probably better left to the textual scholars
of manuscripts and evolved editions.

appendix 2
Aquinas and Atomism
It would seem that Aquinas rejects atomism, not only because of its insistence on a vacuum but
on the philosophical grounds that atomism entails that secondary qualities lack existence as
dispositional properties independent of a perceiver. The secondary qualities of the atomists,
which are similar in perceptual content to the proper sensibles for Aquinas, are mind-
dependent. The following passage discussing atomism found in the writings of Lucretius
reiterates the classical atomist position:
Moreover, since colours cannot be without light nor do the first beginnings of things come out
into the light, you may know how they are not clothed with any colour. For what colour can there be
in blind darkness? [ . . . ] But lest you think that the first bodies abide bereft only of colour, they
are also sundered altogether from warmth and cold, and fiery heat, and are carried along barren of
sound  and devoid of taste, nor do they give of any scent of their own from their body. (De Rerum
Natura, bk II)

Sextus Empiricus wrote that ‘the objects of sense, which it is customary to call real, in truth are
not real; only the atoms and the void are real’.26 This analysis of atomism illustrates the mind-
dependent nature of secondary qualities. Centuries later Galileo would argue the same position:
I think that tastes, odours, colours, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we
place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence, if the living creature were
removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. [. . .] I think that if ears, tongues, and
noses were removed, shapes and numbers would remain, but not odours or tastes or sounds. The latter, I
believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings.27

On the other hand, the existence of the proper sensibles in the truncated world as qualitatively
distinct causal powers is an integral part of Aquinas’s ontology. He reiterates this position often
in his texts, and the following quotation is one of many discussing this issue on the ontological
character of what later philosophers would call secondary qualities: ‘So also colour does not
mean the same as being seen’ (Commentary on the Physics, bk III, lec. 2). In the Commentary
on the Metaphysics, Aquinas argues again for his position of epistemological realism: ‘Sight and
hearing perceive those accidents that remain in sensible bodies, such as colour, warmth and
coldness. Hence, the judgement of sight and touch is extended to things themselves’
(Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk I, lec. 1, sec. 8). To articulate a thorough analysis of the
causal reactions needed for a direct awareness of a proper sensible requires a discussion of
Aristotelian formal causality and not only efficient causality. This analysis requires further
discussion.
These two claims inherent to atomism—the existence of the vacuum and the mind-
dependent nature of secondary qualities—provide evidence enough to reject Hamlyn’s

26
  Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, VII. 135.
27
 Galileo, The Assayer.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

preconditions of visual awareness  165

interpretation suggesting an affinity of Thomas with the atomists. Identifying Aquinas with the
atomists on the nature of a theory of sensation and perception, accordingly, seriously
misrepresents his philosophy of mind. Nonetheless, the rejection of atomism does not entail
that he lacks a causal theory of perception. Atomism’s acceptance of efficient causality and a
causal theory of perception are neither coextensive nor isomorphic.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

7
The Necessary Conditions
for Perception
A Triadic Relation

The preceding chapters discussed Aquinas’s position on the perceptual objects: the
proper or special sensibles, the common sensibles, and the incidental object of sense.
In addition, the role of the proper medium as a necessary condition for sensation,
especially the role of the transparent in visual sensation, was articulated in the preced-
ing chapter. The next step in this building project is to reconstruct an adequate philo-
sophical analysis suggesting what the complete theory of sensation/perception might
look like.
A half-century ago, Ryle raised three issues that are important in considering
Aquinas’s theory of intentionality for sensation and perception:
(a) What is the causal relation between objects in the world and our intentional
awareness of these objects?
(b) Does efficient causality offer a sufficient condition for explaining perception?
(c) How do human perceivers get beyond sensations alone and become aware of
‘things’?1
Recent work in the philosophy of mind considers these issues in some detail. The focus
of this chapter is on sensation theory in Aquinas, with special reference to intentional-
ity in the context of recent analytic philosophy of mind. Aquinas addresses all three of
Ryle’s queries.

The Triadic Relation

This analytic reconstruction of Aquinas’s position on visual sensation proposes an
account consisting essentially of a three-term necessary relation; this triadic relation
itself can be designated as the necessary conditions for sensation by using the follow-
ing terms:

1
  Gilbert Ryle, ‘Sensation’, in H. D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy III (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1956), 427.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  167

(a) the sensible object;

(b) the adequate medium;
(c) the properly disposed sense faculty.

These three categories as the terms of the necessary relation are commensurate with
Aquinas’s rejection in principle of representationalism. Accordingly, one of the terms
of the triadic relation is the presence of an object, which Aquinas refers to as a ‘sensi-
ble’. In addition to the presence of an object, there must be both a proper medium and
a sensing faculty or power itself. These three entities constitute the terms of the triadic
relation, which is a necessary condition for Aquinas’s analysis of sensation.
Furthermore, each of these entities is itself a necessary component of the necessary
triadic relation. It follows, then, that if any term is missing, there will be no triadic
relation. In other words, each term is a necessary condition for the existence of the
triadic relation, which relation itself is the necessary condition for sensation/percep-
tion. This necessary triadic relation might be symbolized as follows: NC[O-M-F]. In
De Veritate, Aquinas indicates this relation: ‘the sense always apprehends a thing as it
is, unless there is an impediment in the organ or in the medium’ (De Veritate I, ii). The
discussion of sight in the preceding section indicated the textual foundations for
these claims. The present task is to reconstruct a theory that is fair and consistent with
the texts of Aquinas on sensation. Visual perception will continue to be used as the
paradigm case for this analysis of Aquinas’s theory of sensation. Aquinas himself con-
siders this act of Sensation-Ia to be the highest or ‘best’ of the acts of sensation of the
external senses, in that it acquires a status near to the ‘spiritual’ awareness of the intel-
lect: ‘Now sight, which is without natural immutation either in its organ or in its
object, is the most spiritual, the most perfect, and the most universal of the senses’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3).
With visual perception, there is an object, which is colour, and Aquinas defines the
primary visible as colour. Thus he considers these sensible properties—what have
classically been called the secondary qualities, which he calls the proper sensibles—to
be in some way or other existing as qualitatively distinct causal factors in the world
independent of minds. This existence of colour in a truncated world does not entail,
however, that there can be no difference in the actual perception of a colour—a proper
sensible—in different perceptual situations. Aquinas does not argue for a s­imple-
minded position of direct realism, sometimes referred to as ‘naive realism’. In other
words, he would be the first to admit that a colour will be perceived differently in the
bright sunlight of high noon and in the dimness of twilight. The facet of visual
perception that forced Locke to admit that secondary qualities are mind-dependent
was faced by Aquinas. However, the variability of the proper sensibles will be explained
by other factors than by Locke’s gambit, which was to make this category of perceptual
objects completely dependent on a mind. For Aquinas, perceptual conditions do differ.
This is not because the object has changed, however. Rather, it happens because the
medium has been affected differently. The diaphanum or medium changes due to the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

168  the necessary conditions for perception

intensity of the light actually present. Accordingly, it is not the object alone that
­determines what is perceived but also the intensity of the transparent medium. The
diaphanum or medium becomes transparent, Aquinas argues, only because of light.
Therefore, the change in the medium is due to the intensity of the light actually present
in the medium. The effect of this medium on visual perception further substantiates his
claim that secondary qualities are not mind-dependent. In other words, he claims that
the medium contributes substantially to the way something is perceived. Accordingly,
the proper sensible—in this case, colour—can exist independently of a mind as a
qualitatively distinct causal factor, but nonetheless be perceived differently in differing
circumstances partly because of the different intensity of light in the medium. This is a
another instance justifying the claim that Aquinas is an objective relativist in his theory
of sensation; furthermore, he remains throughout an epistemological realist.
Two of the three necessary conditions for the triadic relation, namely, the object and
the medium, have been noted. The third necessary condition for perception is the per-
ceiving organ and the perceiving faculty; Aquinas distinguishes between the organ
and the faculty. The organ is the physiological machinery—the vehicle—and the fac-
ulty is the ability to receive intentionally the form of another thing in a non-entitative
manner—i.e. in esse intentionale. Therefore, ‘sensation apparatus’ refers to both the
sense faculty and the physiological organ of that faculty.
The ‘primary sensitive part’, i.e. the organ of sense, is that in which a power [i.e. a sense faculty]
of this sort resides, namely a capacity to receive forms without matter. For a sense organ, e.g.
the eye, shares the same being with the faculty or power itself, though it differs in essence or
definition, the faculty being as it were the form of the organ. [. . .] A bodily organ is ‘what
receives sensation’, i.e. is the subject of the sense faculty, as matter is subject of form, and yet the
magnitude and the sensitivity of sense differ by definition, the sense being a certain ratio, i.e.
proportion and form and capacity, of the magnitude [i.e. of the organ]. (Commentary on the
Soul, no. 555)

Not only must the organ exist along with the faculty, but also the organ and faculty
must be properly disposed so that they may perform a certain perceptual function,
which is to exercise or perform a certain type of mental act. There are two senses of
‘being disposed properly’ for the sense apparatus, but it is too early now to consider
them in detail. At any length, neither the perceiving organ nor the perceiving faculty is
to be considered as a complete tabula rasa. Rather, they are structured mental capaci-
ties geared to undertaking certain mental acts. The activity of the organ and sense fac-
ulty occurs only because the structure reacts in a certain manner with the proper and
appropriate sensible object as found in an appropriate medium. The constitutive struc-
ture of the perceiving apparatus, therefore, is in itself found in a condition of
Disposition-2/Actuality-1 by its makeup or ‘ratio’. This position is a necessary compo-
nent to the claim that Aquinas opts for a ‘structured mental act’ both in sensation and
perception and in concept formation. This explanatory account, furthermore, entails
that the perceiving apparatus could not be what it is without its structure or ratio.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  169

The faculty and organ are not diaphanous in any sense of the term. A structured sensa-
tion apparatus with a certain dispositional order is necessary for perception to occur.
Accordingly, the claim is put forward that the existence of a properly disposed percep-
tion faculty/organ is one term of the necessary triadic relation which itself constitutes a
necessary condition for the act of perception.2
Because the organ and the faculty are not identical in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind,
one might further distinguish the disposed sense organ from the disposed sense fac-
ulty. In the schema NC[O-M-F], one might divide ‘F’ into ‘DO for ‘disposed sense
organ’ and ‘DF’ for ‘disposed sense faculty.’ Hence, NC[O-M-DO/DF]. Thus, ‘DO’
refers to the physiological structure that makes an eye pupil, for instance, colour-blind.
The structure of ‘DO’ is related directly to the structure of ‘DF’. The disposition of the
faculty is dependent on the dispositional situation of the organ. This is an essential
feature of Aquinas’s naturalistic epistemology.

The Intentional Awareness in Sensation

Given the three necessary conditions without which sensation cannot take place, what
is required next is a consideration of the act of sensation itself utilizing these three nec-
essary conditions. Lacking any one of these necessary ingredients entails no mental act
of awareness. It is because of the necessary character of all three terms that Aquinas
asserts claims like the following: ‘Consequently, the judgement of the sense about proper
sensibles is always true unless there is an impediment in the organ or in the medium’ (De
Veritate I, 11; emphasis added). Aquinas places all three categories—object, medium,
and organ/faculty—on the same plane. Hence, it is consistent with the texts to propose
that Aquinas opts for a necessary triadic relation as the set of necessary conditions for
the act of sensation using the external senses. This triadic relation is best elucidated
under the title of ‘objective relativism’. Objective relativism suggests that the context of
the awareness depends on the special exemplification of each necessary condition. To
alter any condition produces a different content for the act of awareness. The awareness
is ‘objective’ because the causal structure of the proper or common sensible is isomor-
phic with the esse intentionale in the sense faculty. The awareness itself, however,
depends upon an exemplification of the other two necessary conditions.
Aquinas suggests that if one of these terms of the triadic relation is deficient in any
way, the possibility for veridical perception diminishes in that particular instance. For
example, if the eye pupil is a colour-blind organ, then no matter how luminous the
medium might be nor how pristine the colour as a causal factor, the perceiver will not
see the object as properly coloured, because colour-blindness affects perceiving the
particular colour in question. In a similar vein, he argues that the tongue of a person
2
  For a different perspective of the innate mental endowment characteristic of Aristotle’s theory of per-
ception, see Judith M. Baumrin, ‘Aristotle’s Empirical Nativism’, American Psychologist 30(4) (1975),
486–94.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

170  the necessary conditions for perception

affected with the flu will not permit her to taste sweet and sour, which would be the
case were the ‘taster’ well and with normal perceptual conditions holding. The follow-
ing passages from the Commentary, the Summa Theologiae, and the De Veritate stress
the importance of a properly disposed faculty and organ in order for veridical percep-
tion to occur:
For, in the first place, sense perception is always truthful with respect to its proper object, or at
least it incurs, with respect to these, the minimum of falsehood; for natural powers do not, as a
general rule, fail in the activities proper to them; and if they do fail, this is due to some derange-
ment or other. Thus only in a minority of cases do these senses judge inaccurately of their
proper objects, and then only through some organic defect, e.g. when people sick with fever
taste sweet things as bitter because their tongues are ill-disposed. (Commentary on the Soul,
no. 661)

A second text: ‘We say that the senses are not deceived regarding their proper sense
object, except by interference and in abnormal cases and when the sense organ is
impaired’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 17 a. 2). In Aquinas’s earlier Quaestiones Disputatae
de Veritate,3 we find the following account, which suggests that Aquinas remained
fairly consistent in his analysis of sense knowledge:
The judgement of sense about certain things—for example, proper sensibles—takes place
­naturally—i.e. spontaneously. About other things, however, it takes place by means of a certain
comparison, made in the human perceiver by the cogitative power [vis cogitativa], a sense
power, whose place in animals is taken by a spontaneous estimation [vis aestimativa]. Thus, the
powers of sensation [i.e. the external senses and the vis cogitativa] judge about common sensi-
bles and the incidental object of sense—i.e. the accidental sensibles. However, the natural—i.e.
spontaneous—action of a thing always takes place in one way, unless by accident it is impeded
intrinsically by some defect or extrinsically by some impediment. Consequently, the j­ udgement
of sense about proper sensibles is always true [i.e. veridical] unless there is an impediment in
the organ or in the medium; but its judgment about common sensibles or the incidental objects
of sense—i.e. the accidental sensibles—is sometimes wrong. Thus, it is clear how there can be
falsity in the judgment of sense. (De Veritate II, q. 1 a. 11)

Even at an early date, Aquinas wrote about the vis cogitativa and the incidental object
of sense, themes that remained central to this philosophy of mind over his lifetime.
There is a relation of dependency of the faculty to the organ. Aquinas claims that a
defective organ contributes to a faculty’s sensing incorrectly or inappropriately.
‘Appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ probably are the useful terms here. It seems to be the
case that a defective organ contributes to a defective faculty because the faculty cannot
function in the appropriate fashion. This indicates again the naturalistic epistemology
upon which Aquinas bases his theory of cognition. A properly working organ is a nec-
essary condition for a properly functioning sense faculty.

3
  Torrell dates this treatise from 1256–9, which would be the first period that Aquinas taught as a Master
in Paris: Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 334.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  171

The previous analysis in terms of Disposition-2/Actuality-1 offers an explanation

for the above passages. Aquinas claims that the sense organ itself must be properly
disposed if it is to contribute to sense perception. If an adequate disposition is absent,
veridical perception has no possibility of taking place. The ‘ratio’ of the organ must be
such that it is capable of an act of sensation. In addition, it is necessary that the medium
be appropriate. The earlier discussion of light as essential for the visual sensation of a
proper sensible renders this claim obvious. Thus, no matter how perfect the eye—i.e. it
is properly disposed to perceive all colours—and how potentially visible the colour, if
there is not an adequate medium—i.e. if the intensity of light in the medium is not suf-
ficient for the colour to react with it—then again there is no possibility of sensation.
These considerations justify proposing that Aquinas’s position on sensation can best
be explained through a necessary triadic relation, NC[O-M-F]. The sufficient condi-
tion needed to make the necessary conditions function is the working of the sensus
communis, which is the ‘root’ (radix) of consciousness. The necessary conditions by
themselves are not sufficient to provide an act of awareness. This point will be dis-
cussed in the next chapter.
In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Thomas writes more about the structure
of awareness; all three necessary components of the necessary triadic relation are dis-
cussed in this passage:
In a given act of awareness of seeing, a threefold division can be discerned. One is the medium
under which it is seen. The second is that by which it is seen, and this is the intentional likeness
[similitudo] of the thing seen. The third is that from which one obtains sense knowledge of the
thing seen. Thus, for instance, in bodily sight, the medium under which a thing is seen is light;
by which the thing becomes actually visible and the power of sight is given the perfection of
seeing. The means by which a thing is seen is the sensible species itself of the thing existing in
the eye, which, as the form of the one seeing in so far as she is seeing, is the principle of the
activity of sight. And the means from which one receives knowledge of a thing seen is like a
mirror, from which the eye at times receives the species of some visible thing, for example, a
stone, and from the stone itself. (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, II q. 18, a 1, replies to
objections; emphasis added)

Aquinas is aware, to be sure, that instances of non-veridical sensation happen; these

issues were covered earlier in this chapter.

The Rose-Coloured Glasses Objection

A related question arises. What if everyone perceives the world through rose-coloured
glasses? Once again, Aquinas appears not worried about this type of epistemological
query. In other words, the basic critical problem espoused by Descartes and Locke, and
furthered by Kant, is foreign to the naturalistic epistemology Aquinas proposes to
explain acts of awareness. Aquinas assumes that sometimes humans do perceive verid-
ically, and it is these cases for which he intends to provide an explanatory analysis. If
everyone perceives the world through rose-coloured glasses, Aquinas’s worry remains
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

172  the necessary conditions for perception

how to provide an analysis of how everyone actually perceives. He is not interested in

seeing if perceivers possibly influence their own perceptions when sensing the proper
sensibles.4 Again, at this juncture of the explanatory account, Aquinas considers only
the working of the external sensorium. When the question of the functioning of the
internal sensorium arises later in this inquiry, he will be much concerned about what
the perceiver contributes to the acts of the internal sensorium. The matter at issue
might be put in the following way. A philosopher of common sense considers the fol-
lowing two statements:
(a) ‘I am perceiving a rose.’
(b) ‘How do I know that I am not hallucinating that I am perceiving the rose?’
Aquinas suggests that it is a difficult project providing an adequate explanatory
account of a theory of intentional consciousness for normal sensation and perception
without worrying about Cartesian dream problems or other foundational issues.
Aquinas responds with the claim that it requires a sophisticated epistemological the-
ory in order to provide an explanatory account of ‘Proposition 1’ without demanding
an immediate answer to ‘Proposition 2’. A later account suggests how Aquinas
responds to ‘Proposition 2’. However, a foundational analysis is neither the first nor the
most important problem to be considered in offering an epistemological analysis of
perception.5

The Causal Aspects of Aquinas’s Theory of Perception

The object, the medium, and the faculty of sensation have been discussed extensively;
hence it is now opportune to consider what happens when the triadic necessary rela-
tion holds and sensation or direct awareness happens. In his ‘Intentionality and
Physiological Processes: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense-Perception’,6 Sorabji argues for a
materialist reading of Aristotle and, a fortiori, of Thomas.7 In response to materialism,

4
  This resemblance to Moore’s metaphilosophy is striking, especially concerning Moore’s attempt to
eliminate what he took to be pseudo-philosophical questions from privileged status by showing that these
problems involve a misuse of common sense and ordinary language, all the while entailing ‘pragmatic’
contradictions.
5
  Fundamentally, Aquinas’s view is similar to Berkeley’s suggestion that a criterion of consistency and
coherence assists in distinguishing ‘Proposition 1’ from ‘Proposition 2’.
6
  Johansen spells out the implications of the Sorabji account quite nicely: ‘On Sorabji’s account, the
sense-faculty becomes like F insofar as the sense organ literally becomes F. In seeing red, the eye jelly liter-
ally becomes red, in smelling cheese the nose become cheesy, in feeling hot the body literally becomes hot,
and so on and so forth. If the notion of the sense-faculty’s becoming like the sense-quality is to be cashed
out in terms of material processes, then it is difficult to see what these material process could be other than
the ones Sorabji points to’: T. K. Johansen, Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 21. Johansen appears not to include any medieval Aristotelians in his discussions. However,
he appears to be correct in this analysis.
7
  Richard Sorabji, ‘Intentionality and Physiological Processes: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense-Perception’, in
Martha Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 195–226.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  173

however, Aquinas argues explicitly for a twofold ‘immutation’, one of which is inten-
tional. It appears that Sorabji dismisses what Aquinas called intentional change, which
produces instances of esse intentionale.8
Burnyeat rejected Aristotelian intentionality theory because of the materialism
endemic to the new science with its reliance on Cartesian material theory and the
rejection of formal causes.9 It is true that Aquinas provides a causal account, because if
there were no object, then there would be no sense knowledge as such. This follows
from the triadic necessary relation for sensation, one of whose terms is the proper sen-
sible itself. Furthermore, the ‘sensible species’—a concept whose logic will be analysed
later—is caused in the sensing faculty by means of the object. However, a causal theory
of perception does not entail atomism. Aquinas emphasizes the role of formal cause in
the production of an instance of esse intentionale, not the role of efficient cause.
Considering Aquinas’s causal analysis begins with his own account of why he
­considers the Democretean theory inadequate. Aquinas argued adamantly against
atomism in general and Democritus in particular. He claimed that an atomist account
of sensation and perception permitted only a material, physical change in the sense
faculty. On the other hand, his account of perception permits both an intentional and a
physical immutation. It is evident that Aquinas’s rejection of atomism is based upon
the rejection by atomism of the possibility of intentionality theory, with its corre-
sponding esse intentionale. The following passage indicates that the ‘change’ needed to
explain the possibility of sensation must be something other than an atomistic
‘discharge’:
Democritus did lay down that no other cause for any of our knowledge is required save the
emission of bodily images from things and their entrance into our soul; the process of knowl-
edge is an affair of images and discharges. The absence of any distinction between mind and
sense underlies this opinion; the assumption is that all knowledge is like sensation, where
objects of sense induce a physiological change. [. . .] Sensation is not the activity of the soul
alone, but of the body-soul compound. So also with regard to all the activities of the sensible
part. That sensible things outside the soul cause something in the human organism is as it
should be; Aristotle here agrees with Democritus that the activities of the sensitive part are
produced by the impressions of sensible objects on the senses—not however in the manner of
a discharge, as Democritus had said, but in some other way. Democritus, incidentally, held that
all action is the upshot of atomic changes. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 6; emphasis added)

This passage is important for an adequate causal analysis of Aquinas’s perceptual

­theory because it denies that a sufficient condition for sensation is explainable solely in

8
  In response to Sorabji on the one hand and Burnyeat on the other, Nussbaum and Putnam proposed a
functionalist reading of Aristotle’s account of sense perception. Functionalism is based on Putnam’s early
work reducing intentional states to computational states. This functionalist account, however, still reduces
the causal action of perception to a material cause. Nussbaum and Putnam’s version of functionalism for
Aristotle appears to rule out intentional change, a change Aquinas adopts unequivocally.
9
  M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Is An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind Still Credible’?, in Martha Nussbaum and
Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 15–26.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

174  the necessary conditions for perception

terms of physical or bodily activity. That a strict atomist causal explanation, further-
more, is not acceptable for Aquinas is evident from the following passage taken from
the above quotation: ‘the activities of the sensitive part are produced by the impres-
sions of sensible objects on the senses—not however in the manner of a discharge, as
Democritus had said, but in some other way.’ This indicates once again that physicalism
and eliminative materialism are foreign to Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The ‘some
other way’ in the above passage is, of course, the crucial phrase; obviously, it needs
sufficient explication. This phrase requires a twofold analysis and interpretation for
Aquinas. In one sense, it refers to a causal analysis, which is different from what
Democritus proposed. In a second sense, Aquinas suggests that sensation, as an
instance of knowledge, is partially an intentional process. This is an instance of his
principle that intentionality requires an ‘immaterial’ reception of the form of a mate-
rial thing. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas elucidates this twofold consideration:
Some philosophers wish to base the distinction and number of the external senses on the dif-
ference of their organs; others on the diverse natures of sensible qualities in the medium of
sensation. But neither attempt is convincing. It is the case that faculties are not for organs, but
conversely; there are not diverse senses because there are different organs. Instead, nature pro-
vides diverse organs to match the diversity of powers. Similarly as regards the media of sensa-
tion. The basis for the distinction and number of the external senses should be determined by
what is direct and proper to each sense. A sense power is a receptive power, designed by nature
to be immuted by the sensible qualities existing in the external world. This external object is
what is directly [i.e. per se] perceived by sense, and the senses are diversified according to the
diversity found in the objects. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3)

Suttor wrote that in this passage, Aquinas proposes ‘a bold and emphatic claim that
structure is for the sake of function, not vice versa’.10 This claim further supports a nat-
uralistic thrust in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind; the comparison with Gibson once
again is striking.

Two Senses of Intentio: From the Active Power

to the Cognitive Faculty
In his causal theory of sensation, Aquinas’s account of intentionality is one of
­externalism. He holds for an ontological theory of intentionality, and the property of
the possibility of achieving intentional states is a primitive in his ontology of the
human person. A knower has an ontological capacity or ability, both the organ and the
faculty, which are rooted in the substantial form of the knower; these abilities enable
the knower to acquire forms of other things in an intentional manner. Also, the con-
tent of an awareness, what Aquinas refers to as esse intentionale, has a basic ‘tending

10
  Timothy Suttor, ‘Commentary’, Summa Theologiae, vol. 11 (Oxford: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1969), 130, n. (a). For the two kinds of immutation, see Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3 ad 3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  175

towards’ or an ‘aboutness’ for an object in the external world. He writes: ‘An immaterial
immutation is when a species is received in a sense organ or in a medium in the man-
ner of an intention “per modum intentionis” ’ (Commentary on the Soul, bk II, 14). In
commenting on this passage, Tellkamp suggested that it is important to understand
the Arabian influences on Aquinas’s account of an intentionality theory. Tellkamp
writes: ‘By saying that the species are being received in the medium per modum inten-
tionis, he [Aquinas] broadens the scope of intentionality placing it outside the mind. In
doing so he seems to follow mainly Avicenna’s theory of the intentio.’11 Yet Aquinas also
writes that the most important characteristic of an intention is its direction towards an
object, which is the property of ‘aboutness’. In his Commentary on the Sentences, he
writes: ‘The very name of an intention suggests that it is able to be received by moving
towards a power; for it is said that to intend is a tending towards another item’ (‘inten-
dere enim dicitur, quasi in aliud tendere’) (Commentary on the Sentences, II q. 1 a. 3). In
the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, he writes much the same thing:
‘Intendere est in aliud tendere’ (Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 12 a. 5). We need only recall
that in discussing sense knowledge, Aquinas uses explicitly the language of intentio: ‘In
the operation of the senses, an immaterial change is required, through which an inten-
tion of the sensible form [intentio formae sensibilis] is received in the sense organ’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3).
Aquinas appears to have at least two important senses of intentio, both of which are
necessary in explicating his account of sense knowledge with the external senses. First,
when the effect of a causal interaction with an entity in the external world produces an
act of awareness. Second, The causally effective product in the medium that interacts
with the sense organ and thus the sense faculty.
In the attempt to comprehend Aquinas’s theory of external sensation, the exact
nature of this difference is difficult to spell out consistently. It was noted above that
Tellkamp argues that in order to understand more precisely what Aquinas meant by
intentio, one needs to consider his Arabic sources, especially Avicenna.12 From the
above accounts, it can be determined that Avicenna argues that the intentional being
of a species has a mind-independent status in the medium together with an intentional
existence in a sense faculty. This twofold account is significant in the explication of the
production of an awareness of a sensible quality in a sense faculty.13
It appears that there are two functions of the sensible species, which would be the
form being transferred from the active power of the proper sensible in the primary
substance to the sense faculty and sense organ in the human knower. This is, accord-
ingly, the result of the active power of the proper sensible in the primary substance

11
  Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp, ‘Aquinas on Intentions in the Medium and in the Mind’, Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 276.
12
  Ibid., 277ff.
13
  Burnyeat also discusses this process with special reference of the intentio affecting the medium before
it affects the sense organ and faculty. See M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Aquinas on “Spiritual Change” in Perception’, in
D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 129–53.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

176  the necessary conditions for perception

causing an awareness of the proper sensible in the knower. The active power produces
an intentio, which affects the medium that exists between the proper sensible itself and
the knowing organ and faculty. The medium is able to take on this form in an immate-
rial but not a cognitive mode of being. In other words, the medium does not ‘actualize’
the form of the active power, but it must exemplify the form in order for the intentio to
‘move’ from the active power to the cognitive organ and faculty. As Burnyeat argues,
another primitive exists in Aquinas’s ontology of the sensing situation: the medium
can ‘take on’ the form of the active power in a non-material manner.14 This is an onto-
logical capacity of the medium. For Aquinas, it explains how the form transfers from
the active power in the primary substance to the cognitive organ and faculty. This will
be called ‘Intentio-I’. Once Intentio-I reaches the cognitive organ, it has some reaction
there, which would be the intention functioning as an efficient cause. The cognitive
faculty, then, is acted upon by the cognitive organ, and the result is an instance of for-
mal cause, in which the cognitive faculty ‘takes on’ the form of the active power now
rendered in an intentional mode (esse intentionale), which is a means by which the
knowing person is aware of the proper sensible in the primary substance. This instance
of an esse intentionale will be referred to as ‘Intentio-II’. It is the means—the a quo—by
which the perceiver is aware of the proper sensible of, say, the red in the Jonathan apple
placed in the fruit bowl near the window—all of which would encompass the state of
affairs existing externally from the perceiver. This is, in effect, the rather complicated
explanation of how the knower is able to be aware of a proper sensible existing in the
external world. This is Aquinas’s explanation of his externalism in sense knowledge.
The three-term necessary relation helps us understand his reliabilism.15
The notion of ‘some other way’ in referring to the causal analysis, therefore, has a
twofold meaning for Aquinas. Explained more fully, this twofold interpretation is
expressed by the two different categories of immutation: physiological or natural and
intentional. The second sense, ‘immutatio spiritualis’, is an indication of the basic
non-material and non-reductionist ingredient in all intentional activity.16 Yet this is
not the only sense of immutation that is necessary for visual sensation. In considering
Democritus’s text above, Aquinas discussed Democritus’s version of a causal theory of
perception. Accordingly, the ‘some other way’ needs to be related also to some type of
physical causality. The problem here, therefore, is how to explain this physical causality
in visual sensation without entailing materialism or physicalism. In his Thomas
Aquinas on Human Nature, Pasnau argues that Aquinas’s theory of sensation is reduci-
ble to materialism:
I believe that Aquinas takes sensation to be a wholly bodily process. In saying this I do not
mean to deny that sensation involves the soul and, more generally, formal causes; what I mean

14
  Ibid.
15
  In his translation of selected passages from the Summa Theologiae, Gilby rendered ‘immutatio natu-
ralis’ and ‘immutatio spiritualis’ into English as ‘physiological immutation’ and ‘psychological immutation’
respectively. ‘Psychological’ is a synonym of ‘intentional’.
16
  In effect, this is Aquinas’s characterization of the ‘realitas objectiva’ of Descartes.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  177

is that sensation involves the soul and other forms in a way that a modern materialist could
readily welcome. That is, Aquinas thinks of sensation as an operation consisting entirely of
various bodily parts undergoing change in various ways. There is no further, nonbodily or
spiritual operation involved. Aquinas is what I call a semimaterialist, in that he believes some
intentional states, and some forms of conscious experience, can have explanations that are, in
our modern sense, wholly physical. This is a controversial claim, but I believe that the textual
evidence is decisive.17

Pasnau appears to dismiss the distinction between a ‘physical immutation’ and an

‘intentional immutation’. Often he appears to equate ‘immaterial’ with ‘spiritual’ rather
than with ‘intentional’. Hence, while Aquinas does reduce his theory of sensation to
materialism insofar as it is not Cartesian dualism, there is nonetheless an intentional-
ity dimension here that is not reducible to physical causality. Pasnau’s analysis appears
conflated on this point. Stump is correct when she writes the following about the
reception of a form in a cognitive event: ‘Aquinas tends to use “immaterial”, “inten-
tional”, and “spiritual” roughly synonymously to refer to this kind of change or recep-
tion of form.’18 Nonetheless, if Pasnau argues that Aquinas is not a Cartesian in matters
of sensation, then his analysis is in agreement with the tenor of the account proposed
throughout this present book.19
Proposing an adequate solution for this problem requires a return to Aquinas’s
treatment of the proper sensible and the medium. In the case of visual sensation, col-
our is the proper sensible and the transparent diaphanum is the medium. In the
Commentary, Aquinas suggested that the visible, which is colour, affects the transpar-
ent medium, which is the diaphanum. With visual sensation, the most obvious
medium is air. Colour affects the medium, and the medium, as a physical body, reacts
with the physical disposition of the eye. In other words, the medium ‘becomes
coloured’, and this physical body, which is a transporter (as it were) of colour, affects
directly the physical organ of visual sensation, which is the eye. If this were a complete
account of visual perception, then Hamlyn, Sorabji, and Burnyeat would be correct in
associating Aquinas’s theory either with Democritus’s atomism or reductive material-
ism. However, any suggestion of identification is impossible structurally for the
­following two reasons.
First, the medium does affect the eye. However, it does not produce a corresponding
physical immutation with the eye. In the following passage from his Commentary on

17
  Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a
75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59.
18
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 528, n. 35.
19
  Kerr reflects on the bodily aspect of Aquinas’s theory of soul: ‘what Thomas meant by saying that the
soul is the form of the body is pretty much what Wittgenstein meant: “The human body is the best picture
of the human soul.” In short, it would take the discipline of being subjected to Wittgenstein’s exposure of
the absurdities of assuming that the interior life is radically private […] to understand Thomas Aquinas’s
pre-Cartesian account of the human mind and will’: Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 21; the Wittgenstein reference is to the Philosophical Investigations, no. 178. Kerr
suggests that using Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is useful in order to help elucidate Thomas’s writings.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

178  the necessary conditions for perception

the Metaphysics, Aquinas considers how the modification of organ and faculty occurs
in the sensation.
And evidently sight is a more immaterial sense, if we consider the modification produced in it
by its object. This is the case because all other sensible objects change both the organ and
medium of a sense by a material modification; for example, the object of touch by heating and
cooling, the object of taste by affecting the organ of taste with some flavour through the
medium of saliva, the object of hearing by means of motion in the body, and the object of smell
by means of the evaporation of volatile elements. But the object of sight changes the organ and
medium of sight only by a immaterial modification; because neither the pupil of the eye nor the
air becomes coloured, but these only receive the form of colour in a spiritual [intentional]
mode of being. Therefore, because actual sensation [sensus in actu] consists in the actual mod-
ification of a sense by its object, it is evident that that sense which is changed in a more imma-
terial and spiritual [intentional] way is more spiritual in its operation. Hence sight judges about
sensible objects in a more certain and perfect way than the other senses do. (Commentary on
the Metaphysics, bk I, lec. I, sec. 6)

In considering the act of seeing, Aquinas writes: ‘solum objectum visus non immutat
nec organum nec medium nisi spirituali immutatione’ (‘The object of sight informs nei-
ther the sense organ nor the medium by itself, but only through a spiritual [i.e. an
intentional) “informing”.’) He continues this discussion in the following way:
Sight informs us of many differences between things, for we seem to know sensible things best
by means of sight and touch, but especially by means of sight. The reason for this can be drawn
from the fact that the other three senses perceive those accidents, which in a way flow from a
sensible body and do not remain in it. Thus sound comes from a sensible body inasmuch as it
flows away from it and does not remain in it. The same thing is true of the evaporation of vol-
atile elements, with which and by which odor is diffused. But sight and hearing perceive those
accidents, which remain in sensible, bodies, such as colour, warmth and coldness. Hence the
judgment of sight and touch is extended to things themselves, whereas the judgement of hear-
ing and smell is extended to those accidents, which flow from things and not to things them-
selves. It is for this reason that figure and size and the like, by which a sensible being itself is
disposed, are perceived more by sight and touch than by the other senses. And they are per-
ceived more by sight than by touch, both because sight knows more efficaciously, as has been
pointed out, and also because quantity [magnitude] and those [accidents] which naturally fol-
low from it, which are seen to be the common sensibles, are more closely related to the object
of sight than to that of touch. This is clear from the fact that the object of sight belongs in some
degree to every body having some quantity, whereas the object of touch does not. (Commentary
on the Metaphysics, bk I, lec. 1, sec. 8)

It must be remembered that change for Aquinas is the reception of a form from
another. If a physical reception were taking place with visual perception—i.e. when the
coloured medium affects the eye—then the eye itself would become coloured.
Obviously this does not happen, although Sorabji appears to say that it does for
Aristotle. Accordingly, Aquinas suggests that ‘in some sense we find spiritual [inten-
tional] immutation only, as in sight’ (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk I, lec. 1,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  179

sec. 8). This means that the eye does not become red even though the coloured object
and the medium both possess the causal power of red. Nonetheless, a certain physical
reaction occurs. In other words, the coloured medium reacts with the disposed faculty
for visual sensation. But the effect was not a ‘red’ eyeball but rather an intentional
immutation, which will be what Aquinas refers to as the ‘sensible species’. Other senses
also become changed physiologically as well as changed spiritually or intentionally. An
example would be the sense of touch when it encounters a hot object. In this case, a
physical change renders the sense receptor itself in the state of becoming hot. In the
case of visual perception, however, only a spiritual or intentional immutation occurs.
This intentional immutation is the basis for Aquinas’s claim that ‘immateriality’ is the
root or basis for all knowledge; i.e. the ability of some ‘X’ to have the form of another
without taking on its physical characteristics.20 In summation, therefore, the physical
causality necessary for visual perception is the coloured medium affecting the visual
disposition, which results in a spiritual or intentional immutation—i.e. the formation
of the sensible species in the sense faculty of sight. In other words, Aquinas differs from
Democritus because the physical reaction, which is the causal interaction from the
objects in the external world, is not a sufficient condition for awareness to occur. It is
not a sufficient but only a necessary condition. In addition, the intentional immuta-
tion, which is having the form immaterially in a cognitive state, which would be in a
state of esse intentionale, is accomplished in the visual disposition, which is the sense
faculty of sight. There are both material and cognitive elements in any sense awareness.
The following passage illustrates the present points under discussion: ‘He remarks that
colour-affected air itself modifies the pupil of the eye in a particular way, i.e. it imprints
on it a likeness [the sensible species] of some colour, and that the pupil, so modified,
acts upon the sensus communis. Similarly, our hearing [ . . . is . . . ] itself affected by the
air’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 773).
This discussion reaffirms the basic and rudimentary ‘immateriality’ of Aquinas’s
thesis of intentionality, even on the level of sensation and perception.21 Because of this
immaterial or intentional immutation, Aquinas cannot be classified as a strict atomist
or materialist, as critics like Hamlyn and Sorabji are wont to do. One might suggest
that Aquinas has atomist tendencies. But this appears reducible to nothing more than
the claim that there are objects in the external world that affect causally our sense fac-
ulties resulting in sensation and perception. Aquinas writes: ‘the pupil of the eye is in
potency with regard to all colours’ (Compendium of Theology, pt I, ch. 89). In effect, this
atomist leaning is reducible to the fact that he is a realist who adopts a causal theory of

20
  This is the fundamental meaning of Principle D-1 in Ch. 2.
21
  In some ways Aquinas’s attempt at explicating ‘intentional’ immutation is similar to Descartes’s con-
cept of ‘objective reality’. Of course, Aquinas and Descartes are not as one on this issue; for Descartes,
realitas objectiva, while an aspect of his cognitive theory, is always an idea serving as a representation; a
necessary and sufficient condition of realitas objectiva is that a representation as an idea is standing for
some other thing, which is normally, for Descartes, a finite substance possessing formal reality. What is
similar is that esse intentionale and realitas objectiva are not reducible to material causes in the manner of
reductive materialism.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

180  the necessary conditions for perception

sensation and perception. A truncated world exists for Aquinas, which world, when in
the presence of a knower, causally affects those beings capable of intentionality—i.e.
beings capable of having forms in esse intentionale. The material, physical world exerts
a causal influence in the mental acts of perceptual awareness. However, these causal
structures are not reducible to atomism. Rather, this is a further indication that
Aquinas is an objective relativist in perception and, as Stump suggests and Jenkins
concurs, a reliabilist with externalist leanings. Aquinas comments: ‘For the act of sen-
sation is not an act of movement; rather to sense is to be moved; since, through the
sensible object’s altering the condition of the senses in acting upon them, the animal
[i.e. the perceiver] is made actually sentient from being only potentially so’ (Summa
Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 82, n. 12).
Knowing, accordingly, is a species of qualitative and not quantitative change;
furthermore, using Aristotelian categories, any act of knowing fits under the umbrella of
alteration. Insofar as it is the actualization of a cognitive power, an act of knowing is
reducible to a kind of ‘perfection’ of the agent, Aquinas writes that knowing ‘is a
perfection of a knower qua knower; this is so because for something is known by a
knower only insofar as the known is somehow in the knower’ (De Veritate II, 2). Aquinas
lets his theoretical imagination run a bit wild in this next passage when he writes that
insofar as what is known is in the knower as esse intentionale, ‘it is possible for the totality
of the whole universe to exist in one thing’ (II, 2). This would appear to follow from the
Aristotelian position that the intellect is, in a sense, all things. Parenthetically, this passage
suggests the epistemological optimism of Aquinas in that he assumes that if there is a
formally existing primary substance, it is capable of being known both by sense and by
intellectual knowledge. Of course, this process of knowledge must begin with external
sensation, which in turn depends on the exemplification of all three necessary conditions
for an act of sensation to occur. This is an ‘in-principle claim’. The assumption appears to
be that if an entity is a primary substance, it is capable of being known. Of course, some of
the postulations of contemporary physics would question this principle.
This interpretation of Aquinas’s account of sensation argues, therefore, for a three-
term relation, which is at the core of the process for an act of awareness. However, this
three-term relation, NC[O-M-F], is only the set of necessary conditions; it is not a suf-
ficient condition for sensation. What happens with sight is that when the eye comes
into contact with a coloured object in a properly lighted medium, then the faculty of
sight is immuted or takes on the form of the object. This intentional immutation is the
reception of the sensible species. What this amounts to is that the faculty of sight is
now ready to see. But it cannot be overly stressed that the object of perception is the red
object existing in the external world and not the sensible species itself. It is to stress this
fact that Aquinas often reiterates passages like the following from his account of human
nature in the Summa Theologiae: ‘A conscious impression is related to a cognitive
power as a medium; it is as form by which the faculty knows’ (Summa Theologiae, I q.
85 a. 2). ‘But the sensible species is not what is perceived, but rather that by which the
sense perceives’ (I q. 82 a. 2 sed contra). ‘Hence that by which the sight sees is the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  181

l­ ikeness of the visible thing [. . .] The likeness of a sensible thing is the form of the sense
in act’ (I q. 85 a. 2). ‘The likeness through which we understand is the species of the
thing known in the knower’ (I q. 85 a. 8, ad 3; emphasis added).
Aquinas’s claim is that the exterior object affects the sense faculty in such a way that
the faculty is now disposed to have sense knowledge of the object. This state of being
actively disposed is when the faculty has the sensible species impressed upon its dispo-
sition. The perceptible object—the proper sensible—in the external world causes this
sensible species. This sensible species is the effect of the physiological immutation but
is expressed only by the intentional immutation. This point was developed in more
detail by the Renaissance followers of Aquinas, most notably John of St Thomas (John
Poinsot); these commentators write extensively about the species impressa. What they
meant by this mildly convoluted term is that the sense faculty is now disposed properly
to perceive a particular proper sensible. John of St Thomas writes the following: ‘Species
autem impressa solum est id, quo potentia cognoscit tamquam principio, ut constat ex D.
Thoma’ (Ars Logica, pt II, bk II, q. 3).22 In referring to the rendering of the intellectus
possibilis into Disposition-I, which renders it ready to know, John of St Thomas writes:
‘Species impressa est principium notitiae formalis; constituit enim intellectum in actu
primo ad eliciendam notitiam formalem.’23 And also in the following passage from the
Ars Logica: ‘At vero species impressa licet non sit primum principium tamen actuat
potentiam ante cognitionem, et consequenter ante manifestationem actualem.’24 These
three passages suggest that the species impressa, which is used in both sense and intel-
lectual knowledge, is that by means of which the knower is aware, not that which is the
object of knowledge. Later scholastic philosophers amplify this discussion by incorpo-
rating a species expressa at both the sense and intellectual realms. On the sense level, a
species expressa is a phantasm formed both in the vis imaginativa and in the sense
memory but never in the external sensorium. On the intellectual level, the species
expressa will be the reflective concept formed in the intellectus possibilis.25
There is, however, a subtle play going on over the use of the terms, ‘properly dis-
posed’. One resolution of this problem suggests that Aquinas, when referring to the
sense faculties of the external sensorium, used ‘disposed to know’ in two ways, since he
claims that visual perception is a sophisticated happening:
(a) The first way is when the faculty of sight is geared towards perceiving colours
and not sounds and so forth for the other four faculties of the external senses.
The first sense is when the faculty of sight is in a state of Disposition-2/Actuality-1.
(b) By elucidating a second sense of ‘disposed to know’, Aquinas explains how,
even though the eye is disposed towards perceiving colour, the faculty for

22
  ‘An impressed species is nothing more that that by which a potency knows as a beginning.’
23
  ‘An impressed species is the beginning of formal knowledge [knowledge of a form]; it constitutes the
[possible] intellect in the first act towards the process of knowing the form.’
24
  ‘Truly, an impressed species, although not the first principle in being, nonetheless actuates the know-
ing potency before the act of knowledge, and thus before the actual manifestation of knowing.’
25
  More analysis of this set of issues will be offered later in this book.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

182  the necessary conditions for perception

visual perception is neither always perceiving the same colour nor even any
colour when, for example, the eyelids are closed. Accordingly, the eye is nei-
ther always sensing every colour nor always sensing one colour. What makes
the eye disposed to sense red at Time-1, and to sense green at Time-2, is the
reception in the eye, which is by its constitution in a state of Disposition-2/
Actuality-1 of the sensible species, which is the intentional immutation. The
intentional immutation is caused by the immuting in the sense organ, which in
turn was caused by the coloured thing in the external world. The ‘intentional
immutation’ is the formal cause while the immutation in the sense organ is the
result of the efficient cause.
Aquinas suggests, therefore, a generic level of disposition and then a specific level of
disposition. The generic level, Disposition-1/Actuality-2, is what distinguishes the fac-
ulty of seeing from the faculty of hearing. The category of proper sensibles in the external
world is so constituted that the genus of colour is, as it were, structurally different from
the genus of sound. But within this genus of each object of each external sense—the
proper sensibles—there are further species. Thus the eye is not ordered only to ‘colour’,
but to reds, greens, blues, and so forth. But in order to perceive these species of colour,
additionally there must be an appropriate disposition. The reception of this disposition is
caused ultimately by the thing in the external world through the physiological immuta-
tion of the sense organ, which in turn results in a sensible species—the intentional
immutation. This intentional immutation is the instance of esse intentionale of the struc-
ture of red in the external world, which in turn is an instance of esse naturale or esse reale.
Accordingly, the sensible species is that which makes the faculty of vision or sight—the
eye—disposed to sense this particular red rather than that particular green. That Aquinas
is considering something like the species impressa of the Renaissance scholastics is
modestly evident from several passages in the Summa Theologiae.
The first part of a passage noted earlier is important for the present discussion
because Aquinas discusses the ‘change’, which is the intentional becoming of the sense
faculty. The sense faculty is properly disposed already as an instance of Disposition-1/
Actuality-2 so that it might sense a member of a genus of a proper sensible. The second
part refers to the formation of one type of phantasm in the vis imaginativa. In other
words, Aquinas distinguishes between the sensible species received from the thing in
the external world and the formation by the vis imaginativa of an ‘image’. These are two
decidedly different functions of the sensorium:
(a) The formation of the sensible species is located in one of the faculties of the
external senses.
(b) The formation of an image, which is a kind of phantasm, is located in one of
the faculties of the internal sensorium.26

26
  In the final two chapters, the case will be made that while every image is a phantasm, not every phan-
tasm is an image.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  183

The formation of the sensible species is a causal function only because there are proper
sensibles existing in the external world. An image is neither identical to nor coexten-
sive with a sensible species. This is another indication that Aquinas is not a representa-
tionalist. In order for representative realism to be predicated of his theory of sensation,
a ‘sensible species’ needs to be equivalent to an image. Aquinas denies, however, that
such equivalence exists.
In conclusion, therefore, a process occurs rendering the disposition, which is an
instance of Disposition-2/Actuality-1, disposed to do something in particular. This is
the reception of the intentional immutation or the formation of the sensible species.
This is accomplished by the sensible objects in the external world. Throughout this
analysis, it must be remembered that the sensible species is not the direct object of
sensation or awareness. It is the means by which (a quo) the sense apparatus is dis-
posed so that the perceiver can be aware of the proper sensible (id quod) in the external
world. The need for such immutation applies to all the faculties of the external senso-
rium. One text in particular indicates this epistemological dependency.27
At this point, a question arises about the mode of causal efficacy exercised by the
medium and the proper sensible on the sense organ and sense faculty. In the passage
just quoted, Aquinas claims explicitly that sight is not like sound, ‘for sound is caused
by percussion and commotion of the air’. When colour affects the medium, there is not
a causal process like sound. But it must be physical in some sense. Aquinas addresses
this issue in the Commentary:
An indication of this is the fact that if a coloured body is placed upon the organ of sight it can-
not be seen; for then there remains no transparent medium to be affected by the colour. The
pupil of the eye is indeed some such medium, but, so long as the coloured body remains placed
upon it, it lacks actual transparency. There must be a medium, for instance, air or something of
the kind, which, being actualized by colour, itself acts upon the organ of sight as upon a body
contiguous or continuous with itself. For bodies only affect one another through actual contact.
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 432)

This is the only passage found in the Commentary in which Aquinas considers physical
contact when discussing sight. However, he writes precious little about the exact work-
ings of this physical, causal process. He continually writes in terms of forms acting on
potentialities. The exact structure of this causal process, however, is left undetermined.
Aristotle too said little about this important matter. This passage indicates that Aquinas
is premodern in theory and does not understand the concept of ‘action at a distance’,
27
  ‘But in some sense, we find spiritual [intentional] immutation only, as in sight, while in others we find
not only a spiritual but also a natural [physiological] immutation, and this either on the part of the object
only, or likewise on the part of the organ. On the part of the object, we find local natural immutation in
sound, which is the object of hearing; for sound is caused by percussion and commotion of the air. We find
natural immutation by alteration in odour, which is the object of smelling; for in order to give off an odour,
a body must be in a measure affected by heat. On the part of the organ, natural immutation takes place in
touch and taste; for the hand that touches something hot becomes hot, while the tongue is moistened by
the humidity of flavours. But the organs of smelling and hearing are not affected in their respective opera-
tions by any natural immutation, except accidentally’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

184  the necessary conditions for perception

which was Newton’s contribution to physical theory. Aquinas demands physical con-
tact in order to explain any causal efficacy in the material realm. This discussion reverts
to the beginning of this chapter when a disposed sense organ (DO) was contrasted
with a disposed sense faculty (DF).
One might argue that at this juncture in Western medieval philosophy, Aquinas like
several others provided a metaphysical rather than a physical account of change. Often
medieval philosophers confused or muddled the distinction between a physical
inquiry and a metaphysical inquiry. Hence, often an attempt was undertaken to find
‘forms’ in much the same way that a physicist might attempt to find atoms. Put differ-
ently, there is a difference between the postulated entities used in metaphysics and the
postulated entities used in physics. Hence, one might argue that Aquinas’s account is
metaphysical rather than physical. On the other hand, the passage above from the
Commentary indicates that actual physical contact occurs. Whatever the nature of this
causality, in the texts Aquinas is disturbingly silent on this topic. Haldane emphasized
that Aquinas’s causality is not reducible to efficient cause but is instead an instance of
formal causality.

The Bounds of Sense

Aquinas proposes that a triadic relation only holds within certain boundaries. He often
gives the example of the ill person with the feverish tongue. An object which is too
intense can not only alter the sensation but also has the possibility of destroying the
sense organ and consequently the sense faculty. Aquinas writes: ‘The same is clear
from the fact that a sense is weakened and injured by sensible objects of extreme inten-
sity. Thus, the ear is impaired by excessively loud sounds, and the eye by excessively
bright lights. This occurs because the harmony [ratio] within the organ is shattered’
(Compendium of Theology, pt I, ch. 79). Aquinas discusses this problem of intensity:
An excess in the object destroys the sense organ. For if sensation is to take place, there must
pre-exist in the organ of sense ‘a certain ratio’ or [. . .] proportion. But the proportion is
destroyed and the sense itself, which precisely consists [. . .] in the formal proportion of the
organ, is neutralized. It is just as though one were to twang cords too violently, destroying the
tone and harmony of the instrument, which consists in a certain proportion. (Commentary on
the Soul, no. 556)

One finds similar passages, some previously noted, throughout the writings of
Thomas. ‘For sense is proportioned to its organ, and in some way is assimilated to its
nature. Therefore, the operation of the sense is changed even according to the change
of the organ. This therefore is the meaning of the expression “not to be mixed with
body”, that the intellect does not have an organ as the sense does’ (On the Unity of the
Intellect Against the Averroists, ch. 1, no. 23). Commenting on this theory, Turnbull
wrote that Aristotle’s account ‘is also, of course, like Plato’s, one in which the active
powers of the thing and the passive powers of the sensitive organ are both needed for
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  185

the perception to occur’.28 Turnbull notes that the ‘ratio’ is a kind of ‘mean’, beyond
which the sense organ cannot function in its proper mode.

Direct Realism in Aquinas’s Theory of Sensation

A further corollary to the present set of claims concerns the status of that difficult
­concept in Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception, the phantasm. ‘Phantasm’ is a
much-used and much-abused epistemological concept found in Aquinas. The phan-
tasm is identified neither with the sensible species nor with what the scholastic com-
mentators called the ‘species impressa’.29 It is a category mistake, therefore, to link
‘sensible species’ with ‘phantasm’ when the only evidence provided is that the term
similitudo occurs in definitions of each.30 Once a sense faculty has been disposed prop-
erly with a sensible species, then it is capable of sensing. Sensation, however, is not
explained sufficiently by only the passive reception of a form. Some contribution on
the part of the perceiver is also required. This means that it is plausible to say that some
person is in a certain state in which all the necessary conditions are present but that she
herself is not perceiving the proper sensibles. This would be the case, for example,
when she is staring blindly at a wall, and not conscious of sensing the colour of the wall.
The requisite conditions would be present here: a red wall, sufficient light, and a prop-
erly disposed faculty. These alone, however, would not be sufficient for sensation.
What is necessary is that the perceiver engage actively with the immuted sensible spe-
cies and thus begin to have a sense awareness. Thus, in addition to the three necessary
conditions for sensation—NC[O-M-F]—the perceiver also must contribute her part.
It is only with this mental activity in conjunction with the necessary conditions that an
act of sensation will take place at all. An adequate account of this activity depends on
an analysis of the sensus communis, which is a faculty of the internal senses. The next
chapter discusses how the sensus communis is an intricate and necessary faculty cen-
tral to Aquinas’s account of sensation. In this end, it is the person who senses and per-
ceives, but it is by means of the sense organs and faculties, both external and internal
senses, that the acts of awareness are possible. This is how Aquinas offers his naturalis-
tic explanation of sense knowledge. As this chapter concludes, it is more evident that
Aquinas is an objective relativist in his theory of sensation. This claim of objective
28
  Robert G. Turnbull, ‘The Role of the “Special Sensibles” in the Perception Theories of Plato and
Aristotle’, in Robert G. Turnbull and Peter Machamer (eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1978), 23.
29
  Some commentators on Aquinas, both scholastic and analytic, have alluded to this position. Deely
notes that Suarez’s position on sensation was structurally similar to Locke’s—i.e. an image is required for
sensation. Cf. John N. Deely: New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994), 135. James B. South questions this role for an image in Suarez’s phil­
osophy of mind: ‘Suárez and the Problem of External Sensation’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10(2)
(2001), 217–40.
30
  More analysis of this set of issues will appear in the final sections of this book, where in addition the
intelligible species used in concept formation and exercise will be discussed as another use of similitudo in
Aquinas.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

186  the necessary conditions for perception

r­ elativism depends upon the three-term necessary triadic relation as a necessary con-
dition for sensation. This analysis is also in agreement with the claims of Stump and
Jenkins of reliabilism in Aquinas. When any term of the triadic relation is not
accounted for, so too will success in the awareness of proper sensibles be found
wanting.
This brings to a close the analysis of Aquinas’s theory of sensation and sense knowl-
edge in the scheme of a three-term necessary relation. It is a realist theory rooted in his
intentionality theory, which demands the strict identity or isomorphism of structure
or form between the knower and the thing known. This comes about from the natural-
ist position Aquinas adopts regarding the philosophy of mind, which in turn is at log-
gerheads with the foundationalist philosophy of mind and its accompanying
internalism so common to modern philosophy, and with the resurgence of mentalism
in recent cognitive theory.31
This chapter is followed by a lengthy appendix divided in two parts: one from the
Commentary and the second from the Supplementum for the Summa Theologiae. This
set of texts offers a tidy summary of Aquinas’s analysis of sensation; furthermore, these
texts, in particular those from the Commentary, are the best and most lucid exposi-
tions of a thesis of intentionality found in Aquinas’s many writings. A second Appendix
discusses externalism and foundationalism.

appendix 1(I)
A Final Summary of Texts from the Commentary
on the Soul
In concluding this analysis, a rather lengthy series of passages from the Commentary is
provided. In these texts, Aquinas nicely sums up his treatment of sensation and perception:
While it is true that every recipient receives a form from an agent, there are different ways of receiving
form. Form received in a patient from an agent sometimes has the same mode of existence in the recipient
as in the agent; which occurs when the patient is disposed to the form in the same way as the agent. For
whatever is received is received into the being of the recipient so that, if the recipient is disposed as the
agent is, the form comes to be in the recipient in the manner in which it exists in the agent. And in this case,
the form is not imparted without the matter.

In other words, matter is the receiver of forms; this is a material change. Aquinas continues
with this discussion in the following text:
For although the numerically one and the same division of matter that is in the agent does not become the
recipient’s, the latter becomes, in a way, the same as the material agent, in as much as it acquires a material
disposition like that which was in the agent. And it is in this way that air receives the influence of fire, and
any other passive thing in nature the action that alters its natural quality.

31
  In his After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), Kerr develops these themes at
some length. Cf. ch. 2, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  187

That this is not the only type of reception is indicated by the following passage in which
Aquinas spells out the possibility for intentionality:
Sometimes, however, the recipient receives the form into a mode of existence other than that which
the form has in the agent. When, that is, the recipient’s material disposition to receive form does not
resemble the material disposition in the agent. In these cases, the form is taken into the recipient
‘without matter’, the recipient being assimilated to the agent in respect of form and not in respect
of matter. And it is thus that a sense receives form without matter, the form having, in the sense, a
different mode of being from which it has in the object sensed. It is in the latter case that it has a
material mode of being [esse naturale], but in the sense faculty it has a cognitional and spiritual [esse
intentionale] mode.

Aquinas next provides an analogous example of a seal on wax to help explain his point:
Aristotle finds an apt example of this in the imprint of a seal on wax. The disposition of the wax to the
image is not the same as that of the iron or gold to the image. Hence, wax, he says, takes a sign, i.e. a
shape or image, of what is gold or bronze but not precisely as gold or bronze. For the wax takes a like-
ness of the gold seal in respect of the image, but not in respect of the seal’s intrinsic disposition to be a
gold seal.

Aquinas then uses this analogy to explicate his account of sensation:

In a like manner, the sense is affected by the sense object with a colour or taste or flavour or sound ‘not in
respect of what each is called as a particular thing’, i.e. it is not affected by a coloured stone precisely as stone,
or sweet honey precisely as honey, because in the sense there is not such a disposition to the form as there is
in these substances. But it is affected as such by them precisely as coloured, or tasty, or as having this or that
‘informing’ principle or form. For the sense is assimilated to the sensible object in point of form, not in point
of the disposition of matter.

Next, Aquinas discusses the organ/faculty distinction:

Aristotle concludes about the organ of sense. Since from his teaching that the sense receives forms into
cognition immaterially [intentionally], which is true of the intellect also, one might be led to suppose that
sense was an incorporeal faculty like the intellect. In order to preclude this error, Aristotle assigns to sense
an organ, observing that the ‘primary sensitive part’, i.e. organ of sense, is that in which a power or faculty
of this sort resides, namely a capacity to receive forms without matter [i.e. intentionally].

This passage reiterates the significant distinction between sense organ and sense power or
faculty. Organ and faculty are explained, in the following text, after the fashion of matter
and form:
For a sense organ, e.g. the eye, shares the same being with the faculty or power itself, though it differs in
essence or definition, the faculty being as it were the form of the organ. [. . .] So he goes on to say ‘an
extended magnitude’, i.e. a bodily organ, is ‘what receives sensation’, i.e. is the subject of the sense faculty,
as the matter is subject of form; and yet the magnitude and the sensitivity of sense differ by definition,
the sense [faculty] being a certain ratio, i.e. proportion and form and capacity, of the magnitude.
(Emphasis added.)

This section concludes with the articulation of a brief restatement of the thesis of intentionality
put forward by Aquinas in his Aristotelian Commentary:
His analysis also gives us the answer to another question, namely, why plants do not feel, though they have
some share in the soul and are affected by certain sense objects, i.e. tangible things, as well as by heat and
cold. The reason why they do not feel is that they lack the proportion necessary for sensation; to be more
specific, they lack that balance between extremes of the tangible qualities which is a prerequisite of the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

188  the necessary conditions for perception

organ of touch, apart from which there can be no sensation. Hence, they have no intrinsic principle for
receiving forms ‘apart from matter’, that is to say, no sense. They are affected and undergo changes only
materially. (Commentary on the Soul, nos 552–7).

appendix 1(II)
A Final Summary of Texts from the Supplement
to the Summa Theologiae
In order to indicate that it was not only in his Aristotelian commentary that Aquinas provided
an account of sensation, the following extended set of texts from the Supplement to the Summa
Theologiae contains a rather precise summary of his theory of sensation. This indicates the
textual claims noted earlier that Aquinas wrote his Commentary in close proximity of his
writing the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. While the following set of passages is from
the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae, nonetheless it is structurally similar to these issues
in sensation and perception treated in the Prima Pars. Aquinas writes:
A thing is perceptible to the senses of the body in two ways, directly and indirectly. A thing is perceptible
directly if it can act directly on the bodily senses. And a thing can act directly either on sense as such or on
a particular sense as such. That which acts directly in this second way on a sense is called a proper sensible,
for instance colour in relation to the sight, and sound in relation to the hearing. But because sense as such
makes use of a bodily organ, nothing can be received therein except corporeally, since whatever is received
into a thing is therein after the mode of the recipient. Hence all sensibles act on the sense as such, according
to their magnitude: and consequently magnitude and all its consequences, such as movement, rest, num-
ber, and the like, are called common sensibles, and yet they are direct objects of sense. (This is the necessary
condition for the formation of a species impressa in the sense faculty.)
An indirect object of sense [i.e. the incidental object of sense] is that which does not act on the
sense, neither as sense nor as a particular sense, but is annexed to those things that act on sense
directly: for instance Socrates; the son of Diares; a friend and the like which are the direct object of
the intellect's knowledge in the universal, and in the particular are the object of the cogitative power
[vis cogitativa] in human knowers, and of the estimative power [vis aestimativa] in other animals. The
external sense is said to perceive things of this kind, although indirectly, when the apprehensive
power (whose province it is to know directly this thing known), from that which is sensed directly,
apprehends them at once and without any doubt or discourse (thus we see that a person is alive from
the fact that she speaks): otherwise the sense is not said to perceive it even indirectly. (Summa
Theologiae, Supp., q. 82 a. 3)

This concludes the summary texts on sensation in Thomas.

appendix 2
Externalism versus Foundationalism in Aquinas
It is important to realize exactly what Aquinas proposes in undertaking his philosophical
analyses. This discussion illustrates how Aquinas differs in his metaphilosophy from that
adopted by many early modern philosophers. Aquinas is not concerned about providing a
criterion for distinguishing a veridical perception of perceived proper sensibles from a non-
veridical perception. The foundationalist epistemology common to Cartesian and Lockean
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  189

sceptical worries about the relation between image and extra-mental causal object at any given
moment of perceptual awareness—what Descartes called the ‘objective reality’ and the ‘formal
reality’—is not Aquinas’s concern. Accordingly, a philosopher with foundationalist concerns
harbouring a basic doubt over veridical awareness based on representationalist worries, and
further concerned with what characteristics distinguish a veridical awareness from a non-
veridical awareness, will view with askance Aquinas’s brushing off this ‘critical’ problem. In his
earlier work, Pasnau asks this set of foundationalist queries of Aquinas; moreover, he finds fault
with the analysis Aquinas proposes because it dos not address these foundationalist worries.32
MacDonald also argues for a version of foundationalism in Aquinas, especially related to
Aquinas’s construction of scientia in his system. MacDonald argues that an externalist account
of mental acts for Aquinas ‘is untenable as an interpretation of Aquinas, however, for he quite
explicitly commits himself to a strong version of internalism with regard to paradigmatic
knowledge and justification’. MacDonald justifies this position on the grounds that Aquinas
admits justification only if the knower possesses ‘the grounds constitutive of his justification’.33
MacDonald even suggests that ‘it seems to me clear that Aquinas’s own grounds for thinking
our faculties reliable are similar to Descartes’s. This devolves to the claim that the reliability of
our knowing faculties depends on his philosophical theology.’ That this structural closeness
with the Cartesian arguments posed by MacDonald is problematic is a dominant theme in
these discussions.
In contrast to these claims, however, one must recall Haldane’s metaphilosophical point:
Aquinas seeks to explain, not to justify.34 Aquinas is not undertaking a foundationalist analysis
of veridical perception.35 In his essay on foundationalist interpretations of Aquinas’s
epistemology, A. N. Williams also argues, like Stump, against placing Thomas in the
foundationalist camp.36 Such an internalist position, in addition, would appear to run counter
to the general externalist thrust of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. As MacDonald himself notes,
Aquinas begins his metaphilosophical approach with his ontology, not his epistemology. It
appears to be a stretch to place Aquinas in the internalist camp.
Aquinas seems never to consider seriously the possibility that representationalism is a viable
epistemological position. Behind this confidence in direct realism probably rests a teleological
conviction. This version of teleology is similar to the epistemological naturalism of James
Gibson. Gibson appeals to our evolutionary development over time as a sufficient account of
the arrangement of our sense faculties. Ross broaches this subject in considering matters of
faith. He suggests that one might suppose that a human person, in Aquinas’s account, is ‘a
cognitive device [which has been] constructed (or has evolved) successfully. [. . .] Suppose (by

32
  Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997); see also Pasnau’s Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 308.
33
  Scott MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, in N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163–8.
34
  Haldane suggests that Aristotle and Aquinas adopt a different architectonic of proceeding from what
one finds in modern philosophy: John Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association 73 (1999), 38.
35
  It is at this juncture that the ‘ante-’ or ‘post-’modernism tendencies illustrated in the texts of Thomas
enter the picture. Aquinas does not adopt the foundationalist metaphilosophy common to modern philos-
ophy; he is unabashedly premodern.
36
  A. N. Williams, ‘Is Aquinas a Foundationalist?’, New Blackfriars 91(1031) (2010), 20–45.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

190  the necessary conditions for perception

adaption, of course) humans “fit” the earth . . . ’.37 Ross would appear to accept, at least in
principle, the evolutionist account discussed as rooted in the work of Gibson. Ross does
suggest, at least in the mind of John Jenkins, ‘that Aquinas was a reliabilist in epistemic matters’,
and that human persons have a ‘fit with the environment’.38
It was noted in an earlier chapter that Stump denies that evolution could be a sufficient
explanation of Aquinas’s account of the reliability of sense faculties. Stump argues that God
created our sense faculties to understand his creation accounts for their reliability. Stump
notes: ‘it has seemed to some contemporary thinkers that a theory of knowledge at least similar
to Aquinas’s can form part of a non-theistic worldview.’ She continues: ‘For God as the guarantor
of the reliability of human cognitive equipment, on the view of some thinkers it is possible to
substitute evolution and to suppose that the theory of evolution provides roughly the same
support for such a theory of knowledge that Aquinas’s theism does.’39 MacDonald suggests a
response similar to that put forward by Stump when he asks why Aquinas seemed ‘unconcerned
with skeptical worries that seem to us both clear and pressing’; McDonald responds: ‘It has
often been suggested that Aquinas’s thoroughly theological world view caused him not to take
possibilities of this sort seriously, since they would entail that creatures created by God are for
the most part radically mistaken about the nature of the world.’40 In his Warrant and Proper
Function,41 Plantinga argues that a naturalistic account of the evolutionary development of
cognitive faculties is not sufficient to guarantee the reliability of these faculties. He accordingly
argues that reliability entails a supernatural or divine based ontological theory. In ‘Cognitive
Faculties and Evolutionary Naturalism’,42 Cantens argues against this irrationality of naturalism
held by Plantinga. In addition, in asking the reliability question about naturalistic-based
cognitive developmental theories, Plantinga appears to adopt a Cartesian methodology seeking
justification and not explanation. While Aquinas of course appealed to the divine plan as
exemplified through the divine ideas in God’s mind, nonetheless this order might still
correspond to what evolutionists like Gibson refer to with their ecological theory of cognition.
In this sense, there is a structural similarity between Aquinas and Gibson. That Gibson, in
Aquinas’s mind, did not provide a sufficient explanation is correct; but he did at least provide a
necessary explanation.
Stump, MacDonald, and Plantinga provide a variation, noted earlier, of what some moral
theorists would call ‘theological definism’ for moral judgments; in this case, however, it is for
the justification of the sense faculties and their ontological roots. In effect, this position
challenges any naturalistic account of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. In opposition, one might
argue that Aquinas reaches towards the divine plan only as the final question in his philosophy
of mind rather than the first.

37
  James Ross, ‘Aquinas on Belief and Knowledge’, in William A. Frank and Girard J. Etzkorn (eds),
Essays honoring Allan B. Wolter (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1985), 250.
38
  John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 176, 178.
39
 Stump, Aquinas, 524, n. 96. 40
  MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, 185.
41
  Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); the interested
reader might consult James Beilby’s collection of essays on the Plantinga position, Naturalism Defeated?
Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2002).
42
 Bernardo Cantens, ‘Cognitive Faculties and Evolutionary Naturalism’, in Intelligence and the
Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 201–8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  191

In opposition to Stump’s and Plantinga’s analysis and MacDonald’s suggestion, this study has
argued that an evolutionary position is sufficient to account for the logic of Aquinas’s argument
about the development of the human set of sense faculties. In other words, Aquinas believed
that the perceiving apparatus is fitted naturally for its object. Kerr discusses this aspect of
Aquinas’s naturalism in the following way, which is also an implied response to the
foundationalism and Cartesian connections expressed by MacDonald:
Our experience of things is not a confrontation with something utterly alien, but a way of absorbing, and
being absorbed by, the world to which we naturally belong. The mind does not primarily depict, reflect or
mirror the world; rather, it assimilates the world as it is assimilated to the world. That is an easy claim to
make but, of course, very hard to credit as a philosophical account of our way of knowing, and thus of
actually being the world. Much else perhaps needs to be in place. Thomas takes for granted this non-sub-
ject-centered way of being in the world. We are inclined to begin with the mind, asking how our mental
acts relate to the world; he begins on the contrary with the external objects which evoke intellectual activity
on our part, and thus bring to fulfillment the capacities with which we are endowed.43

In writing ‘We are inclined to begin with the mind’, Kerr shows where the foundationalist
metaphilosophical principle of modern philosophy leads us. It appears that the foundationalist
and internalist worries common to Cartesian modern philosophy hover over these criticisms
of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The constant search for a ‘reliabilist foundationalist criterion’
is, one suspects, behind these philosophical queries. However, to the contrary, Aquinas begins,
not with the mind, but with the world of external objects. Descartes and Locke, however, do
not adopt the teleological, naturalistic perspective adopted by Aquinas.
Throughout his discussions of sensation, Aquinas maintains his epistemological realism,
which is rooted in his naturalistic philosophy of mind. The following passage illustrates his
continual tendency towards ontological realism. He is concerned lest one suppose that the idea
or image itself is the direct object of an act of sense awareness:
It must be noted that the mode of reception of the imagination does not result in real sensation, because
every passive power, according to its specific nature, is determined to some special active principle, since a
power as such bears relation to what with respect to which it is said to be the power. Wherefore, since the
proper active principle in external sensation is a thing existing outside the soul and not an intention thereof
existing in the imagination or reason, if the organ of sense is not moved by external things, but by the imag-
ination or other higher powers, there will be no true and veridical awareness. (Summa Theologiae, Supp., q.
82 a. 3; emphasis added)

In opposition to the thrust towards representationalism common in much modern philosophy,

Aquinas held that the qualitatively distinct proper sensibles functioned as causal factors in the
external world; these sensible objects are knowable. Given this ontological claim, there are
objects to which the external sense faculties can be ‘fitted’. With this teleology, he assumes that
more often than not humans do perceive veridically. Therefore, fundamentally he is concerned
over what must be the case epistemologically if an adequate analysis and causal explanation of
veridical sensation are to be provided. How might this be explained is the driving issue as
Aquinas undertakes what contemporary philosophers call ‘the philosophy of mind’. Aquinas
shares the same set of aporias that Wittgenstein and Ryle posed for Cartesian epistemology. In
fact, in considering this connection between the metaphilosophy of medieval philosophy and
similar philosophical modes of operating in late twentieth-century philosophy, Kerr uses the

43
 Kerr, After Aquinas, 31.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

192  the necessary conditions for perception

term ‘Wittgensteinian Thomists’.44 The French analytic philosopher Roger Pouviet, in his Après
Wittgenstein, saint Thomas, when referring to the work of Anscombe, Geach, and Kenny, uses
the phrase ‘un compendium de thomisme wittgensteinien’.45 Much like these Wittgensteinians,
Aquinas presupposes that whatever veridical perception is, it is not searching for a relation of
adequacy found in an internal image compared with that in the external world. Aquinas does
not assume that the ‘match’, which is one way to translate Aquinas’s term ‘adequatio’, is in
principle fundamentally flawed. In discussing Geach’s account of philosophy of mind, Haldane
writes: ‘Having dismissed pragmatist, performative and correspondence accounts, [Geach]
advances Thomas Aquinas’s “conformative” theory (my term) according to which the truth of
a judgement by A that x is f consists in the co-occurrence of one and the same form in the
object and in the mind of A.’46 In all of this, Aquinas would agree with Putnam in rejecting what
Putnam once referred to as ‘the inner theatre of the mind’. In his Reason, Truth and History,
Putnam articulated his worries about any representationalist theory of mind and meaning.47
Kerr writes: ‘Thomas sees no gap between mind and world, thought and things, that needs to be
bridged, either by idealist/empiricist representations or (as with Barth) by divine intervention.’48
If a perceiver does not perceive veridically, then this is due, Aquinas proposes, to a failure of
one of the necessary conditions. Therefore, it is the case that Aquinas’s interests lie principally
in providing an adequate explanatory account for the possibility of normal sensation. Hence,
his principal philosophical interest is not in providing a foundationalist criterion for
distinguishing any given image or awareness as veridical or non-veridical. He is not a
foundationalist. In other words, he assumes that there are times when normal sensation
happens. His intention is to offer a philosophical analysis explaining the possibility of these
instances of normal sensation and perception. Admittedly, there is a further question, and an
important question at that, concerning the determination of when an instance of ‘normal’
perception occurs. This is the foundationalist question that Pasnau puts to Aquinas. Pasnau, in
both his treatises on Aquinas—Thomas Aquinas and Human Nature and Medieval Theories of
Cognition—puts Aquinas into a foundationalist camp. To the contrary, Aquinas is not overly
concerned with this second question establishing foundationalist criteria determining an
instance of veridical sensation from an instance of non-veridical sensation. The texts reiterate
this claim. His principal philosophical concern, granting that a perceiver at times has veridical
awarenesses, is to analyse and explain what must hold epistemologically if the possibility of
these instances is to be explained. The philosophy-of-mind programme Aquinas undertakes by
developing a naturalist epistemology and philosophy of mind is at variance with the dualism
common to Cartesian foundationalism.
The articulation of these metaphilosophical differences is a difficult philosophical undertaking.
Nonetheless, as Kerr notes, Aquinas adopted such a position, as do several contemporary
philosophers of mind. Note Kerr’s analysis in the following passage:

44
  Ibid., 28. Kerr’s book is a wide-ranging discussion of the different ways in which the philosophy of
Aquinas fits into contemporary philosophy and theology.
45
 Roger Pouviet, Après Wittgenstein, saint Thomas (Paris: PUF, 1997); English translation, After
Wittgenstein, St Thomas, by Michael Sherwin, OP (Notre Dame, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2006).
46
  John Haldane, review of Peter Geach’s Truth and Hope, Journal of Philosophy 99(3) (2002), 159.
47
 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, vol. 3: Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); see also Haldane’s analysis of Putnam’s arguments in ‘Putnam on Intentionality’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52(3) (1992), 671–82.
48
 Kerr, After Aquinas, 30.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

the necessary conditions for perception  193

In brief, looking for an alternative to modern philosophical claims to the effect that we never see the world
immediately but always through intervenient entities of some kind (thus opening scepticism about whether
things really are as they appear to us), these philosophers look to the natural or naive realism which sees
no need for any such intermediaries between us and the world.49

In his Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas, Jenkins argues for externalism in Aquinas on
the conceptual or intellectual level: ‘I am attributing to Aquinas an externalism of concepts or,
better, a conceptual externalism. Conceptual externalism, which is current in philosophical
literature, asserts that the individuation of at least some of our concepts not only depends on
what is in our minds (as we have access to this through introspection), but also depends on the
environment.’50 What is interesting here is that Jenkins considers Aquinas as an externalist on
the conceptual level and not merely on the perceptual level; Jenkins argues for externalism on
the perceptual level too.51

49
  Ibid.
50
 Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith, 116–17. While the focus of much of Jenkins’s admirable study is on an
elucidation of the propositions of religious faith, nonetheless he writes: ‘Aquinas’s view of the warrant for
faith is epistemically externalist and parallels his view on the assent to principles in mostly human scien-
tiae’ (p. 186).
51
  Jenkins, ‘Aquinas on the Veracity of the Intellect’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

8
The Sensus Communis
The First of the Internal Sense Faculties

The next block in building Aquinas’s theory of perception is an analytic account of the
internal senses. Aquinas again adopts a rigorous faculty psychology. The internal
senses have a greater and a more detailed contribution to make in human perception
than is suggested in the writings of many classical and contemporary epistemologists
from Locke and Berkeley to Russell, Moore, and Ayer. In opposition to much modern
and contemporary accounts of inner sense by the internal senses, Aquinas does not
refer exclusively to acts of introspective awareness. On the contrary, he posits a unique
set of inner sense faculties, each of which has a specific role to play in a perceiver’s
awareness of the world. The internal sense faculties exhibit more cognitive capabilities
than the standard use of ‘itches’ and ‘tickles’ common in the writings of mid-century
analytic philosophers. Yet an analysis of this section of his philosophy of mind is not
always clear. Even a sympathetic critic like Kenny writes: ‘Aquinas’s treatment of the
inner senses is not one of the more satisfactory parts of his philosophy of mind.’1 Stump
too gives scant attention to the internal senses: ‘in what follows, I will consider only
phantasia and imagination among the internal senses.’2

Cognitive Possibility and the Internal Senses in Thomas

Aquinas posits the internal senses because human awareness of the external world is
not explained adequately only in terms of an awareness of the ‘sensibles’—both proper
and common—of objects in the world. Referring to what might be taken as an early
twentieth-century paradigm for these questions, Aquinas claims that the awareness of
sense data or impressions of qualia alone do not exhaust human perception. The
awareness of sense qualities in the mind is not sufficient to explain human perception.
Aquinas appeals to the pre-analytic data of sense awareness. The need for positing
1
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 39.
2
 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 248. Stump’s account of mental events in
Aquinas is, on the whole, extraordinarily good. The distinction she makes between phantasia and imagina-
tion needs to be discussed. It should be noted that Stump does not consider the vis cogitativa, which is an
important faculty of the internal sensorium. She appears to consider the vis aestimativa as coextensive with
the vis cogitativa in Aquinas; however, to equate both faculties is a textual and a structural category
mistake.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  195

additional sense faculties comes about because of the inadequacy of the external senses
alone to provide a sufficient explanatory account of human awareness. The following
passage from the Summa Theologiae suggests this mode of operating with the internal
senses:
Because nature does not fail in necessary things, there must needs be as many actions of
the sensitive soul as may suffice for the life of a perfect animal [i.e. a perceiver]. If any of these
actions cannot be reduced to one and the same principle, they must be assigned to diverse
powers. This is because a power of the soul is nothing else than the proximate principle of
the soul’s operation. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

If the preceding analysis of Aquinas’s theory of sensation is correct, then the intentional
awareness of an object in the external world is an ‘awareness of P’, where ‘P’ is a sensible
object, either a proper sensible (colour, sound, taste, etc.) or a common sensible (shape,
motion, number, etc.) in the external world. Moreover, the object ‘P’ is perceivable
only in conjunction with the other two necessary conditions for sensation, namely, a
sufficient medium and a properly disposed faculty. Aquinas’s contention is, however,
that this analysis alone does not explain sufficiently what a perceiver is aware of during
an act of awareness. There is more to sense knowledge than an awareness of empiricist
primary and secondary qualities—the proper and the common sensibles. Aquinas
parts company radically with the British empiricists.
The force of Aquinas’s argument is that if knowers manifest knowledge behaviour
that cannot be explained sufficiently through external sensation alone, then this epis-
temological datum requires an additional account, which provides an ontological
underpinning for the mental acts of sensation. Like the external sense analysis,
Aquinas provides an explanation and not a foundationalist position. In considering
the external senses, Turnbull posed the question:
I think it is helpful to suppose that both Plato and Aristotle put to themselves the following
question: Granted the existence of the unperceived material world, how is it possible for sen-
tient beings, qua sentient, to become aware of it? Or, if you please, how is it possible for them
to perceive it, or rather, parts of it? And I think the answer that both gave to this question is:
Only by way of perceiving colors, sounds, odors, hards and softs, and the like.3

Turnbull’s claim is commensurate with Aquinas’s metaphilosophy articulated by

Haldane, placing emphasis on explanation and not on criterial justification; this same
method is used in the analysis of the inner senses. In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas
sets forth the clearest and shortest account for what he takes to be the ontological need
for the internal senses:
We must observe that for the life of a perfect animal [i.e. one with sense knowledge], the animal
should apprehend a thing not only at the actual times of sensation, but also when the thing is

3
  Robert G. Turnbull, ‘The Role of the “Special Sensibles” in the Perception Theories of Plato and
Aristotle’, in Robert G. Turnbull and Peter Machamer (eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1978), 7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

196  The Sensus Communis

absent. Otherwise, since animal motion and action follow apprehension, an animal would not
be moved to seek something absent; the contrary of which we may observe especially in perfect
animals, which are moved by progression, for they are moved towards something apprehended
and absent. Therefore, through the sensitive soul, an animal must not only receive the species
of sensible things, when it is actually affected by them, but it must also retain and preserve them.
[. . .] Therefore [. . .] the power [external sense faculties], which receives the species of sensible
things, must be distinct from the power [internal sense faculties] that preserves them. (Summa
Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

Next, Aquinas affirms that not only do the internal senses retain sensible species, but
also the three faculties of inner sense engage in other types of mental awareness. This is
based, he believes, on the pre-analytic data of mental awareness experienced by ordi-
nary perceivers: a naturalistic, explanatory motif directs this inquiry.
Again, we must observe that if an animal were moved by pleasing and disagreeable things only
as affecting the sense, there would be no need to suppose that an animal has a power [sense
faculty] besides the apprehension of these forms which the senses perceive, and in which the
animal takes pleasure, or from which it shrinks with horror. But the animal needs to seek or to
avoid certain things, not only because they are pleasing or otherwise to the senses, but also
because of other advantages and uses, or disadvantages; an example is the sheep that runs away
when it sees a wolf, not because of its colour or shape, but because it is a natural enemy. So too,
a bird gathers together straws, not because they are pleasant to the sense, but because they are
useful for building its nest. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

These examples lead Aquinas to postulate the need for additional faculties and corre-
sponding functions for the internal senses: ‘Animals, therefore, need to perceive such
intentions, which the external sense does not perceive. Now some distinct principle is
necessary for this, since the perception of sensible forms comes by an immutation
caused by the sensible, which is not the case with the perception of the above inten-
tions’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4 ad 2; emphasis added).
These passages indicate the mode of explanation that Aquinas adopts as he seeks to
establish a complete explanatory theory of sensation and perception involving the
external and the internal senses.

The Four Internal Senses

These texts reveal that for Aquinas, a simple direct awareness of sensibles, while neces-
sary, is not sufficient to account for sensation and perception. There appears to be a
fourfold reason for his claim, each of which indicates the need for a unique faculty of
the internal senses.

(a)  First, Aquinas claims that knowers not only are directly aware of brute sensa-
tions, which are the proper and the common sensibles, but they are also simply aware
of complete ‘wholes’. A perceiver is not aware only of a red colour patch, but of the red
patch together with a certain shape, a certain size, and so forth with the rest of the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  197

proper and the common sensibles pertaining to any given perception. The awareness
of ‘complex wholes’ as well as a discrimination of the different genera of the proper
sensibles, one from another, force Aquinas into postulating the faculty of the sensus
communis.
The proper sense [external sensorium] judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from
other things, which come under the same sense. For instance, by discerning white from black
or green. But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet, because what discerns
between two sense qualities must know both. Hence, this discerning judgement must be
assigned to the sensus communis. To it, as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses
must be referred, and by it, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived. (Summa
Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4 ad 2)

This unifying function of the sensibles comes about because the sensus communis is
the common root of the external sensorium. A text from the Commentary makes this
point: ‘Now the sensitivity flows to the organs of all the five senses from one common
root, to which in turn are transmitted and in which are terminated, all the sensations
occurring in each particular organ’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 609). The sensus
communis, therefore, synthesizes a composite sensible, or a concrete whole, from the
discrete data received from the external senses.
(b)  Secondly, there is a need for an additional sense faculty, which Aquinas refers to
as the phantasia or imagination. This faculty retains or conserves the complex impres-
sion which has been perceived as a unified whole by the sensus communis. ‘For the
reception of sensible forms, the proper sense and the sensus communis are appointed.
[. . .] But for the retention and preservation of these forms, the phantasia or imagination
is appointed, being as it were a storehouse [thesaurus] of forms received through the
senses’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4; emphasis added). In the Summa Contra
Gentiles, Aquinas writes: ‘The powers, which preserve the forms that are not actually
being apprehended, are not “apprehensive” powers, but “storehouses” [thesauri], of the
apprehensive faculties; for example, the imagination, which is the storehouse of forms
apprehended by the sense’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 74). The second of the
internal senses, therefore, is that faculty which conserves or retains sense impressions
gained through the external sensorium. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, the Latin term
used by Aquinas for the imagination is ‘imaginatio’.4
(c)  Aquinas’s third reason for positing the internal sensorium is his conviction
that human perceivers are aware of individuals as specific entities and not just as the
‘bundles of sensations’ so common to British empiricism. The exact nature of the vis
aestimativa in animals and the vis cogitativa in humans will be analysed later. Suffice
it to say now that the mental act of the former apprehends that which is agreeable or
disagreeable or that which is useful or to be feared, while the latter perceives the

4
  The Latin text for this passage is the following: ‘Virtus autem quae conservant formas non apparehensas
in actu dicit non esse vires apprehensivas, sed thesaurus virtutum apprehensivarum; sicut imaginatio, quae est
thesaurus formarum apprehensarum per sensum’: Summa Contra Gentiles (Rome: Marietti, 1946).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

198  The Sensus Communis

individual as a concretum. Aquinas argues that this facet of sense experience cannot be
explained through direct awareness when referring to the external sensorium alone.
Accordingly, he needs another internal sense, which he refers to as the vis aestimativa
in animals having only sense knowledge and as the vis cogitativa in human perceivers.
Aquinas discusses these faculties in the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra
Gentiles, and the Commentary on the Soul, among other places:
Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions that are not received through the senses, the
aestimative power is appointed. [. . .] Therefore, the power, which in other animals is called the
natural aestimative [vis aestimativa], in human persons is called the cogitative [vis cogitativa],
which by some sort of comparison discovers these intentions. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4;
emphasis added)
Accordingly, it [vis cogitativa] is aware of this human person as this individual human person
and this tree as this tree. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 398)

(d)  Fourthly and lastly, a correlative principle to the vis aestimativa in animals and
the vis cogitativa in humans is not only that are these are ‘unsensed intentions’—what
later scholastic philosophers would refer to as ‘intentiones non sensatae’, an object of
awareness—but that these perceptions also are conserved and retained. This ability to
conserve these ‘intentiones non sensatae’ is the function of the sense memory: ‘And
for their preservation [the intentiones not received through the external senses], the
memorative power, which is a storehouse for such intentions’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 78 a. 4; emphasis added). Aquinas also writes in the Summa Contra Gentiles: ‘The
memory, which is a second storehouse of intentions, this one for intentions apprehended
without the senses, as when the sheep apprehends the enmity of the wolf ’ (Summa
Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 74; emphasis added).5
The method used in establishing the faculties of the internal senses is similar to what
Aquinas used with his explanatory account of the external senses.
(a) A human perceiver is aware of complex wholes.
(b) A human perceiver retains the awareness of these wholes.
(c) A human perceiver is aware of individuals and not just of mere bundles of
sensations.
(d) A human perceiver retains that awareness of individuals as individuals.
In order to account for these four distinct internal sense mental acts, Aquinas posits
the four internal senses of sensus communis, imagination (vis imaginativa), vis cogita-
tiva (the vis aestimativa in animals), and sense memory (vis memorativa). In other
words, Aquinas is convinced that these four internal sense faculties are necessary
in  order to account for the pre-analytic facets of sense knowledge and perceptual

5
  The Latin text of the preceding passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles reads as follows: ‘Memoria,
secundum ipsum, quae est secundus thesaurus intentionum apprehensarum abseque sensu; sicut quum ovis
apprenhendit inimieitiam lupi’ (ibid.).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  199

awareness. This is a continuation of his faculty-based philosophy of mind. He uses this

mode of explanation as opposed to epistemic justification throughout his philosophy
of mind.

Aquinas versus Avicenna

Throughout this discussion of the faculties of both the external and the internal
­sensorium, one must note that Aquinas is not pulling sense faculties arbitrarily out of
a  cognitive magician’s hat. In a manner of proceeding somewhat similar to what
Strawson proposed at mid-century, Aquinas submits to philosophical analysis what he
believes perceivers know in a pre-analytic fashion. Furthermore, he offers epistemo-
logical categories in order to provide an explanatory account for the totality of human
perception.6 To interpret this experience, which Strawson once referred to as ‘the massive
central core of human thinking’,7 Aquinas makes use of his epistemological principle
that a knowing power is determined by its acts and objects. If there is a specific type of
mental activity, then there must be a corresponding capacity or ability necessary to
explain these mental acts. This epistemological principle permits him to posit consist-
ently the various internal sense faculties. If there is a characteristic activity, this activity
requires an explanatory account, which Aquinas believes is best offered through the
naturalist philosophy of mind common to his faculty psychology. He suggests that
some capacity or disposition is required as a necessary condition in order to explain
the mental acts under discussion.
Using this method to determine the principles of establishing the internal senses,
Aquinas rejects Avicenna’s account of the number of the faculties necessary to explain
the functioning of the internal senses.
Avicenna, however, assigns between the aestimative and the imaginative a fifth power, which
combines and divides imaginary forms. As when from the imaginary form of gold, and the
imaginary form of mountain, we compose the one form of a golden mountain, which we have
never seen. But this operation is not to be found in animals other than humans, in whom the
imaginative power suffices for this purpose. [. . .] So there is no need to assign more than four
interior powers of the sensitive part, namely the sensus communis, the imagination, the aesti-
mative (or the vis cogitativa) and the memorative powers. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

This passage exhibits clearly how Aquinas develops his method for establishing the
specific sense faculties for the internal senses. His claim is that the activity of the fifth
internal sense faculty postulated by Avicenna is not sufficiently distinct from the activ-
ity of the imagination. It follows then that there is no need in this case to postulate an

6
  To use Strawson’s once-familiar terms, Aquinas provides a ‘descriptive metaphysics’ of knowledge and
not a ‘revisionary metaphysics’ of knowledge. Descriptive metaphysics regards the structure and categories
of everyday thought as givens; revisionary metaphysics rejects the forms of everyday thought for a priori
explanatory structures.
7
  P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), p. xiv.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

200  The Sensus Communis

additional faculty of inner sense other than the imagination; the imagination itself can
account for the activity of combining various elements of sensation in order to form
complex images of things, which have never been observed in the external world:
‘There are two operations in the sensitive part. (a) One is limited to immutation, and
thus the operation of the senses takes place when the senses are impressed by the sensi-
ble. (b) The other is formation [i.e. image construction], insofar as the imagination
forms for itself an image of an absent thing, or even of something never seen’ (Summa
Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2 ad 2).
In the preceding text, the term ‘image’ will be classified as one use of phantasm in the
analysis of this much-used but somewhat muddled term in Aristotelian epistemology.
Furthermore, in this discussion Aquinas makes use of what later philosophers would
call the more familiar ‘Occam’s razor’. That Aquinas was aware of this methodological
device is clear from what he writes in the Summa Theologiae: ‘quod potest compleri per
pauciora principia, non fit per plura’ (I q. 2 a. 3). Hence, one must not multiply the
number of entities postulated if fewer can resolve the aporia under discussion. By a
judicious use of his own methodological principle of Occam’s razor, Aquinas claims
that Avicenna’s theoretical position lacks warranted philosophical grounds for posit-
ing a fifth internal sense faculty. Aquinas’s gambit is that the imagination itself is
the faculty which can form images of things not directly perceived—the mermaids,
unicorns, winged horses, and leprechauns—which caused twentieth-century philoso-
phers who pondered the writings of Meinong so much anguish.
Much analysis must be undertaken in order to elucidate the functions of the facul-
ties of the internal senses. The greater part of the remainder of this study consists in
completing that task. Furthermore, the argument will be put forward that the inter-
nal senses, especially the vis cogitativa and the sense memory, play critical roles in
the explanation of concept formation through the intellectus agens. The internal
senses do not have for their objects only the ‘faint’ impressions of the external senses,
as Hume proposed for the nature and scope of inner sense. Quite the contrary: the
internal senses are distinctly creative and serve as the locus of a perceiver’s aware-
ness of an individual as an individual of a natural kind and not merely as a bundle of
sensations. Both the classical British empiricists and the Continental rationalists
blurred the workings of the internal senses with the functioning of the external
senses. In the history of Western philosophy, therefore, these muddles caused the
sophistication of the internal sensorium found in Aquinas to be misunderstood or
neglected completely.8
Inner sense for Aquinas is not reducible only to an awareness ‘through the mind’s
eye’, as it were. This dimension of ‘inner sensation’ begins with Locke and Descartes. In
his The Metaphysics of Mind, Kenny argues that philosophical confusions on the nature
of the self grow out of the view of inner sense when equated with introspection found

  One task of this book is to help set the historical and structural records straight.
8
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  201

in the writings of modern philosophers, especially Locke and Descartes.9 Often when
Kenny uses the concept of ‘inner sense’ in discussing Aquinas, he appears to be con-
cerned with the philosophical problems associated with ‘introspection’ as coextensive
with ‘inner sense’. Kenny is concerned that what he considers to be an erroneous view
of the self as the subject of inner sensation grew out of this conflation of inner sense
with introspection. Kerr also considers this non-introspective dimension of Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind.10

The Sensus Communis

Following Aristotle, the first of the internal sense faculties that Aquinas considers is
the sensus communis. This term is often translated as ‘common sense’. In order to avoid
confusion, it must be noted that Aquinas uses this term to denote an internal sense
faculty. It does not refer to some type of ‘common-sense knowledge’ acquired by wise
old folks with plenty of experience. Nor, with this faculty of inner sense, is Aquinas
advocating any type of ‘common-sense criterion’ for the admission of philosophical
truths, which Moore introduced into early twentieth-century English philosophy in
his battle with the absolute idealists.11 Furthermore, Aquinas’s use of ‘sensus communis’
is not to be confused with the Scottish common-sense realism of Reid. While Aquinas
accepted, at least in principle, some of the presuppositions found in both Reid and
Moore, nonetheless his internal sense faculty of the sensus communis transcends the
limited use put forward by both Reid and Moore.12 Hence, Aquinas affirms the exist-
ence of a special faculty of the internal senses.13 In order to avoid misunderstanding,
the Latin term for this internal sense faculty will not be rendered into English.
9
  Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 90–91.
10
  Fergus Kerr, OP, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 21; parenthetically,
Kerr bemoans the lack of engagement with 20th-c. analytic philosophy by many English-speaking students
of Aquinas. This is especially sad given the conceptual similarity of philosophical themes in the writings of
several mid-century analytic philosophers with the philosophical insights found in the writings of Aquinas.
In a critique of Fides et Ratio, the encyclical of Pope John Paul II on the importance of the study of philos-
ophy, Kerr is critical of the lack of reference to analytic philosophy: ‘While not unfriendly allusions are
made [in Fides et Ratio] to phenomenological, hermeneutic and post-modern tradition(s), there is no
informed reference to analytic philosophy, let alone recognition of the decades of intense and fruitful
argument on precisely these matters’: ‘Aquinas and Analytic Philosophy: Natural Allies?’, Modern Theology
20(1) (2004), 123.
11
  It is the case, nonetheless, that there are several similarities in metaphilosophy between Aquinas and
Moore. This is not a complicated or wide-ranging claim, however.
12
  Reid did have sensus communis in his philosophical vocabulary, although he appears to have used it
more in Moore’s sense than in Aquinas’s.
13
  It is the case, however, that some scholastic commentators have questioned the need to postulate the
sensus communis as a special faculty of inner sense; Phillips, for instance, writes in his general introduction
to the philosophy of Aquinas: ‘Though traditionally the common sense has been considered by the
Scholastics to be a separate faculty with a special organ, it does not seem clear that Aristotle thought it to
be other than the general sensitivity. In fact, this view, as Cardinal Mercier points out, is consonant with
the teaching of St. Thomas, and avoids the considerable difficulties, which arise if we regard the common
sense as a distinct faculty’: Phillips, Modern Thomistic Philosophy: An Explanation for Students, vol. 1: The
Philosophy of Nature (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1934), 237.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

202  The Sensus Communis

Translators of Aquinas often have been ingenious in attempts to render ‘sensus communis’
into English.14 Given all of these English renderings, the Latin term, ‘sensus communis’
will appear in this analysis, rather than its accustomed translation, ‘the common sense’.
In particular, this practice will keep front and centre the claim that this is a cognitive
faculty of the internal senses.

The Function of the Sensus Communis

The discussion and explication of the sensus communis begins with the following
passage from the Commentary on the Soul in which Aquinas considers the unique
function of this internal sense faculty.
Aristotle points out the faculty that discriminates, as the particular senses cannot discriminate,
between the object of the different senses; [. . .] the demonstration has three parts:
(a) He shows that there is a sense faculty that perceives the differences between black and
white and sweet.
(b) He shows that this sense is one faculty, not two.
(c) He shows that it simultaneously perceives both sensible objects about which it perceives
as distinct and which it conjoins.
He observes that whereas we are able to distinguish not only between black and white or
sweet and bitter, but also between white and sweet, and indeed between any one sense object
and another, it must be in virtue of some sense that we do this; for to know sense objects as
such is a mental activity of the senses. The difference between white and sweet is for us not
only a difference of ideas, which would pertain to the intellect, but also precisely a difference
between sense impressions, which pertains only to some sense faculty. (Commentary on the
Soul, no. 601)

Aquinas explains the need for postulating the sensus communis as a specific internal
sense in order to take care of mental activities that he considers as pre-analytic data.
Moreover, this must be (he argues) one sense faculty and not many: ‘Aristotle shows
that it is by one and the same sense that we distinguish white from sweet’ (no. 603).
Aquinas has already distinguished these two proper sense objects—white and sweet—
each of which is the proper object of a special sense power—sight and taste. The sensus
communis conjoins these two disparate sensibles as pertaining to one collection of
sensibles. Accordingly, this is not so much ‘discrimination’ as ‘conjoining’. In the fol-
lowing text, by considering the set of problems that would follow if sensation were
exhausted in terms of the external senses alone, Aquinas postulates the need for this
special internal sense faculty.

14
  Gilby has been the most adept at these verbal gymnastics. In his St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical
Texts, he refers to the sensus communis as a ‘clearing-house’. In addition, he refers to this sense faculty as the
‘communal sense’. In his Blackfriars translation of the Summa Theologiae, Gilby calls it the ‘central internal
sense’. Other translators call the sensus communis the ‘synthesizing sense’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  203

Sight does not perceive the audible as such, nor hearing the visible as such (for eye takes no
impression from the audible, nor the ear from the visible), but both sensible objects are per-
ceived by each sense only in so far as ‘one sense’, i.e. one actual sensation, so to say, bears upon
an object which contains both. I mean that both the senses in question are exercised at once
upon one and the same sensible thing, as when bile is at once seen as red and tasted as bitter.
So that as soon as we see that this thing is red, we judge that it is bitter. But there is no external
sense for the conjunction of redness and bitterness. For this conjunction is quite incidental, and
what is incidental cannot be the object of any special (i.e. proper) sense faculty. (no. 581;
emphasis added)

The problem Aquinas proposes is that human perceivers, to use his example, have an
awareness that the same thing is both ‘red’ and ‘bitter’. This awareness of the conjunc-
tion of these two proper sensibles, however, is not a specific function or act for any
external sense. It appears what Aquinas means is that this relation of conjunction of
sensible qualities is not perceivable because the proper sensibles themselves are quali-
ties and not relations.15 However, Aquinas claims that even though the external senses
are not properly geared towards perceiving the conjunctive relations, nonetheless an
object is perceived immediately as a bundle of sensations and not as a series of discrete
sensibles. In order to account for this awareness of conjunction of sensible qualities,
which awareness cannot be explained by means of the external senses alone, Aquinas
posits the sensus communis. On this point, Aquinas and Russell, among others, would
be at odds philosophically. It appears to be impossible, so Aquinas suggests, for a per-
ceiver to have a direct awareness of a relation through the means of the external senses
while sensing the proper sensibles. In The Problems of Philosophy, among other places,
Russell argued that knowers have a direct awareness of relations. Relations were, for
Russell, subsistent universal entities. Aquinas adopted an ontological position only on
properties and primary substances, and not on relations. Following Aristotle, Aquinas
opted for the existence of a ‘relational property’ rather than a subsisting relation as an
ontological singular. This ontological position may account for Aquinas’s requirement
that there be a specific faculty of internal sense, which is able to perceive directly this
conjunctive relation.16
This account postulating the need for the sensus communis is developed further in
the Summa Theologiae. In addition, Aquinas notes that another mental activity of the
sensus communis is the proper reflection of sensual awareness. It is through the sensus
communis that a perceiver is aware that she indeed is sensing. In other words, this is the
internal sense faculty through which a perceiver is aware that she is aware.
The proper sense judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from other sensibles that come
under the same sense, for instance, by discerning white from black or green. But neither sight
nor taste can discern white from sweet, because what discerns between two things must know

15
  On this set of issues, Aquinas is (it appears) almost like Berkeley.
16
  This awareness of the conjunctive relation is sufficient reason for rejecting Phillips’s claim that the
sensus communis is not a faculty per se in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

204  The Sensus Communis

both. Hence, the discerning judgement must be assigned to the sensus communis. To it, as to a
common term, all mental acts of the external senses must be referred, and by it, again, all the
intentions of the senses are perceived. For instance, when someone sees that she sees. For
this cannot be done by the proper sense, which knows only the form of the sensible by which
it  is immuted. In this immutation, the action of sight is completed, and from it follows
another  immutation in the sensus communis, which perceives the act of seeing. (Summa
Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4 ad 2)

That this is one sense faculty or power is suggested in the following passage from a
­different part of the Summa Theologiae; this passage, referring explicitly to ‘a single
sense faculty’, offers additional textual evidence opposed to Phillips’s claim mentioned
above: ‘Also, it follows that in a human person, the sensus communis, which is greater
than the proper senses—although it is a single faculty—knows all the things, which are
known by the five external senses’ (q. 57 a. 2).
The first role of the sensus communis is to account for the perceiver’s ability to
discriminate between the different sensibles of divergent categories known by the
external senses. In analysing the above passages, it becomes obvious that Aquinas’s
justification for postulating the sensus communis is that the external senses themselves
cannot perceive the given difference between different genera of sensibles, whether
proper sensibles or common sensibles. Thus the eye might distinguish between the
given ‘red’ and the given ‘blue’, but it cannot distinguish the ‘c-sharp’ from the ‘blue’.
But Aquinas, again appealing to a pre-analytic datum of awareness, claims that human
perceivers do make such distinctions. Furthermore, if such distinctions are made
mentally, then a corresponding mental act of awareness is necessary in order to
account for this distinction. If such a mental act exists, then there must be a corre-
sponding ability or capacity to account for this mental act. This, in effect, is Aquinas’s
argument for postulating the sensus communis as a necessary factor in completing his
epistemological account of sensation. This faculty offers a naturalistic explanation of
the mental acts for which it is responsible.
Although textually Aquinas places great weight on ‘discrimination’ or ‘the discern-
ing ability’ as the chief operational characteristic of the sensus communis, it seems that
this discriminating ability is treated structurally as a necessary condition for the ‘syn-
thesizing ability’ of the sensus communis. In other words, the sensus communis is the
faculty that ‘ties together’ the discrete sensible data of the external senses into concrete
wholes. For example, the sensus communis brings together the red-sensible and the
round-sensible with the sweet-sensible in forming the concrete sensible whole. In this
case, the concrete sensible whole would be the red, round Jonathan apple here and
now seen, touched, and tasted.17 Thus the perceiver is not limited to mere awareness

17
  Aquinas, in effect, argues that the psychological atomism common to British empiricism is not sufficient
in explaining direct perceptual awareness of a concrete holistic object. Sense knowledge is not exhausted by
the human perceiver’s ability to be bombarded with various sense qualities in a totally disjointed manner.
Aquinas claims, quite to the contrary, that the perceiver is able to assemble various qualities into coherent,
concrete wholes.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  205

of discrete psychological atoms. Rather, the perceiver, because of the function of the
sensus communis, is able to be aware of concrete wholes. The bundle of sensations from
the different external sense faculties is conjoined as one. From this analysis it follows
that Aquinas rejects simple psychological atomism.

The Sensus Communis as the Root of Sensation

Aquinas claims that the sensus communis is the structural root or source for the work-
ings of the external sensorium. He appears to build on this ‘common root’ idea by con-
sidering what must be necessary if discrimination of sensibles is to occur. In order to
explain this argument, we must consider several texts from the Commentary:
Aristotle shows that it is by one and the same sense that we distinguish white from sweet. For
one might have supposed that we did it by different senses, by tasting sweetness and by seeing
whiteness. But if this were true, he says, we could never perceive that white was other than
sweet. If this difference is to appear [i.e. to be perceived], it must appear to some one sense
faculty. So long as white and sweet are sensed by distinct faculties, it is as though they were
sensed by two different human perceivers, one perceiving sweet and another white: I this and
you that. In this case, ‘a’ (sweet and white) and ‘b’ (white) are obviously distinct, because I am
impressed in one way by sweetness and you in another by whiteness. (Commentary on the Soul,
no. 603)

Aquinas proceeds to elaborate on this distinction:

But this alone would not show us their sensible difference. There must be one single faculty,
which ‘says’ that sweet is not white, precisely because this distinction is one single object of
knowledge. The ‘saying’ is the expression of an inward knowing; and as the saying is a single
act, it must spring from a single act of understanding and sensing that what is sweet is not
white. [. . .] As when the human person who judges white to be other than sweet, must be one
knower who is aware of both objects, so she must do this by means of one faculty. For aware-
ness is the act of a cognitive faculty. Hence, Aristotle’s conclusion, that it is clearly impossible
to perceive ‘separate’, i.e. by distinct, means; there must be one single power aware of both
sensible objects. (no. 604)

Aquinas continues his argument in establishing the unity of the sensus communis.
The judgement of difference is in the present in the sense that there is a difference at present;
which necessarily implies a simultaneous apprehension of the two different objects. They are both
known in the same instant as they are known to be different. Obviously, then, they are known
at once and together. Hence, as one undivided faculty perceives the object’s difference, so in
one undivided moment both are apprehended. (no. 605)

Using an analogy of a point and a line, he argues for the unity of perception:
Aristotle gives the correct solution [to the sensus communis], using the simile of a point.
Any point between the two ends of a line can be regarded either ‘as one or two’. It is one as
continuing the parts of the line that lie on either side of it, and so forming the term common
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

206  The Sensus Communis

to both. It is two inasmuch as we use it twice over, to terminate one part and begin the
other. (no. 609)

Aquinas next applies this analogy to the sensus communis:

Now sensitivity flows to the organs of all the five senses from one common root, to which in
turn are transmitted, and in which are terminated, all the sensations occurring in each particu-
lar external sense organ. And this common root can be regarded from two points of view:
(a) the common root and term of all sensitivity; or
(b) the root and term of this or that sense in particular.
Hence, what Aristotle means is that, just as a point, under a certain aspect, is not one only
but also two or divisible, so the principle of sensitivity, if regarded as the root and term of
seeing and of hearing, appears twice over under the same name, and in this way it is divisible.
(no. 169)

In this schema, the sensus communis accounts for the unity of the external sensorium:
‘The sensus communis is a common sensitive principle, aware of several objects at once
because it terminates several organically distinct sensations; and as such, its functions
are separate. It is because it is one in itself that it discerns the difference between these
sensations’ (no. 610).
To put the matter a bit differently, insofar as each external sense faculty is defined
only in terms of one generic type of proper sensible, there cannot be a cross-reference
by using the activities of the external sense faculties alone. As a consequence of this
impossibility of faculty cross-reference among the external senses themselves, Aquinas
argues for the need for an additional faculty, which can explain this cross-reference. He
is convinced that this cross-reference occurs as a pre-analytic datum of experience.
The required faculty to explain human awareness of this pre-analytic datum is the sen-
sus communis. The function of the sensus communis, consequently, is not only one of
discrimination. Rather, this discrimination is a necessary condition for unifying the
discrete data perceived by the external senses. Therefore, insofar as Aquinas is
convinced that perceivers do experience ‘concrete wholes’ and not mere ‘psychological
atoms’ or discrete ‘sense data’, he postulates the sensus communis. This faculty explains
the perceiver’s awareness of sensible wholes, even though the immediate data of the
external senses are solely in terms of discrete sensibles—the individual proper and
the common sensibles. Accordingly, the sensus communis accounts for the unity of
sensation in the external sensorium.

The Object of the Sensus Communis is not the

Common Sensible
Considering the proper and the common sensibles as discrete objects of direct sensa-
tion rules out the possibility of confusion over the function of the sensus communis.
One might be led to claim, however, that the sensus communis is that faculty by which
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  207

the common sensibles are perceived. There are indications that Aristotle believed that
the common sensibles were the direct objects of awareness of the sensus communis.
Turnbull once offered this interpretation of Aristotle: ‘I may also note that the Aristotelian
“common sense” is especially the faculty for perceiving the common sensibles [. . .].’18
What is interesting here is that Turnbull, at the end of this analysis, indicates the position
of common sensible noted above: ‘[the] common sensible is available in more than one
sense modality and not mostly in sight.’19 Everson20 too holds this position, arguing that
for Aristotle the common sensibles are the objects of the sensus communis and are
perceptible by the external senses only ‘qua the common sense’.21
In commenting on this discussion, Pasnau notes that Albertus Magnus shared this
controversial reading of Aristotle. However, Aquinas, Pasnau correctly claims, had ‘no
doubt that the common sensibles are perceived per se by the external senses’.22
The argument articulated in this study is that while Aquinas holds the second posi-
tion noted above by Turnbull, he does not hold the first. The sensus communis does not
have as its per se object the common sensibles. This claim would make sense only if
the sensus communis were looked at as the ‘root’ of every act of sensation. But then the
proper sensibles too would be the objects of the sensus communis. The difference
between Aristotle and Aquinas here may be in the interpretation of the ‘root’ function
for the sensus communis. Furthermore, even if Aristotle held this position on the com-
mon sensibles being the object of the sensus communis, this is unequivocally not the
position adopted and put forward by Thomas Aquinas.23 Aquinas appears to consider
the opposite position not found in Aristotle’s texts either. In support of this line of
argument, one finds the following passage in the Commentary:
Aristotle rejects the suggestion that the ‘common sensibles’ are an object of another and dis-
tinct sense. For the proper and direct object of any one sense is only known indirectly by any
other sense. But the common sensibles are not known indirectly by any sense at all. Rather,
they are each directly known by several senses. Therefore, they cannot be the proper objects of
any one sense. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 575)

The same argument is put forward in the following passage from the Commentary:
‘[The common sensibles . . .] are a common yet direct object of several distinct senses. It

18
  Turnbull, ‘The Role of the “Special Sensibles”’, 15.    19  Ibid., 25–6.
20
  Stephen Everson, Aristotle on Perception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 148–57.
21
  Rescher offers a similar interpretation: ‘Medieval scholasticism introduced a different sort of sensus
communis [Rescher uses ‘sensus commonia’] by contrasting the outer senses (sight, touch, hearing, etc.)
with an inner sense capable of apprehending matters about which two or more senses can inform us in
common even as the shape of the sugar cube can be revealed, both by sight and by touch. Clearly the appre-
hension of such commonality is not revealed by any of the outer senses themselves, but requires a different
capacity for its apprehension, and thus access to sense-commonality was characterized as sensus commu-
nis’: Nicholas Rescher, Common-Sense: A New Look at an Old Philosophical Tradition (Milwaukee, Wis.:
Marquette University Press, 2005), 239, n. 24.
22
  Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a
75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 432, n. 23.
23
  Aquinas, furthermore, had the benefit of reading the Aristotelian commentaries by Avicenna and
Averroes.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

208  The Sensus Communis

follows that they answer to no special and distinct sense’ (no. 580). These texts have
established, therefore, that the common sensible is not the per se object of the sensus
communis as this internal sense faculty is construed by Thomas.

The Power of Reflection

In addition to discriminating between different exemplifications from the different
genera of sensibles as well as unifying the concrete whole of sense experience,
Aquinas claims that the sensus communis is the faculty capable of producing ‘reflex-
ive’ mental acts in sensation. It is the internal sense faculty by which a perceiver is
aware that she can be aware of seeing an object. In other words, not only is the per-
ceiver seeing the object, but also she is aware that she is seeing it. It is through the
mental act of the sensus communis that a perceiver is aware that she is aware. Aquinas
writes that the faculty, which takes care of this mental act of reflexive awareness, is
the sensus communis. It is impossible for a mental act to have any physical, sensible
qualities or properties. Therefore, the act of awareness can have as its object only
an existing, ‘fleshed out’ proper or common sensible. Accordingly, a mental act of
seeing is not itself coloured, even though it is ‘about’—i.e. it ‘intends’—a coloured
object. Aquinas’s basis for intentionality theory is brought to bear on this issue. The
form of the thing known is possessed in an immaterial manner—in esse intentionale—­
and not in a physical, entitative manner—esse naturale.24 The result of this ‘inten-
tional immutation’ or ‘non-material immutation’ is that the mental act in sensation
lacks any physical characteristics that are existentially ‘fleshed out’ as naturally existing
proper or common sensibles as found in the external world. Aquinas referring to
Aristotle does use the analogy of the ring/signet in the wax example, as this often-
used passage illustrates:
Aristotle finds an apt example of this in the imprint of a seal on wax. The disposition of the wax
to the image is not the same as that of the iron or gold to the image. Hence, wax, he says, takes
a sign, i.e. a shape or image, of what is gold or bronze but not precisely as gold or bronze. For
the wax takes a likeness of the gold seal in respect of the image, but not in respect of the seal’s
intrinsic disposition to be a gold seal. (Commentary on the Soul, nos 552–7)

While this is only an analogy, the point is that a ‘form’ or ‘shape’ of a thing can be
­transferred—‘immuted’—into another medium. It does not follow, however, that only
a physiological immutation is sufficient in order to explain a human person’s aware-
ness of a specific sense object—either a proper or a common sensible.
Aquinas affirms, however, that a perceiver is aware that she is aware; i.e. when the
perceiver actually perceives (P), she can also be aware that she is perceiving (P).
To it [the sensus communis], as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses must be
referred, and by it, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived. As when someone sees

24
 See Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3 ad 3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  209

that she sees. For this cannot be done by the proper sense, which knows only the form of the
sensible by which it is immuted. In this immutation, the action of sight is completed, and from
it follows another immutation in the sensus communis, which perceives the act of seeing.
(Summa Theologiae, q. 78 a. 4 ad 2; emphasis added)

It is the sensus communis, therefore, which is the faculty of reflexive sensation. This is
necessary because the external senses, insofar as they are ordered to the proper and the
common sensibles, cannot perceive their own mental acts per se. This is due to Aquinas’s
theory of intentionality by which a mental act itself lacks both physiologically existing
proper and common sensibles. Therefore, the act of sense awareness itself cannot be an
act of the external sense faculties. The sensus communis is postulated in order to take
care of this pre-analytic datum of human awareness. In effect, the sensus communis
becomes the ‘root’ or ‘source’ of consciousness: ‘The internal sense [called the sensus
communis] is called ‘common’ not by predication, as if it were a genus, but as the com-
mon root and principle of the external senses’ (q. 78 a. 4 ad 1). ‘The object of the sensus
communis is the sensible. Therefore, this includes whatever is visible and whatever is
audible. It follows, then, that although the sensus communis is one power, it extends to
all the objects of the five senses’ (q. 1 a. 3 ad 2). The last passage illustrates wonderfully
the necessity of postulating the sensus communis in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. This
entails that the sensus communis is the source of consciousness. Sleep as well as uncon-
sciousness are due to the non-functioning of the sensus communis.25
By way of summary, there are three functions of the sensus communis:
(a) to be directly aware of the conjunctive relation and its relata (the proper and
the common sensibles) of the external senses;
(b) to be able to have a reflective awareness of the act of awareness of the external
senses;
(c) to serve as the ‘seat of consciousness’; thus, it is through or due to the sensus
communis that one is a conscious perceiver of the external world.

The Sensus Communis and the Phantasm

One additional point needs clarification before completing this expository analysis of
the sensus communis. Several commentators on Aquinas’s theory of perception have
argued that a phantasm is needed in order for the sensus communis to function. In his
Sensation and Perception, Hamlyn offers this interpretation:
Aquinas believes, therefore, that corresponding to the physical change in the sense organ, there
is a spiritual change resulting in a phantasma, which is a particular mental entity. [. . .] On the
Thomist view the phantasmata set up are mental entities and for this reason are like sensations
which are produced by stimulation of our bodily organs; yet, being somehow representative of

25
  It follows that dreaming is an act of the imagination and not of the sensus communis. This will become
important when the internal sensorium is distinguished from the external sensorium.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

210  The Sensus Communis

the objects which produce them, they are more than mere sensations. They are indeed more
like the ideas or impressions of the British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, except that
Aquinas holds that we are not ordinarily aware of them.26

Weinberg wrote much the same thing:

An object external to the human organism causes the medium between the object and the
sense organ to have duplicates of the forms of the object. In turn, the medium communicates
forms to the sense organs and thence to the faculties of sense. These various forms thus received
are brought together (by the internal senses) into a common image or phantasm.27

What these two passages imply is that the awareness of a ‘complete whole’ by the sensus
communis is accomplished by means of a phantasm. In one of his books on Aquinas,
Pasnau (along with Kemp) also suggest this role for the phantasm. In other words, the
‘conjunction’ of discrete sensibles accomplished by the sensus communis produces a
phantasm, which is the object of the act of awareness of the sensus communis itself. In
effect, the claim put forward is that the sensus communis has for the object of its mental
act a phantasm. In this chapter, the present purpose is not to elucidate the concept of
phantasm. However, several commentators have construed the phantasm as involved
in direct perception involving the external senses. The conclusion of the analysis illus-
trated by Hamlyn and Weinberg is that either a phantasm is produced in all of the
external senses or else is the ‘synthesis’ produced by the sensus communis from the
discrete data from the external senses. In other words, the phantasm is the direct object
of the mental act of sensation. This would entail that the phantasm as an image is the
direct object of perception.28
This position still holds sway in discussions of Aquinas on perception. Several
recent commentators on Aquinas’s theory of perception argue that a phantasm, what
they take to be an image, is an intermediary intentional entity that serves as a necessary
condition for perceiving things in the external world. This entails that Aquinas is a
representationalist in his theory of perception. Pasnau too is unclear on the role of
phantasm in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. In Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature,
Pasnau adopts a position similar to what will be discussed later in this book, although
his account is not as detailed. In his translation of A Commentary on Aristotle’s De
Anima, nonetheless, Pasnau offers a more restrictive picture. In this latter book, he
writes that ‘phantasms, for Aquinas, are the images or representations produced by
phantasia (imagination)’.29 In his extensive commentary on Aquinas’s theory of human

26
  D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1969), 47–9.
27
  J. R. Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1964), 207.
28
  Even Kenny, who is generally concerned that Aquinas never elucidated a clearly articulated account
of phantasm, writes: ‘at all times, it seems clear that he did not mean by “phantasm” simply a mental image’:
Aquinas on Mind, 38.
29
  Thomas Aquinas, A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Robert Pasnau (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1999), 15, n. 15.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  211

nature, moreover, Pasnau appears to adopt the opposite position. In an illustration of

the internal senses, Pasnau holds that phantasms belong to the sensus communis.30 In a
review of Kemp’s Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages, Pasnau wrote: ‘According to
Kemp, it was the standard medieval view that the common sense is responsible for
imagining images (as opposed to storing them). This is an important issue, and I think
Kemp gets it right.’31
On the contrary, however, Aquinas never uses the term ‘phantasm’ when discussing
either direct sensation involving only the external senses or any mental act involving
the sensus communis. Of course, if the sensus communis has an image for its direct
object, this renders Aristotelian philosophers representationalists, thus subverting the
epistemological realist thrust of much Aristotelian perception theory, especially that
elucidated by Aquinas. Kemp and Pasnau are not the only ones who hold this position.
In opposition to what might be called the Kemp-Sometime Pasnau interpretation,
Aquinas mentions explicitly the powers or sense faculties in which the phantasm is
found, and this listing conspicuously omits any discussion of the sensus communis. The
Summa Contra Gentiles indicates this position: ‘The powers in which the phantasms
are found, namely, the imagination, the memory and the vis cogitativa’ (Summa Contra
Gentiles, bk II, ch. 73, 11).32
Other passages in Aquinas’s texts indicate this same point. In these texts, Aquinas
discusses the internal sense powers in which the phantasms reside. It would be
inconsistent were he to omit any mention of the sensus communis if a phantasm did
‘reside’ with this internal sense faculty. In addition, there appears to be no passage in
which he discusses explicitly phantasms as belonging to the sensus communis.33 On
the other hand, there are many places where Aquinas asserts that the phantasms are
found only in the other three internal sense faculties, conspicuously omitting any
reference to the sensus communis.34 It is a serious misreading of the Aquinas texts
to  have any image in the sensus communis, especially a phantasm. It is possible
that historians of philosophy like Hamlyn and Weinberg confused the ‘sensible spe-
cies’ with the phantasm. These two concepts, however, are neither identical nor

30
  Robert Pasnau, Aquinas’s Treatise on Human Nature (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2003), 281.
31
  Robert Pasnau, Review of Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages by Simon Kemp, Isis 88 (1997),
703–4.
32
  In private conversations, James South agrees with this restrictive placement of a phantasm in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind.
33
  Mahoney agreed with this account of phantasms in Aquinas: ‘[Aquinas] reserves the word “phan-
tasm” for the species found in the imagination, the cogitative power and memory.’ Furthermore, Mahoney
argued in the following way asserting that the phantasms are not part of the sensation process of the exter-
nal senses: ‘[A] phantasm is not used of the sensible species as found in the external senses or the common
sense. […] It would be a misreading, however, to take Aquinas to mean that the species produced in the
power of sight are phantasms’: Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Sense, Intellect, and Imagination in Albert, Thomas
and Siger’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 607, n. 18.
34
  Several texts found in the Summa Contra Gentiles illustrate this position.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

212  The Sensus Communis

coextensive. Kenny notes that in discussing phantasms, ‘this theory seems to be

­confused in several ways’.35

The Sensus Communis and the External Sensorium

In order to complete the analysis of the mental act of the sensus communis, one final
point needs to be considered. Aquinas includes this faculty among his listing of the
internal senses: ‘So there is no need to assign more than four internal powers of the
sensitive part—namely, the sensus communis, the imagination, and the aestimative (or
the vis cogitativa in human beings) and the memorative powers’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 87 a. 4). The reason for placing the sensus communis as an internal sense faculty
appears to be based on Aquinas’s physiology, where the bodily organ in which the sen-
sus communis is found was located somewhere in the brain. With this physiological
location, obviously it could not be classified as one of the external sense organs.
Structurally, however, the sensus communis is part of the external sensorium. The object
of the sensus communis is not an image, phantasm, or any type of post-sensation, ter-
tium quid mental entity. The object of the sensus communis is a concrete whole unified
from the discrete data of the external senses. Textually, Aquinas concludes his discus-
sion of the sensus communis in the Commentary with the following remarks:
‘Concluding, Aristotle says that he has now discussed the principle according to which
an animal is said to have, or be able to have, sensations’ (Commentary on the Soul,
no. 614). Aquinas suggests an important distinction between the following categories:
(a) the external senses and the internal senses, and (b) the external sensorium and the
internal sensorium.
The distinguishing factor behind the external and internal senses appears to be the
physiological location of the organs of sensation. Each organ of the external senses is
located on or near the immediate surface of the body. The internal senses, on the
other hand, have their organs located within the body, presumably in the brain. In
De Veritate, Aquinas writes: ‘the organs of the cognitive powers of imagination, of
memory, and of the vis cogitativa, are in the brain itself, which is the place of greatest
moistness in the human body’ (De Veritate II, q. 18 no. 5).36 The division between inter-
nal and external sensoria, on the other hand, is determined by means of the function of
the corresponding mental acts. The function of the external sensorium is to be aware
of the objects in the external world, which are present immediately to the perceiver in a
causally efficacious way. If there are no objects, then there will be no mental acts with
the external sensorium. Of course, the object is reducible to the collection of proper

35
 Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 38. Later chapters attempt both to clear up these confusions that worry
Kenny and to provide a conceptual elucidation of this often muddled concept in Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind.
36
  It is certainly unclear what role the degree of ‘moistness’ plays in all of this! Nonetheless, this account
appears to be part of the general physiological wisdom of the day, as Thomas uses this description several
times in his writings.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  213

and common sensibles known by the respective external senses and combined into a
perceptible unity by the sensus communis. In discussing the need for sense organs for
inner sense in Thomas, Kenny writes: ‘The inner senses, he thought, were like the outer
senses in having bodily organs: only, the organs of the inner senses were inside the
body and not at the surface. Thus, the organ of the [vis] cogitativa is “the middle cell of
the head” and the fancy (imagination) has an organ that is injured in cases of seizure or
coma.’37 The internal sensorium, on the other hand, has the ability to both ‘remember’
what has been perceived and to ‘interpret’ what is currently experienced. Both of these
functions go beyond the immediate data of the external sensorium. What distin-
guishes the internal from the external sensorium is the presence of phantasms. In
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, the role of phantasms is a necessary condition for the
intentional activities of inner sense.
From the fact that the sensus communis is the root of consciousness, it follows that
Aquinas would claim that sleep results because the sensus communis is affected and is
not working. The physiological claims are, of course, not relevant here. What is rele-
vant, however, is the consequence of placing the sensus communis with the external
sensorium. Since this is the case, it follows that neither images nor phantasms are used
with the sensus communis. It appears that those historians of philosophy who suggest
that a phantasm is the direct object of the sensus communis fail to reconcile the ramifi-
cations of the consequent representationalism with Aquinas’s strong assertion of direct
realism associated with his externalism.
The final necessary condition for sense perception is the working of the sensus com-
munis. In the previous chapter, the necessary conditions for the occurrence of a mental
act for an external sense were explicated in terms of a necessary triadic relation, NC[O-
M-F]. In addition to this triadic relation, the final necessary condition is the function
of the sensus communis. In other words, the sufficient condition for sensation is the
occurrence of a series of necessary triadic relations—proper and/or common sensi-
bles, adequate mediums, and properly disposed sense organs and faculties—together
with the mental act of the sensus communis, the root of consciousness. When this
occurs, one is aware of sensible qualities existing in the external world. In this way,
Aquinas affirms his ontological realism and his epistemological realism, which are the
ontic grounds for his externalism.
In conclusion, Aquinas’s account of sensation is a conjunction of a series of necessary
three-term relations together with the mental act of the internal sense faculty of the
sensus communis. The final state of sensation by means of the external sensorium is the
awareness of a concrete whole. This awareness of a concrete whole is similar structur-
ally to the awareness and physical object as a ‘bundle of sensations’—a philosophical
move common to much British empiricism. One might argue that at this level, the
empiricism connected with immediate sensation as found in Aquinas converges with
the later British cohort of philosophical empiricists. However, the internal sense faculties

37
 Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 31. Kenny refers to Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, no. 73.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

214  The Sensus Communis

of the vis cogitativa and the sense memory provide a radical bifurcation between
Aquinas and the British empiricists. In effect, the sensus communis is that part of the
external sensorium, which accounts for the unity of sense awareness. This unity comes
about because there is a single faculty, which is the root or source of the five external
senses. The unity does not come about because the sensus communis forms a new
‘object’, be it an image, phantasm, or sense datum, from the data of the five external
senses. Aquinas’s rejection of psychological atomism is rooted in the unity of the exter-
nal sensorium—a unity which is explained by means of the sensus communis.
The next part of this analysis begins the discussion of the three faculties of inner
sense that require as a necessary condition for their functioning the existence of a
phantasm. These are the imagination, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory.
Appendix 1 is a brief historical excursus on the role played by the ventricle system in
medieval discussions of the physiological organs of the internal sense faculties

appendix 1
The Ventricle System and the Internal Senses
in Medieval Cognitive Theories
Research activities in the history of philosophy are often distinct and separate from research
activities undertaken by historians of psychology, even though both consider the same areas of
inquiry and often deal with similar subject matter. One discovers this when considering the
internal sense theories of medieval philosophers like Aquinas and the physiological ventricle
system of the brain developed by other medieval philosophers like Avicenna; it was Avicenna
who developed the faculty psychology of the internal senses articulated in medieval philosophy.
In particular, Kemp’s historical research provides the principal thrust of this interesting yet
abbreviated analysis. Kemp offers an informative account of the ventricle system of the brain,
which he suggests influenced the Arabian philosophers, especially Avicenna and Averroes, and
through them Thomas Aquinas.38 The shadow of Aristotle’s De Anima hovers over these
discussions of internal sense faculties and their functioning in what late twentieth-century
psychologists call cognitive psychology. With Avicenna, the cognitive functions of the
Aristotelian phantasia were localized in the ventricle system of the brain.39
Kemp’s research suggests that the ventricle system began with the early anatomical and
physiological work of Galen. Following empirical observations resulting from dissection of
cadavers, Galen first discussed the ventricle system and its importance. Kemp argues that
Galen got the biological location of the ventricles more or less right. He did not, however, assign
cognitive functions to any particular part of this system; this cognitive theory developed later
with the work of Avicenna and then Aquinas. Physiologically, there are three ventricles in

38
 Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990) and Cognitive
Psychology in the Middle Ages (Greenwood Press, 1996). Kemp develops this account, with Garth Fletcher,
in ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, American Journal of Psychology 106(4) (1993), 559–76.
39
  See reviews of Kemp’s Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages: Jeffrey E. Brower, Speculum 75(1)
(2000), 206–7; Pasnau, Isis (1997).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  215

the brain, which were seen as ‘fluid-filled cavities’. Galen was, however, incorrect concerning
one important aspect of the ventricle system, which would cause chaos theoretically for late
medieval and early Renaissance commentators. Galen thought, according to Kemp, that the
sensory nerves that carried ‘information’ from the external sense faculties were routed
directly to the front ventricle. This ‘routing’, however, was not confirmed by experiment.
The development of this cognitive dimension of Aristotelian insights on inner sense required
the analysis and experimentation of Avicenna, who offered what became the more or
less canonical account of the ventricle system and its relation to the internal sense faculties.
A well-trained physician of his time, Avicenna wrote widely on medical as well as philosophical
issues. In addition, Kemp noted that, in illustrating characteristics of a genuine bon vivant,
Avicenna appears to have had, as Kemp suggests, ‘a keen interest in women and wine’. Kemp
further notes that Avicenna’s ‘Canon of Medicine was a standard medical text in Europe from
the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries’.40 Avicenna argued that the three ventricles
of  the  brain—what some translations call ‘concavities’—were the physiological places of
five  distinct and different inner sense faculties that served as the organic foundation for
the cognitive functions of perception.41 According to Avicenna, these five faculties were: the
sensus communis, the retentive imagination, the compositive imagination or vis cogitativa,
the vis aestimativa (which for Aquinas functions in humans as the vis cogitativa), and the
sense memory. Kemp does not appear to distinguish the two faculties of the imagination,
but Avicenna did affirm this distinction of faculties of inner sense. These internal sense
faculties are common to psychological treatises based on Aristotle’s account in the De Anima.
What is significant is Avicenna’s placing the cognitive functioning faculties in different
parts  of the three ventricles discussed by Galen. This squares with Aquinas’s distinction
between physiological ‘organ’ and intentional ‘faculty’. It should be noted, however, that
Klubertanz is probably correct in suggesting that Aquinas’s ‘attitude toward localization
is hesitant’.42

The Three Ventricles

The sensus communis was found in the front part of the forward ventricle. In an Aristotelian
fashion, the sensus communis is where the discrete impressions from the external sense faculties
are combined. Like Aristotle before him and Aquinas afterwards, Avicenna adopts a ‘bundle
view of sensations’, with the physical object being reducible to a combination of discrete
sensations—Aristotle’s proper and common sensibles—coming from the different external
sense faculties. This is, of course, the classic ‘heap theory’ of a physical object.
Avicenna placed both the sensus communis and the imaginatio in the foremost ventricle in
the human head. Kemp writes: ‘all the sensory nerves were believed to be connected to the
front ventricle, in the front of which the common sense was located.’43 Kemp also notes that,
according to Avicenna, ‘the consistency of the front ventricle was more liquid and slippery than

40
  Kemp, ‘The Inner Senses: A Medieval Theory of Cognitive Functioning in the Ventricles of the Brain’,
in Wolfgang G. Bringmann, Helmut E. Luck, Rudolf Miller, and Charles E. Early (eds), A Pictorial History
of Psychology (Chicago: Quintessence, 1997), 8.
41
 Avicenna, De Anima, I, 5; in George Peter Klubertanz, SJ, The Discursive Power (St Louis, Mo.:
Modern Schoolman, 1952), 95–6.
42
  Ibid., 163.   43  Kemp, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, 563.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

216  The Sensus Communis

the back, so that sensation was rapidly received by the common sense but also quickly lost if the
stimulus were removed’.44 The state of the liquid character of the frontmost part of the ventricle
is contrasted with the state of the rear part of this ventricle: ‘the imagination at the back could
retain images because it was drier.’45 Kemp’s analysis is consistent with several puzzles found in
reading Aquinas’s texts on the internal sense organs where Thomas uses the ‘moist’ description.46
According to Avicenna, the sensory information from the front ventricle is passed through
to the middle ventricle by means of a narrow passage, which had a gate-like mechanism: a
small ‘worm-like organ known as the vermis’.47 In the middle ventricle there were, according
to Kemp’s reading of Avicenna, two cognitive processes, what Aquinas later would call the vis
aestimativa and the vis cogitativa. According to Kemp, the function of the vis cogitativa was to
form images like ‘the golden mountain’, composed from discrete images or phantasms of a
mountain and of gold. The workings of the vis aestimativa, according to Kemp’s reading of
Avicenna, are like ‘implications’, which are either instinctively or are the results of what Kemp
calls ‘associative learning’. Kemp illustrates this by using the familiar examples from
discussions on the vis aestimativa: ‘a sheep will instinctively fear a wolf even if it has never
encountered one before, since it can recognize the threat to it that is one of the implications of
the appearance of the wolf. Also a dog will cringe in terror from a stick with which it has been
previously beaten.’48
Finally, the inner sense faculty of memory—memoria or vis memorativa—is found in the
rear ventricle of the brain. Kemp’s reading of Avicenna suggests that the memory—what some
translators of Aquinas call the ‘sense memory’ in order to distinguish it from the vis
imaginativa—stores the phantasms from the vis aestimativa. In the case of human knowers,
Aquinas would have the phantasms from the vis cogitativa stored in the vis memorativa.
Humans do not have a vis aestimativa; on this point, Aquinas writes: ‘Therefore, the power
which in other animals is called the natural aestimativa in humans is called the cogitativa’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4).

The Ventricle System and Aquinas’s Cognitive

Theory of Inner Sense
Kemp falters, it appears, in his analysis of Aquinas on the internal sense faculties. Textual
support provides evidence that Avicenna argued for five internal sense faculties where Aquinas
only postulated four. Avicenna divided the imaginatio into the retentive imagination and
the compositive imagination, or what he referred to as the vis cogitativa.49 The former was
the ‘storehouse’—the ‘thesaurus’ in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae account—while the later was the
faculty that produced images like ‘the golden mountain’. Aquinas sees no need to divide these

44
  Ibid.   45  Ibid.   46  De Veritate, II q. 18 no. 5.
47
  Kemp, ‘The Inner Senses’, 9.    48  Ibid., 10.
49
 See Harry Austryn Wolfson’s classic essay, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew
Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review 28(2) (1935), 69–133. Wolfson’s article is a significant his-
torical analysis of the development of the various positions medieval philosophers held in discussing the
function of the internal senses. Frede and Michon refer to this somewhat forgotten yet vastly important
study by Wolfson.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

The Sensus Communis  217

two aspects of the imaginatio and hence postulates only one inner sense faculty that is capable
of two functions.50 Moreover, the vis cogitativa for Thomas had a different function.
Kemp’s consideration of the sensus communis, and his claim that Aquinas postulates the vis
aestimativa as a human faculty of inner sense, are not four-square with the texts. At this
juncture, Kemp, like many historians of both philosophy and psychology, adopts a paradigm
of explanation from epistemological theories as developed in modern philosophy. Kemp
appears to assume that Aquinas—and several other medieval Aristotelians—defend a
representational view of perception. Following this interpretive method, historians of
psychology like Kemp and Thomas Leahey go awry in their structural accounts of Aquinas on
the internal senses.
Where Kemp goes astray in his account is his suggestion that the resultant combination of
discrete external sensibles produces an ‘image’ known by the sensus communis. Kemp writes:
‘The images produced in the common sense are stored in the imagination (Latin: imaginatio or
formans) located at the back of the front ventricle.’ 51 He also writes that ‘in normal waking life
the images that are presented to the common sense [. . .] arise from perceiving the world’.52
Kemp refers several times to ‘images in the common sense’. This would entail that Aquinas is a
representationalist in his theory of perception.
There is another textual blur in Kemp’s analysis of Aquinas. Kemp has the vis cogitativa as
the cognitive faculty in animals responsible for the performance of complex functions, like the
spider weaving its web or the bird building its nest. Aquinas gives these cognitive functions to
the vis aestimativa, which he sometimes characterizes as instinct in animals; however, it is not
found as a cognitive inner sense faculty in human persons. In his Cognitive Psychology in the
Middle Ages, Kemp suggests that Aquinas and Avicenna differ in that Aquinas denied the
existence of the vis cogitativa. Even a cursory glance at almost any set of Aquinas texts on inner
sense demonstrates that Kemp’s claim is incorrect. Leahey, moreover, also ascribes what he refers
to as ‘estimation’ to the human perceiver. Yet he also refers to ‘human estimation’ as the
‘cogitativa’.53 Furthermore, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that it is in the imaginatio
where the composite image of the ‘golden mountain’ is formed, not, as Kemp suggests, in the
vis cogitativa.
On the other hand, Kemp suggests, rightly, that the vis aestimativa is, according to
Avicenna—and also Aquinas—the inner sense faculty ‘which perceives the non-sensible intentions
that exist in the individual sensible objects, like the faculty which judges that the wolf is to be
avoided’.54 These are, Avicenna writes, ‘intentions which we do not sense’.55 Aquinas argues in
his Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul that the vis cogitativa (and the vis aestimativa in
animals) provides the cognitive ability to be aware of non-sensible forms—the so-called
‘intentiones non sensatae’. The intentional object of the vis cogitativa is what Aquinas refers to
as the Aristotelian ‘incidental object of sense’. This faculty of inner sense renders possible his
awareness of the individual as a primary substance and not merely as the ‘bundle of sensations’

50
  An obvious use, one would think, of Occam’s razor!
51
  Kemp, ‘The Inner Senses’, 9. Also Kemp and Fletcher, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’.
52
  Kemp, ‘The Inner Senses’, 10.
53
  Thomas Hardy Leahey, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought, 2nd rev. edn
(Harlow: Longman, 1987), 72.
54
  Kemp and Fletcher, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, 564.
55
 Avicenna, De Anima, in Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 98.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

218  The Sensus Communis

so common to British empiricism. For Aquinas, part of the function of the vis aestimativa in
animals is absorbed in humans, as it were, in the inner sense faculty of the vis cogitativa. Hence,
the human perceiver does not have a vis aestimativa but an enriched vis cogitativa. In considering
the inner sense faculties, Kemp notes that Roger Bacon called the vis cogitativa ‘the mistress
of the sensitive faculties’.56 This indicates the dignity of this important inner sense faculty, one
that has been seriously neglected in much contemporary commentary on Aquinas’s theory of
sensation and perception.

56
  Kemp and Fletcher, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, 564.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

9
The Imagination and Phantasia
A Historical Muddle

The next internal sense faculty to be discussed in this building-block process is the
imagination or what Aquinas sometimes refers to as ‘phantasia’. Philosophers in the
analytic tradition have undertaken, at best, modest work on the internal sense faculties
in Aquinas. To begin, it is important to recall a significant clarification regarding
Aquinas’s texts. For the most part, this study has used as a principal source of texts
Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul along with selected passages from the
Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and the Quaestiones Disputatae de
Veritate. Overall, the accounts given in these various texts have remained generally
consistent. Concerning the classification of the internal senses, however, a somewhat
baffling phenomenon occurs in the Commentary. Aquinas appears to be using the
term ‘phantasia’ to apply to all three faculties of the internal sensorium—the imagina-
tion, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory. This is strange textually, because earlier
in this very work Aquinas has made explicit reference to the incidental object of sense,
indicating that it is the specific sensible object of the vis cogitativa. This blurring of the
three faculties of the internal sensorium is often overlooked by translators of the
Commentary, since they repeatedly render phantasia into English as ‘imagination’.
A reader unfamiliar with Aquinas’s work might conclude with good reason that, in
this Aristotelian commentary, he considered only one internal sense.
On the other hand, often in various other texts ‘phantasia’ refers only to the imag-
ination.1 Several passages found in the Summa Theologiae illustrate this claim: ‘But
for the retention and preservation of these forms, the phantasia or imagination is
appointed […].’2 This Summa Theologiae text in which Aquinas discusses the inter-
nal senses asserts that the phantasia is identical and coextensive with the single
internal sense faculty of the imagination. On the other hand, the structure of the
argument in the Commentary suggests that while ‘phantasia’ is used repeatedly, this
term refers to all three of the faculties of the internal sensorium and not specifically

1
  Pasnau refers to these as the ‘theological texts’ of Thomas. See Robert Pasnau, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas
Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. xx.
2
  The Latin version of this text is: ‘Ad harum autem formarum sententionem aut conversationem ordina-
tur phantasia, sive imaginatio, quae sunt idem’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

220  The Imagination and Phantasia

to the imagination alone. In the writings of Aquinas, accordingly, at least two textual
uses of phantasia occur:
(a) In the Summa Theologiae, ‘phantasia’ refers to the faculty of the imagination
alone.
(b) In the Commentary, ‘phantasia’ is used regularly as a generic term referring to
all three faculties of the internal sensorium: the vis imaginativa, the vis cogita-
tiva, and the vis memorativa.
Furthermore, ‘phantasia’ refers only to those faculties of inner sense in which the
phantasms are found. A phantasm never occurs with an act of awareness in the exter-
nal sensorium alone. A necessary condition for the intentional existence of a phantasm
is that it should be a mental act of the dispositional faculties or powers of the internal
sensorium. A phantasm is never associated intentionally with the external sensorium,
either the external or the internal sense faculties of the sensus communis.

Weinberg and Stump on Aquinas and Phantasia

A second textual issue concerns whether the phantasia is a single internal sense faculty
distinct from the faculty of the imagination. While some contemporary historians
of medieval philosophy, namely Stump and Weinberg, argue for the existence of two
separate faculties, the phantasia and the imagination, there appears to be no textual
evidence that Aquinas held that the phantasia itself is a separate, unique, internal sense
faculty distinct from the imagination. In other words, he does not adopt the position
that phantasia is a distinct internal sense faculty or power along with the other three
faculties of inner sense—the imagination, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory.
Weinberg, however, denied this claim when he argued that the phantasia is a separate
faculty distinct from the other three. Stump writes: ‘Phantasia proper, as distinct from
imagination.’3 Moreover, Weinberg articulates five separate faculties of internal sense
for Aquinas: ‘[T]he sensitive [powers] include the functions of the five exterior senses
[sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch] as well as the functions of the interior senses of
the common sense, the phantasy, the imagination, the aestimative [or cogitative]
capacity, and memory.’4 Clearly Weinberg has the phantasia listed as a separate faculty
of inner sense. In defending this account concerning the number of internal sense
faculties in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, Weinberg fails to provide a convincing
argument.5 In the Summa Contra Gentiles, there appears to be no direct reference to
3
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 258.
4
  J. R. Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1964), 201.
5
  Weinberg refers the reader to the Summa Contra Gentiles, bk IV, ch. 58. However, Weinberg’s reference
justifying a five-faculty set for inner sense is either a misprint or a mistake. Ch. 58 is ‘On the Number of
Sacraments of the New Law’; this specific set of texts contains no reference to the faculties of the internal
senses, let alone affirming the proposition that the phantasia is a distinct faculty of inner sense. It is in
Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II that Aquinas discusses the faculties of the internal senses. Ch. 58 of bk II,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  221

the phantasia as a separate faculty of inner sense distinct from the imagination. When
Aquinas refers to the imagination in the Summa Contra Gentiles, he frequently uses
‘vis imaginativa’ or ‘imaginatio’ rather than ‘phantasia’. In addition, Stump writes:
‘Besides the external senses, Aquinas recognizes a number of internal senses: the com-
mon sense, phantasia, and imagination, the estimative power and the memorative
power.’6 Weinberg, in contrast to Stump, does include the vis cogitativa in his listing.
Yet for Weinberg, like Stump, the phantasia is neither identical to nor coextensive with
the inner sense faculty known as the imagination.7 Stump appears to arrive at her
interpretation of Aquinas on distinguishing phantasia from imagination because she
adopts the position that for Aquinas, the phantasia operates when a perceiver is ‘con-
currently sensing something’.8 The imagination as an internal sense faculty, however,
does not operate concurrently with the external senses.
In opposition to Weinberg’s and Stump’s interpretation of these two faculties of
internal sense, textural references abound arguing that Aquinas never held that the
phantasia is a faculty of the internal senses distinct and separate from the other facul-
ties delimited in Weinberg’s and Stump’s accounts. Aquinas refers to the phantasia
either as another term for the imagination (in Summa Theologiae) or as a generic con-
cept referring to the faculties of inner sense that require phantasms in order to have
mental acts (in the Commentary). There are passages in which the imagination itself is
discussed as a distinct and unique sense faculty of the internal sensorium. ‘In imagina-
tione non solum sunt formae rerum sensibilium secundum quod accipiuntur a sensu, sed
transmutatur diversimode’ (Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 173 a. 2.); ‘Vis enim imaginativa
est apprehensiva similitudinum corporalium, etiam rebus absentibus quarum similtu-
dines’ (q. 15 a. 1).
In order to have the cognitive faculty road map clear for the internal senses, in his
frequently cited account of sense knowledge found in the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae (q. 78 a. 3 and a. 4), Aquinas identifies the phantasia with the imagination:
‘But for the retention and preservation of these forms [i.e. those acquired through the
external senses and conjoined by means of the sensus communis], the phantasia or
imagination, which are the same, is appointed’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4; empha-
sis added). In the remainder of Article 4, Aquinas discusses the other two faculties of
inner sense which require phantasms: the aestimative faculty (which he claims in this
text corresponds to the vis cogitativa in humans) and the sense memory:

however, cannot justify Weinberg’s interpretation either; it is a discussion entitled ‘That in Human Beings
there are not Three Souls: Nutritive, Sensitive and Intellective’; there is no explicit reference to faculties of
the internal senses.
6
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 248. It is interesting to note that Stump makes
no mention of the vis cogitativa, which Aquinas mentions in four major works: the Summa Theologiae, the
Summa Contra Gentiles, the Sentencia Libri de Anima, and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate.
7
  In discussions regarding Weinberg’s account, James B. South wondered how Weinberg got Aquinas’s
position so muddled.
8
 Stump, Aquinas, 258.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

222  The Imagination and Phantasia

Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions, which are not received through the external
senses, the estimative power is appointed; and for their preservation, the memorative power,
which is a storehouse of such intentions. We know this is the case from the fact that the princi-
ple of memory in animals is found in some such intention, for instance, that something is
harmful or otherwise. And the very character of something as past, which memory observes,
is to be reckoned among these intentions.
Moreover, we must keep in mind that in receiving sensible forms, there is no difference
between human perceivers and other animals. For they are similarly immuted by external
sensible objects. But there is a difference in regard to the intentions mentioned above. For
animals other than human perceivers are aware of these intentions only by some sort of
­natural instinct, while human knowers perceive them by means of a certain comparison.
Therefore, this cognitive power, which in other animals is called the natural aestimative
[instinct], in humans, is called the cogitative, which by some sort of comparison discovers
these intentions [i.e. those not received through the external senses] [. . .] (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 78 a. 4)

Aquinas next introduces the positions on the faculties of inner senses held by Avicenna
and Averroes:
Avicenna, however, assigns between the aestimative and the imaginative a fifth power, which
combines and divides imaginary forms; for instance, when from the imaginary form of gold
and the imaginary form of a mountain, we fabricate the one composite imaginary form of a
golden mountain, which we have never seen. But this operation is not to be found in animals
other than humans; however, in human knowers, the imaginative power suffices for this purpose
[i.e. of fabricating images of things not perceived directly]. Furthermore, Averroes attributes
this action to the imagination, in his book De Sensu et Sensibilibus. Therefore, it is evident that
there is no need to assign more than four interior powers to the sensitive part, namely, the sensus
communis, the imagination, the estimative [or cogitative] power, and the memory. (q. 78 a. 4;
emphasis added)

In these passages from the Summa Theologiae, three points relevant to Weinberg and
Stump’s interpretation of Aquinas must be considered:
(a) There is categorically no assertion in the texts of Aquinas that the phantasia is
a faculty distinct from the imagination.
(b) The phantasia as an internal sense faculty is identified explicitly with the
imagination.
(c) There is an unequivocally clear proposition that there are only four internal
sense faculties.
The Summa Theologiae texts provide sufficient evidence running counter to the inter-
pretive position articulated by Weinberg and Stump. Such confusion on these matters
is found often in discussions of the internal sense faculties articulated by Thomas.9

9
  Appendix 1 discusses various interpretations put forward by historians of philosophy in developing
their respective accounts of inner sense faculties rooted in Aristotle’s De Anima.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  223

Wolfson on the Internal Senses in Medieval Philosophy

Given the muddled analyses with which scholars, both classical and contemporary,
have considered Aristotle’s treatment of phantasia, it is not surprising that in the
Middle Ages various interpretations were proposed to render Aristotle’s theory of
sensation and perception coherent and consistent. Among these early attempts, the
Arabian philosophers, especially Avicenna and Averroes, stand out. In the above texts
from the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas notes that Avicenna held that the phantasia is a
distinct and separate faculty of inner sense. However, in the Summa Theologiae,
Aquinas clearly rejects the need for a fifth faculty of internal sense. Aquinas’s mentor,
Albertus Magnus, to the contrary, at times claims the existence of five faculties of inter-
nal sense, one of which was the phantasia. According to the account ascribed to him in
the Libri Tres de Anima,10 Albertus lists five faculties of the internal senses: the com-
mon sense, the imagination, the aestimative faculty, the memory, and the phantasia.
In his Summa de Homine,11 however, Albertus places the sensus communis with the
external senses. He then lists four faculties of internal sense: imagination, aestimative,
memory, and phantasia. Accordingly, Aquinas’s philosophical mentor affirmed the
existence of the phantasia as an independent and distinct faculty of the internal senses
separate from the imagination. In his classic historical analysis, Wolfson indicated
four different ways in which Albertus classified the internal sense faculties.12 It is
interesting to note that in one text, Albertus assigned to the phantasia the ability to
‘combine and divide’ images and intentions.13 The extended passage discussing the
internal sense faculties from the Summa Theologiae considered above indicates that
Aquinas attributed to Avicenna the postulation of an additional and distinct internal
sense faculty whose function was to ‘combine and divide’ images. Wolfson referred to
this internal sense faculty as the ‘compositive imagination’.14 Wolfson in turn attributed
a second function to the imagination, which he called ‘the retentive imagination’.
Hence, Avicenna had two internal sense faculties of imagination: the compositive
imagination and the retentive imagination. In the Summa Theologiae, however,
Aquinas rejected Avicenna’s position. Aquinas ascribed to the imagination as one fac-
ulty both the ‘retentive’ and the ‘compositive’ functions that Avicenna and Albertus
attributed to distinct and separate faculties. Aquinas argued that there is no need for

10
  Albertus Magnus, Libri Tres de Anima, in Omnia Opera, ed. Borgnet, lib. 2, tract. 4, c. 7, vol. V,
pp. 302–4; in George Peter Klubertanz, SJ, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa
According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Modern Schoolman, 1952), 135–8.
11
  Albertus Magnus, Summa de Homine (pt 2), title of q. 18, vol. 35, pp. 164, 323; in Klubertanz, The
Discursive Power, 139–42.
12
 Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’,
Harvard Theological Review 28(2) (1935), 116–18. Wolfson’s article is a classic historical analysis of the
development of the various positions medieval philosophers held in discussing the function of the internal
senses.
13
  Libri Tres de Anima, 303, in Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 136–7; also Wolfson, ‘The Internal
Senses’, 117.
14
  Ibid., 116–18.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

224  The Imagination and Phantasia

a separate f­ aculty distinct from the imagination to provide this function of ‘combina-
tion and division’. Therefore, even though some of Aquinas’s predecessors affirmed
that the phantasia is a separate faculty of the inner sense—an interpretation that
Weinberg and Stump attributed to Aquinas—in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas
rejected this position. It may be that Aquinas’s combination of these two functions into
one faculty is his use of Occam’s razor.15
Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that, although both Avicenna and Albertus
postulated the phantasia as a faculty of inner sense distinct from the imagination, each
philosopher assigned a different cognitive function to this internal sense faculty. In
many texts, Albertus assigned to the phantasia the power to ‘combine and divide’
images—Wolfson’s ‘compositive imagination’. Avicenna, on the other hand, assigned
this compositive function to the imagination itself and not to the phantasia. What
Wolfson refers to as the ‘retentive imagination’ Avicenna calls the phantasia, while
Albertus relates this ‘retentive’ function to what he calls the imagination. Aquinas
combined both functions with one faculty: ‘phantasia sive imaginatio, quae idem sunt.’
Wolfson also notes that in one work, the Isagoge in Libros de Anima, Albertus identi-
fied the phantasia with the sensus communis; in his De Anima, Avicenna made the
same identification.16 This discussion indicates that philosophers of the high Middle
Ages, in discussing the inherited natural psychology of Aristotle, offered significantly
different accounts of the scope, function, and number of faculties of what Aristotle in
his De Anima referred to only as the phantasia.17
The difference in analysis of this set of issues considering Aquinas’s use of phantasia in
the Summa Theologiae and in his Sentencia Libri De Anima resolves in principle several
of the conceptual muddles discussed so far. Insofar as a phantasm is not needed by the
sensus communis, this faculty is not part of the phantasia. In his Commentary, Aquinas
remarked: ‘it is by the phantasia that we become conscious of phantasms’ (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 638). It is possible that this generic use of ‘phantasia’ is due to the fact that,
while in his De Anima Aristotle mentioned the imagination, he had no general term by
which to refer to those faculties which came to be known later by the medieval philoso-
phers as the internal senses. The Jewish, Arabian, and Latin philosophers of the Middle
Ages postulated additional faculties in order to account for the various functions and
cognitive abilities of the internal senses as distinct from the five external senses.

John of St Thomas on Distinctions in Aquinas

In his treatise on natural philosophy, the Renaissance scholastic commentator on
Aquinas, John of St Thomas (more recently known as John Poinsot) offers this same
distinction on the two uses of phantasia in the texts of his mentor, Thomas Aquinas:

15
  Aquinas, like his early 14th-c. scholastic successor, if possible did not multiply entities or sense faculties.
16
  In his Sixth Meditation, Descartes also combines these two internal sense faculties.
17
  Klubertanz’s monograph spells out these theoretical and textual differences in some detail.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  225

The concept phantasia should be taken in two ways.

(a) One way is broader in scope and refers to each faculty of the internal senses, which
make their own objects [phantasms]. The phantasia is distinct from the sensus commu-
nis and the external senses, which only know when they are impressed directly by the
sensible objects. Thus, every internal sense except the sensus communis is referred to as
the ‘phantasia’, which St Thomas uses in his Commentary on the Soul. [ . . . ]
(b) Another way is when phantasia is taken as a term for the potentia imaginativa
[i.e.  vis imaginativa], which is a faculty distinct from the vis aestimativa and the
memoria [ . . . ]18
This position articulated by John of St Thomas corresponds to the structure and
content of the analysis undertaken in this chapter.19
In his discussion of medieval psychological theory, Leahey suggested that Aquinas
‘makes no original contribution to Aristotelian psychology’.20 It would seem, however,
that the description of the internal sense organs and faculties found in Aquinas’s texts
differs extensively from what Aristotle claimed in the De Anima. In discussing the role
of each faculty of inner sense, Aquinas moves beyond the limits that Aristotle exhib-
ited in the De Anima. Aquinas offers a distinction between the physiological place of
the internal sense organs and the cognitive function of the faculties. In discussing the
role of the faculty of an inner sense, he focuses attention on those inner sense powers
that require a phantasm.21 Leahey’s interpretation, it appears, is without textual or
structural merit.
While Aquinas writes that the sensus communis is not part of the phantasia when
the phantasia is used as a generic concept, nonetheless the precise relationship and
distinction between the phantasia and the sensus communis is not elucidated con-
sistently by either medieval or early modern philosophers. For example, in his Liber
Cannonis, Avicenna lists the phantasia as a faculty distinct and different from the
sensus communis, which refers to that faculty of inner sense that retains the sensible
forms after they have been conjoined by the sensus communis. This account is the
same structurally as the one provided by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae when he
identified the phantasia with the imagination. On the other hand, in his De Anima,

18
  John of St Thomas, Philosophia Naturalis, 4, p. 8, art. 2 (Reiser edn, III, 252b20–253a41). Deely, in
his commentary on this part of John of St Thomas (better known in Deely’s work as John Poinsot), sug-
gests that possibly a distinction between sensation and perception is affirmed in this passage. This point
will be developed later. In the judgement of this author, because of the distinction between the sensus
communis and the vis cogitativa, Aquinas can affirm this distinction between sensation and perception.
Deely’s study of John of St Thomas is particularly illuminating in his discussion of the role John played
in  the maintenance of standard interpretations of Aquinas. See John N. Deely, New Beginnings: Early
Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See also Deely,
Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton
Press, 2007).
19
  Wolfson notes (‘The Internal Senses’, 97) that among the Arabian commentators, localization of the
internal senses within the brain caused disputes between the physicians and the philosophers.
20
  Thomas Hardy Leahey, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought (Harlow:
Longman, 1987), 71.
21
  Both Leahey and Kemp appear to blur this distinction between organ and faculty.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

226  The Imagination and Phantasia

Avicenna identified the phantasia with the sensus communis: ‘Of the hidden vital
apprehensive powers, the first is the phantasia, which is the sensus communis. It is a
power placed in the first concavity of the brain, receiving by itself all the forms,
which are imprinted on the five senses and given to it.’22 That there is a conceptual
and logical inconsistency here is apparent. Establishing the structural and textual
reasons for this distinction in Arabian philosophy of mind, however, is beyond the
scope of this present inquiry.
In discussing Weinberg’s interpretation of Aquinas, the account of the internal
senses that Wolfson ascribed to Aquinas should be noted. Wolfson’s essay agrees with
the interpretation presented in this study, and he lists a fourfold classification of the
internal senses for Aquinas’s philosophy of mind: ‘(1) Sensus communis, (2) imagina-
tion (phantasia sive imaginatio), both retentive and compositive, the latter only in man
[sic], (3) estimation in animals corresponding to cogitation in man [sic] (aestimativa,
cogitativa), (4) memory (memorativa).’23 In addition, he list the five faculties of the
internal senses which he claims Aquinas attributed to Avicenna. Interestingly enough,
these are the very same five faculties of internal sense that Weinberg and Stump (the
latter without reference to the vis cogitativa) attributed to Aquinas:
Referring specifically to Avicenna’s fivefold classification of the internal senses, Thomas
Aquinas enumerates these as follows: (1) sensus communis, (2) retentive imagination (phan-
tasia), (3) compositive human and animal imagination (imaginativa), (4) estimation or
cogitation (aestimativa seu cogitativa), the former in animals and the latter in man, (5)
memory (memorativa).24

Given this discussion, it appears that Weinberg and Stump have attributed to Aquinas
what Aquinas had indeed attributed to Avicenna. That this is a misunderstanding
of Aquinas’s texts by Weinberg and Stump is clear. In referring to the influence of
Avicenna on Thomas, Kenny too suggests: ‘Aquinas believed that there were inner
senses, and took over a list of them from Avicenna [ . . . ].’25 While Aquinas never
argued that the phantasia was a separate faculty of inner sense distinct from the imag-
ination, nonetheless it is correct that some of his medieval predecessors did affirm
this claim of separation—even his mentor, Albertus Magnus. In fact, as Wolfson has
shown, nearly every medieval commentator on Aristotle devised his own position
regarding the number and function of the internal senses. Appropriating Wolfson’s
useful categories, Aquinas, utilizing his own version of Occam’s razor, combined the
‘retentive’ and the ‘compositive’ functions of inner sense into one faculty called the
imaginatio or phantasia.

22
 Avicenna, De Anima, as found in Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 95.
23
  Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses’, 122.
24
 Weinberg, Short History of Medieval Philosophy, 120–21.
25
  Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 235; yet this may be but a slip
of the pen (or the computer key, as the case may be), since Kenny lists only four internal senses and not the
five postulated by Avicenna.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  227

The Mental Act of the Vis Imaginativa

The next part of this analysis elucidates the function of the internal sense faculty
of imagination in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. There are many passages in which
Aquinas discusses the imagination as a distinct faculty of inner sense. Two different
terms—imaginatio and vis imaginativa, translated as ‘imagination’ and ‘imaginative
power’—are used in discussing the function of the imagination. However, there is no
indication that the phantasia belongs in this discussion as a faculty separate from the
imagination. Accordingly, it is obvious that Aquinas postulated a special faculty called
the imagination, which belongs to the internal sensorium.
The function of the imagination is indicated by the following passage, noted earlier,
from the Summa Theologiae: ‘For the reception of sensible forms, the proper sense and
the sensus communis are appointed [ . . . ] But for the retention and preservation of these
forms, the phantasia or imagination is appointed, being as it were a storehouse [thesau-
rus] of forms received through the senses’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4.).26 This term
thesaurus usually is translated as ‘storehouse’, which gets to the root meaning of the func-
tion of the imagination. In her recent account of inner sense in Thomas, Frede translates
thesaurus as ‘treasure house’.27 The imagination, as a thesaurus, is a faculty whose objects
are a complete aggregate of impressions of ‘concrete wholes’, which have been sensed pre-
viously by the external sense faculties in conjunction with the internal sense faculty of the
sensus communis. Accordingly, the imagination has at least the function of storing or
retaining the forms of the things directly sensed through the external sensorium. What is
conserved, it is important to recognize, takes on the epistemological status of a phantasm.
In effect, the imagination is the faculty by which one gains ‘experience’ rather than being a
novice. It is by means of the imagination that a person conserves her experience of con-
crete wholes so that every working of the external senses in conjunction with the sensus
communis is not a totally new kind of awareness. This is what the British empiricists usu-
ally refer to as ‘the memory’. Why Aquinas refers to this faculty as the imagination and not
the sense memory must await the discussion on the vis cogitativa and the vis memorativa.
The mental acts of the vis cogitativa and the vis memorativa, usually referred to as the
‘sense memory’ in many English translations, are intricately related in much the same
manner as the mental acts of the sensus communis are related to the imagination.
This ‘conservation’ or ‘retention’ of ‘concrete wholes’—what Wolfson has referred to as
the ‘retentive’ function of the imagination—is, accordingly, not the only mental act of

26
  The Latin text of the above passage: ‘Opportet ergo quod animal per animam sensitivam non solum
recipiat sensibilium, cum praesentialiter immutatur ab eis set etiam eas retinet et conservat. […] Ad harum
autem formarum retentionem aut conservationem ordinatur phantasia, sive imaginatio, quasi Thesaurus
quidem formatum per sensum acceptarum.’
27
 Dorothea Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of
Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 174. It is unclear what rendering thesaurus as ‘treasure house’ adds to
the understanding of the role of the imagination in the texts of Aquinas. Timothy Suttor renders thesaurus
as  ‘treasure-store of forms’: ‘Man’, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 11 (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 139.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

228  The Imagination and Phantasia

the imagination. Aquinas claims that the imagination is not only a storehouse of the
‘sensible forms’: ‘the imaginative power extends itself to everything which the five senses
know, plus it does more’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk I, no. 65). This passage suggests that
the imagination can retain everything that is known by means of the five external senses
in conjunction with the sensus communis, in addition to doing more than is contained
within the limits of the external sensorium. In other words, the imagination can be aware
of more than what is known directly by means of the external sensorium. What Aquinas
points out here is that the imagination has a creative ability—what Wolfson called the
‘compositive’ function of the imagination: ‘There are some powers of knowing which
from likenesses first conceived can form others—as in the imagination we can form the
image of a golden mountain from those of gold and a mountain’ (Summa Theologiae, I q.
12 a. 6 ad 2). The imagination is, therefore, a wonderfully creative faculty of inner sense in
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. Nonetheless, it is neither identical nor coextensive with
‘introspection’ or ‘private language’ issues, the latter associated with mid-twentieth-­
century criticisms of Cartesian philosophy of mind. What the imagination stores within
its receptive faculty role are the ‘sensible’ forms perceived by the sensus communis. This
would be, it appears, the sensible species plus the conditions of the sense faculty and the
medium during the mental act of sensation, all three of which are components of an
awareness of a ‘concrete whole’ by the sensus communis. The resulting phantasm
implanted in the imagination, then, is itself a composite structure that results from the
mental act of awareness of the sensus communis.
One must remember that the organ/faculty distinction holds for the internal as
well as for the external senses. Often Aquinas, with usual references to the Arabian
philosophers, indicates that the internal sense organs are in the brain, rendering the
brain itself the physiological basis for the organs of the internal senses. Yet the brain
itself, as a material organ, is an instance of esse naturale. All knowing is in the psycho-
logical status of esse intentionale. It is the root of intentionality in Aquinas to have an
‘immaterial’ reception of forms serve as the groundwork for all cognitive states. The
faculties, however, must be found in a physiological ‘home’, as it were, which is the
organ itself; this is what Kenny calls ‘the vehicle’. From Kemp’s history of psychology
writings, one learns that the organs of the internal senses are found in the three ven-
tricles of the brain. Esse intentionale, which is a necessary condition for awareness,
is not reducible to the physiological events or brain states in the ventricles; Aquinas is
not a physicalist. The brain-cell activity in the ventricles would seem to be what
Aquinas would call a transient and not an immanent activity. It appears that Kemp is
not clear on this distinction between intentional faculty and vehicle organ.

Imagination and Early Modern Philosophy

One might suggest that it is because of the creative capacity that Aquinas called the
imagination the ‘phantasy’. The internal sensorium is that cache of internal sense facul-
ties that (1) goes beyond the immediate data of sensation illustrated by conserving the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  229

forms of sensible objects in the imagination known through the sensus communis; (2)
provides interpretations to the ‘concrete wholes’ of sensation by means of a Gestalt-like
awareness through the vis cogitativa; and (3) stores the awarenesses of the vis cogitativa
in the sense memory. Insofar as the imagination, in addition to conserving the forms
of the sensible objects from the sensus communis, also has a certain creative ability,
then it is entitled to be called ‘phantasy’. If the imagination were just to ‘retain and
conserve’, then there appear to be fewer grounds for Aquinas to call it the phantasy; the
imagination as such would not go beyond the object of direct sensation known by
the sensus communis. Accordingly, this characteristic points to the essential nature of
the internal sensorium, which is to go beyond the data of immediate sensation. This is
not just a moot point. This cognitive characteristic obviously needs much explanation,
which occurs with the vis cogitativa and the sense memory. Structurally the imagina-
tion, when used in its creative capacity as the phantasia, is probably what Descartes
and Hobbes referred to as the ‘fancy’ in their writings. In his Essay, Locke too uses
‘fancy’ to refer to the activity of the imagination; he often uses ‘fancy’ as a verb—e.g.
‘Let me fancy as much as I will’. In addition, both Hobbes and Descartes blur the
conceptual distinction over what Aquinas called the sensus communis and the
imagination. By the seventeenth century, the precise distinctions between the sensus
communis and the imagination used by Aquinas had become muddled. Moreover, this
structural identity of faculties and functions expressed in the writings of several early
modern philosophers accounts for the claim that the phantasm is the direct object
of knowledge.
Frede suggested, in the same vein as Hamlyn and Weinberg, that ‘St. Thomas locates
the phantasms in the common sense’.28 She justifies her interpretation by an appeal to
paragraph 773 in the Commentary on the Soul. However, a close reading of this text
does not imply the role for phantasms that she suggests:
First then Aristotle remarks that colour-affected air itself modifies the pupil of the eye in a
particular way, i.e. it imprints on it a likeness of some colour, and then the pupil, so modified,
acts upon the sensus communis. Similarly our hearing, itself affect by the air, acts upon the
sensus communis. And though there are several exterior senses, their reactions all come back to
one point, which is a certain common medium between all the senses, like a center upon which
lines from a circumference all converge. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 773)

This passage indicates that the sensus communis is the common point for the compil-
ing of the various discrete awarenesses from the external senses. It does not propose
that this compilation or conjunctive relation is a phantasm. This point needs to be
emphasized continually. As Mahoney once noted, ‘[a] phantasm is not used of the sen-
sible species as found in the external senses or the common sense’.29 Frede, however,

28
  Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, 168.
29
  Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Sense, Intellect, and Imagination in Albert, Thomas and Siger’, in N. Kretzmann,
A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 607, n. 18. See appendix to Ch. 11 for a further discussion of this set of
issues.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

230  The Imagination and Phantasia

suggests otherwise: ‘For this reason, St. Thomas locates the phantasms in the common
sense: there all the sensory information runs together and is synthesized to a compre-
hensive picture.’30 Moreover, textual evidence confirms that Aquinas never used a
phantasm as a sensible object with the cognitive functioning of the sensus communis.
One might suggest that these contemporary commentators incorporate seventeenth-­
century interpretations in their analysis while working with thirteenth-century
writings. Of course, one must not push this suggestion too far. As noted above, one
interpretation suggests that Suárez held that the phantasm functioned as the direct
object of the sensus communis. In addition, there are texts, also noted above from
Albertus Magnus and Avicenna, in which a similar account is provided. These
accounts, however, are inconsistent structurally with the explanatory account
Aquinas provided. Nonetheless, it is obvious to philosophers familiar with the writ-
ings of early modern philosophers that phantasms served as the direct object of
perception. Locke, for example, offers a clear indication of this claim: ‘ “idea” [ . . . ] is
that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the
understanding when a man thinks [ . . . ] [It] expresses whatever is meant by phan-
tasm, notion, species [ . . . ].’31 Deely notes that by Locke’s time, the late medieval
scholastic philosophers had about a dozen synonyms for the intentional object in
the understanding or imagination.32
Furthermore, these claims are connected directly with representationalism. Insofar
as Aquinas is an epistemological realist, the objects in the world are the objects of
knowledge. But when representationalism came to the forefront of modern philo-
sophical discussions in conjunction with the rise of the new science, there were good
structural reasons for blurring the internal sense categories used by Aquinas. It is
unclear whether Frede regards the placement of a phantasm in the sensus communis as
entailing some form of representationalism. In her analysis, Frede is concerned about
the image dimension of a phantasm in the process of understanding. In the end, her
interpretation conflicts with Aquinas’s texts, which confirm that phantasms pertain
only to the faculties of the internal sensorium.
In his study of late medieval and early modern philosophy of mind, Deely suggests
the following helpful schema for three distinct positions that medieval philosophers
articulated in discussing the ontological states of sense qualities:
(a) Aquinas, Scotus, and John of St Thomas: The proper and common sensibles
have a causal structure outside the mind that acts upon the sense organ and
faculty, which organ and faculty are biological and intentional dispositional
properties. This is Aquinas’s form of epistemological realism and ontological
realism, which grounds his externalism.

30
  Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, 168.
31
  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), no. 8.
32
 Deely, New Beginnings, 123; also N. J. Wells, ‘Descartes’ Idea and its Sources’, American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 67(4) (1993), 513–36.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  231

(b) Occam: The sensible qualities inhere in the material objects that act upon the
senses and are present to the senses through this action. This is a form of naïve
realism, much less sophisticated than what Aquinas and Scotus proposed.
South suggests, however, that Occam’s rejection of sensible species rendered a
more sophisticated theory of sensation.
(c) Suárez: The sensible qualities are images (phantasms) formed by the sense
faculties through the causal interaction of the thing with the sense faculty.
This is epistemological representationalism. South, to the contrary, while
acknowledging this is a common interpretation of Suárez,33 argues against
this position affirmed by Deely.34
The position articulated by Suárez as interpreted by Deely becomes the epistemological
paradigm adopted by Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, and most modern and some contem-
porary British empiricists. What this conceptual turmoil indicates is a tremendous
disparity of positions regarding the sensible qualities that developed from the late
Middle Ages up to the rise of early modern philosophy.35

Imagination as ‘the Master of Falsity’

Because of the imagination’s creative capacity, Aquinas does not trust completely its
veracity:
Regarding the apprehension of the senses, it must be noted that there is one type of apprehensive
power, for example, a proper sense, which apprehends a sensible species in the presence of a
sensible thing. But there is also a second type, the imagination, for example, which apprehends
a sensible species when the thing is absent. So even though the sense always apprehends a thing
as it is, unless there is an impediment in the organ or in the medium, the imagination usually
apprehends a thing as it is not, since it apprehends it as present though it is absent. Consequently,
the Philosopher says: ‘Imagination, not sense, is the master of falsity.’ (Quaestiones Disputatae
de Veritate, I, 11)

Aquinas appears concerned about items that worried Descartes in the First Meditation,
namely dreams and hallucinations:

33
  James B. South, ‘Suárez and the Problem of External Sensation’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology
10(2) (2001), 217–40.
34
 Deely, New Beginnings, 130.
35
  This discussion suggests a lesson that historians of medieval philosophy know all too well. It is a mis-
take to interpret medieval philosophers by the way their concepts were understood and used by their
descendants in early modern philosophy. Regarding the sensus communis, the imagination, and the phan-
tasm, this is one case where a ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of Aquinas proves dangerous. A misunderstanding
of these three critical concepts can affect medieval scholarship dramatically. Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes,
among others, were not using the epistemological categories elucidated by Aquinas in the same way Aquinas
himself had used them. It is possible, therefore, that commentators like Hamlyn and Weinberg, and possibly
Frede, may have misunderstood Aquinas’s account of sensation because they transferred an understanding
of terminology and structure from the early modern philosophers to the writings of Aquinas.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

232  The Imagination and Phantasia

Now, although the first immutation of the imagination is through the agency of the sensible,
since the phantasia [imagination] is a movement produced in accordance with sensation,
nonetheless it may be said that there is in the human person an operation which by division
and composition forms images of various things, even of things not perceived by the senses.
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 6 ad 2)

The imagination can be quite involved in non-veridical awareness. ‘Non-veridical’ is

here used to denote an act of awareness without an object present in the external world. It
is not surprising that Descartes and Locke, with the conceptual blurring they maintain in
relation to Aquinas’s faculties of the sensus communis and the vis imaginativa, empha-
sized the function of the imagination with its built-in non-veridical nature. This forces
them to claim that one can never be assured that the idea represents the external world
veridically. Hence emerge the foundationalist worries rooted in an internalist position
on knowing, which became common in early modern philosophy and remained preva-
lent even in late twentieth-century of Western philosophy. To read this paradigm on
explanation into Aquinas’s philosophy of mind account is, however, a misunderstanding
of Aquinas. Hence, it may well be the case that the conceptual blurring of the imagination
with the sensus communis combined with the need for a phantasm as a tertium quid for
the imagination led to the representationalism so common in modern philosophy.
Furthermore, with the emphasis on representationalism comes the pervasiveness of
internalism, along with an emphasis on foundationalist epistemology and its accompa-
nying scepticism. This emphasis probably led to the excessive concern over introspection
conjoined with what Wittgenstein and Ryle appear to hold in the Philosophical
Investigations and The Concept of Mind regarding the private language problem. That
Aquinas kept these matters under control is certainly part of the history of medieval phi-
losophy. What is interesting, however, is that the distinction and separation of internal
sense faculties between the sensus communis and the phantasia as imagination may have
contributed fundamentally to Aquinas’s epistemological realism.
The final chapters build upon the analyses undertaken so far. The telos of this present
work, like an Aristotelian final cause, is directed towards a block-by-block construction
through an explicatio textus of the role that inner sense, with special reference to the vis
cogitativa, plays in Aquinas’s account of the perception of individual things—the pri-
mary substances of his Aristotelian ontology. This account of perception will depend
upon a consistent elucidation of the concept of phantasm in these cognitive processes.

appendix 1
Pasnau, Stump, and Shiels on Phantasia in Aristotle
and Thomas
Pasnau, Stump, and Christopher Shiels have different perspectives on the concept of phantasia,
all three of which will be useful to consider in this analysis of phantasia. Pasnau and Stump are
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  233

more directly concerned about Aquinas’s use of this concept, especially in the Commentary on
the Soul and the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. Shiels has written an extended analysis
of recent work on Aristotle’s De Anima considering the vagueness with which Aristotle appears
to treat the concept of phantasia in the De Anima.
In his ‘Introduction’ to A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Pasnau remarks that
Aquinas’s discussion of the concept of ‘phantasia’ is an Aristotelian aporia. Pasnau writes: ‘In his
theological works Aquinas consistently speaks of phantasia as an inner sensory power that plays
two quite limited roles. First it preserves prior sensory impressions. […] Second, phantasia
creates new images by putting these sensory forms together in novel ways.’36 This is, of course,
the passage quoted above from the Summa Theologiae in which Aquinas identifies the
imagination with the phantasia. Pasnau remarks that Aquinas’s account depends heavily on the
Aristotelian commentaries by Avicenna and Averroes.37 Pasnau is concerned that these texts of
Aquinas discussing the role of phantasia found in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae,
when compared with the use of this concept of inner sense as developed by Aristotle in the De
Anima, is less complex that what Aristotle had rendered. Pasnau argues that for Aristotle,
‘phantasia plays a direct role in sensory experience; it does not merely preserve leftover images
but at least in some cases accounts for the sensory experience itself.’38 Pasnau then suggests,
on the other hand, that in the Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas offers a broader view of the
role phantasia plays in sense perception. Pasnau writes that in this Aristotelian Commentary,
Aquinas ‘seems to opt for a broader reading: that phantasia is engaged whenever an object
appears to us in a certain way. In other words, phantasia seems directly involved in all kinds of
sensory experience.’39 The final chapters of this study provide an attempt to resolve this aporia
that Pasnau suspects exists in comparing the theological with the more philosophical works of
Aquinas treating phantasia: ‘thus the De Anima commentary suggests an account of phantasia
that is very different from the one Aquinas offers in his theological works.’40 Pasnau does not
offer a resolution to this quandary, nor does he explicate how Aquinas developed a different
position in his Commentary from what is found in the Summa Theologiae.
Stump appears to regard Aquinas’s account of the inner senses as less complex than Pasnau
suggests (or as will be developed later in this present study). She writes that ‘phantasia and
imagination are connected’. Then she goes on to offer the limits to what she intends to undertake
in her analysis of Aquinas on ‘the mechanisms of cognition’: ‘Except for a brief discussion of
the memorative power, in what follows I will consider only phantasia and imagination among
the internal senses.’41 The next chapter considers in great detail the function of the vis cogitativa,
an inner sense faculty in Aquinas that Stump appears to neglect almost totally. Stump appears
to base her distinction between the phantasia and the imagination on passages in the
Commentary on the Soul. Yet in her analysis as noted above, phantasia also appears to be a
separate and distinct faculty of inner sense that is not reducible to the imagination. She argues
that ‘phantasia [is] distinct from imagination’.42 For Stump, imagination appears to be the

36
  Robert Pasnau, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.
37
  Ibid.; Pasnau refers to Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press 1996).
38
  Pasnau, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.
39
  Ibid.; in these texts from Pasnau, the use of italics for ‘phantasia’ has been incorporated into the
passages in order to retain a consistent use in this book.
40
  Ibid.   41 Stump, Aquinas, 248.    42  Ibid.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

234  The Imagination and Phantasia

retentive and compositive faculty of inner sense that Aquinas considers explicitly in the Summa
Theologiae. On the other hand, phantasia, as a distinct faculty in Stump’s rendition, is involved
in direct perception; however, she has precious little to say about this perceptual function of
phantasia. She may be too closely influenced by the Arabian philosophers who do have phantasia
as a distinct faculty separate from the imagination. The final chapters in this book discuss the role
of phantasms with the vis cogitativa that accounts for the direct perception of the individual
primary substance in the external world. In contrast to both Stump and Pasnau, both of whom
appear to have phantasia be involved directly with the mental act of perceiving the external
world, the position articulated in the last chapter of this present study argues that there is only
one faculty subsumed under the generic use of phantasia, namely, the vis cogitativa, by means
of which this direct perception is exemplified in the texts of Aquinas.
The second revised printing of Hamlyn’s translation of Aristotle’s De Anima contains
a  remarkable essay by Christopher Shiels discussing in some detail more than several
contemporary scholarly works on this important Aristotelian treatise.43 In this extended
discussion of cognitive faculties, Shiels appears to identify phantasia with imagination. He
remarks that ‘unfortunately, Aristotle does little to characterize imagination in any positive
way’, and quotes Hamlyn’s remark that in Aristotle’s explication of phantasia ‘there is clearly
little consistency here’.44 In an extended footnote Shiels notes that Brentano’s work on Aristotle
has been sadly neglected; he remarks that Brentano ‘both interprets and appropriates Aristotle’s
account of thinking in fertile ways’.45 An earlier chapter provided substantive analysis of the
important connections between Brentano and Aquinas on the ontological status of intentionality
theory. Shiels’s essay offers a thoughtful and quite complete account of the scholarly work
undertaken in the last quarter of the twentieth century on more than a few of the major issues
considered in Aristotle’s De Anima.

appendix 2
Late Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
In the seventeenth century, in discussing his famous ‘wax example’ in the Second Meditation,
Descartes, in a manner similar to one text found in the writings of Avicenna, identified the
‘imaginative faculty’ with the sensus communis: ‘I shall proceed with the matter in hand, and
inquire whether I had a clearer and more perfect perception of the piece of wax when I first saw
it, and when I thought I knew it by means of the external sense itself, or, at all events, by the
common sense [sensus communis], as it is called, that is, by the imaginative faculty.’46 It should
be noted that the Latin term ‘sensus communis’ appear in the Cartesian text.
In Leviathan, Hobbes appears to make the same identification of sensus communis with the
phantasia, which he called ‘fancy’: ‘All Qualities, called sensible, are in the object that causes
them as so many several motions of the matter, by which it presses against our organs diversely.
Neither in us that are pressed are they any thing else, but diverse motions. But their appearance

43
  D. W. Hamlyn, Aristotle De Anima, Books II and III, with Passages from Book I (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986), containing Christopher Shiels, ‘Some Recent Approaches to Aristotle’s De Anima’.
44
  Ibid., 174.   45  Ibid., 181, n. 37.
46
  Meditation Two, in The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, trans. John Veitch
(Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Imagination and Phantasia  235

to us is Fancy, the same waking that dreaming.’47 According to Hobbes, ‘Fancy’, which is an
English derivative of phantasia, is utilized in both direct perception and in dreaming.48 For
Aquinas, these two faculties are neither equivalent nor coextensive. What these texts suggest is
that interpretations of medieval theories may have exerted a far more persuasive and substantive
influence on early modern philosophy than is often assumed.
There is textual evidence noted above that both Avicenna and Albertus Magnus identified
the phantasia with the sensus communis. Whether either or both of these philosophers
influenced Descartes is an intriguing query. According to some interpretations, Francisco
Suárez did require a phantasm for the intentional exercise of the  sensus communis.49 It is
highly probable that Suárez’s philosophy influenced Descartes, especially since the latter
studied scholastic philosophy at La Flèche, an important Jesuit-sponsored institution in the
seventeenth century. Considering the influence of  Suárez on these philosophy-of-mind
matters, Deely has written: ‘Locke’s (and Descartes’s) position is rather that of Suárez, who
held that external sense, no less than internal sense and understanding, required the formation
of species expressa (i.e. an image or an idea) to produce its object of apprehension.’50 Accordingly
to  Deely, it is obvious that Suárez’s position is neither coextensive nor identical with
that  articulated by Thomas Aquinas. What is ironic, as Deely notes, is that Suárez’s
Disputationes Metaphysicae was treated as the principal conduit through which medieval
Aristotelianism ‘filtered’ into modern western Europe.51 South, however, rejects this account
of perception:
If cognition is a likeness, does this mean that one is directly aware of the likeness and at best only indirectly
aware of the object of which the act is a likeness? Suárez emphatically denies such a theoretical conse-
quence. After all, he is careful to state that the terminus of the act of sensation does not present the sensible
object in such a way that it is represented as an object in the image produced by sensation.52

Considering the significance of Suárez’s influence on later philosophers, Bréhier wrote the
following: ‘Thomism as formulated by the Jesuit Suárez was universally taught and finally
supplanted the doctrine of Melanchthon, even in the universities of Protestant countries.’53 In
his ‘A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents’, Kerr suggests, following insights
from Gilson and Chenu, that Suárez appears to have adopted a deductive model of Thomism
more than faintly similar to the Wolffian attempts to devise a thoroughly deductive ontology.54
This suggests more than a hint of the soon-to-be-developed Cartesianism; in addition, in his
philosophy of mind Suárez appears to have argued for only one internal sense power. At any
length, this analysis makes eminently clear that there is no textual evidence that Aquinas

47
  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt 2, ch. 1.
48
  In his Aquinas on Mind, Kenny uses ‘fancy’ when discussing the phantasia as imagination.
49
  Deely supports this claim regarding Suárez while South denies that Suárez held this position.
50
 Deely, New Beginnings, 135.   51  Ibid., 43.
52
  South, ‘Suárez and the Problem of External Sensation’, 233; this is a very thorough analysis of issues in
the philosophy of mind in Suárez contrasting Suárez’s account with that of Aquinas. Resolving this issue of
differing interpretations of Suárez is beyond the limits of this monograph. Nonetheless, the contemporary
reader should be aware of these differences of analysis and the impact that each might have on the devel-
opment of early modern rationalist epistemology.
53
  Émile Bréhier, The Seventeenth Century, trans. Wade Baskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 1; this is Bréhier’s 1938 history text.
54
  Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents’, International Journal of
Systematic Theology 8(2) (2006), 146.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

236  The Imagination and Phantasia

identified the phantasia or imagination with the sensus communis. Moreover, since the sensus
communis is not part of the internal sensorium, it cannot be included with those faculties of
inner sense to which the phantasia applies as a generic concept. There is a category difference
between the sensus communis and either use of phantasia by Aquinas.55

55
  Writing on early modern theories of the philosophy of mind, Margaret Wilson noted: ‘early modern
figures [. . .] did not put much weight on the special (proper)/common sensible issue in maintaining that
only a subset of the apparent qualities are, as we perceive them, really in the objects’: M. D. Wilson, ‘History
of Philosophy in Philosophy Today, and the Case of the Sensible Qualities’, Philosophical Review 101(1)
(1992), 210, n. 42.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

10
The Vis Cogitativa
On Perceiving the Individual

When considering the objects of sensation in the preceding chapters, brief mention
was made of the incidental object of sense. This object of perception, discussed only
sketchily by Aristotle, is the direct object of awareness of the internal sense faculty that
Aquinas calls the vis cogitativa. The exact nature of this faculty requires an explication
of the internal sensorium. Having completed that task in the preceding chapters, it is
now time to venture into the uncharted waters of analysis of this unique faculty of
inner sense in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
Writing on contemporary naturalist epistemology, Haldane argued persuasively, it
will be recalled, that discussion was needed in this area of inner sense in Aquinas
along with the intellectus agens: ‘What is now needed, however, is a fully perspicuous
philosophical account [ . . . ] of the nature and operations of what in the Aristotelian-
Thomistic tradition are spoken of as the “cogitative powers” and the “active intellect”.
That might be one of our tasks for the next century.’1 The task about to be undertaken
will push forward an analysis of the ‘cogitative powers’ that Haldane considers neces-
sary. Secondly, suggestions will be offered concerning how the vis cogitativa may assist
in determining a contemporary account of the intellectus agens. In this study, however,
the particular set of issues addressed concern principally Aquinas’s account of sensation
and perception. Attention to concept formation through the intellectus agens is given
only peripherally. One of the principal goals is to elucidate how Aquinas handles the
issue of perceiving an individual as an individual and not merely as a collection of sensi-
ble qualities.2 Hence, Aquinas provides a proposal offering a solution to Ryle’s puzzle.
Inner sense has proven to be a terribly difficult bit of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind
to render into a consistent exposition.3 Klubertanz’s extensive philosophical narrative,

1
  John Haldane, ‘Insight, Inference and Intellection’, in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 73 (1999), 43; Haldane also discusses these issues in ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics
of Mind’, in John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of
Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 119–39.
2
  Ryle worried about this puzzling issue more than half a century ago; see Gilbert Ryle, ‘Sensation’,
in H.  D.  Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy III (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 427; see
beginning of Ch. 7.
3
  It will be useful to recall the state of contemporary work with inner sense in Aquinas. Two Ph.D.
dissertations completed recently by Leo White and Mark Baker and several essays by White and De Haan
provide fresh considerations of this illusive faculty of inner sense.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

238  The Vis Cogitativa

The Discursive Power, is one of the more detailed analyses of the vis cogitativa in
Aquinas.4 Kemp’s several essays treat the vis cogitativa as discussed in both Arabian
and western European theories of mind.5 An article published in The Modern
Schoolman probably best describes lack of scholarship on inner sense in Thomas:
‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’.6 In his account
of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind from the perspective of scholastic Thomism, Peifer
does not discuss the role of the vis cogitativa.7 Martin shrugs his shoulders, it appears,
by remarking: ‘it is impossible here to enter into a discussion of Aquinas’s views on [the
vis cogitativa].’8 Stump does not consider the vis cogitativa, although she spends con-
siderable time offering an analysis of phantasms.9 In his essay on Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind, Kretzmann does not discuss the vis cogitativa.10 In his Medieval Philosophy,
Kenny, in discussing the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa, provides the usual exam-
ples of instinct for the mental acts of the vis aestimativa; yet he is perplexed by the vis
cogitativa.11 Kenny, in an earlier text, attributes to the concept of inner sense a Cartesian
mental awareness devoid of sense awareness; he comments less than positively about
the nature of inner sense, which he takes to misrepresent the imagination, among
other acts of awareness: ‘Hence, if the whole notion of inner sense is misconceived,
then not only the objects of imagination are misrepresented as inner sense data, but so
also, more importantly, there is a misunderstanding underlying the idea that there is
an inner subject of sensation, the self of empiricist tradition.’12
Kenny is concerned, it appears, about a mental act of awareness of inner sense that is
unconnected with any direction to the outside world. This would be the Cartesian—
and probably the Lockean—concept of inner sense. Aquinas, however, focuses
attention on the faculties of inner sense, which are rooted in the internal sensorium
that provide an explanatory account of the pre-analytic data of some of acts of
human awareness.13 This chapter, accordingly, embarks on an analysis of Aquinas’s

4
 George Peter Klubertanz, SJ, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa
According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Modern Schoolman, 1952)—perhaps the only book-
length treatment of the vis cogitativa.
5
 Simon Kemp’s Medieval Psychology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990) is an informed
account of this faculty of inner sense from the perspective of a historian of psychology; nonetheless, Kemp
is somewhat confused on Aquinas’s position
6
 Julien Peghaire, ‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’, Modern
Schoolman 20 (1942–3), 123–40; 210–29.
7
  John Peifer, The Mystery of Knowledge (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1964).
8
  Christopher Martin, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (London: Routledge, 1988), 122.
9
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003).
10
 Norman Kretzmann, ‘The Philosophy of Mind’, in Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128–59. In the same
volume (pp. 160–95), Scott MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, does not mention the vis cogitativa in
discussing Aquinas’s epistemology.
11
  Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 235.
12
  Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 91.
13
  Aquinas is not considering the ‘myth’ of Ryle’s infamous ‘ghost in the machine’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  239

theory on the vis cogitativa with the intention of assisting discussions of Aquinas’s
realist account of sensation and perception. It goes beyond the limits of inner sense
that bother Kenny, responds to Kenny’s worries about Aquinas’s unclarity on this
inner sense faculty, and resolves what Frede called ‘an embarrassment’.14 The analysis
put forward will enhance Aquinas’s claims for both an ontological realism and an
epistemological realism.

The Vis Aestimativa and the Vis Cogitativa

Aquinas distinguishes the vis aestimativa from the vis cogitativa because the former,
he suggests, pertains to animal perceivers and the latter to human perceivers. Both
sense faculties are posited to account for an object of sensation that goes beyond the
‘concrete wholes’ synthesized and conjoined by the sensus communis from the discrete
sensibles of the external senses. Aquinas offers the following data establishing an epis-
temological foundation for positing this unique internal sense faculty: ‘Furthermore,
for the apprehension of intentions that are not received through the senses, the aestima-
tive power is appointed; and for their preservation, the memorative power, which is a
storehouse (thesaurus) for such intentions’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4; emphasis
added). In De Veritate, Aquinas writes that ‘the imagination, which is the storehouse of
forms received by the senses, [ . . . and . . . ] the memory, for particular apprehensions
not received from the senses’ (De Veritate II, q. 10).
Aquinas suggests that the act of awareness of this inner sense faculty goes beyond
the data of sensation as determined by the external sensorium. ‘Animals, therefore,
need to perceive such intentions, which the exterior sense does not perceive. Now some
distinct principle is necessary for this, since the perception of sensible forms comes by an
immutation caused by the sensible, which is not the case with the perception of the above
intentions’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4; emphasis added). This set of passages
describes the function of the vis aestimativa, which functions so that a sensing animal
is aware of ‘intentions’ that are not perceived or perceivable directly in the external
world. This is what several late medieval philosophers called an ‘intentio non sensata’;
Aquinas refers to this term as ‘sensibile per accidens’. With the vis aestimativa, this fac-
ulty functions something like what a contemporary zoologist would call some form of
‘instinct’. The wolf, which makes the sheep run, is perceived through the external sen-
sorium of the sheep only as a dark object of a certain shape making certain sounds
in the near distance. The sheep, so Aquinas suggests, is aware directly of this dark,
moving, sound-producing object of a particular shape as a ‘thing to be feared’. The fact
that the sheep is aware of something beyond what is sensed immediately, according
to Aquinas, indicates that there is a need for postulating a sense faculty that is able

14
 Dorothea Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of
Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 170.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

240  The Vis Cogitativa

structurally to account for this kind of awareness.15 The same evidence accounts for
the bird’s gathering certain straws in order to build a nest.16
From Aquinas’s writings, there appear to be three kinds or levels of sense knowledge
appropriate to different levels of animal life. It follows that ‘instinct’ is too broad and
inclusive a concept under which to place all forms of animal sense knowledge.17 In
Book I of the Commentary on the Metaphysics, Thomas discusses these three areas of
sensitive awareness proper to non-human animals. It appears that by means of the dif-
ferentiation of sense powers, Aristotle and Aquinas are determining different levels of
sense life in what the medievals often referred to as brute animals. The following
­passages illustrate Aquinas’s keen powers of observations regarding various forms of
animal life:
It is evident, then, that there are three levels of knowing in animals. The first level is that had by
animals which have neither hearing nor memory, and which are therefore neither capable of
being taught nor of being prudent. The second level is that of animals that have memory but
are unable to hear, and which are therefore prudent but incapable of being taught. The third
level is that of animals which have both of these faculties, and which are therefore prudent and
capable of being taught. Moreover, there cannot be a fourth level, so that there would be an
animal that had hearing but lacked memory. For those senses which perceive their sensible
objects by means of an external medium—and hearing is one of these—are found only in ani-
mals which have locomotion and which cannot do without memory. [Aquinas remarks that
this last point was noted in Section 10.] (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk I, sec. 13)

What is interesting in this passage is that the third level of animal sensitive life appears
to border that life modelled by human persons. Aquinas uses the term ‘prudence’ in
these discussions. Yet it is different from ascribing the same term to a human person.
Aquinas continues:
Again, from the fact that some animals have memory and some do not, it follows that some are
prudent and some not. Since prudence makes provision for the future from memory of the past
(and this is the reason why Tully in his Rhetoric, Book II, makes memory, understanding and
foresight parts of prudence), prudence cannot be had by those animals that lack memory. Now
those animals that have memory can have some prudence, although prudence has one mean-
ing in the case of brute animals and another in the case of human persons. Human beings are
prudent inasmuch as they deliberate rationally about what they ought to do. Hence it is said
in Book VI of the Ethics, that prudence is a rationally regulated plan of things to be done. But
the judgement about things to be done which is not a result of any rational deliberation but of

15
  R. P. Phillips writes in much the same vein: ‘S. Thomas called the “estimative faculty” or power, a
function which is included under what now goes by the rather vague name of “instinct”’: Modern Thomistic
Philosophy: An Explanation for Students (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1934), 237.
16
  Frede shares this interpretation: ‘In the animals this estimative power works purely by instinct, i.e. the
animal associates with a sensory impression the feeling that something is detrimental’: ‘Aquinas on
Phantasia’, 170.
17
  Deely notes Aquinas is not always precise regarding the different uses of these terms for animal know-
ing. See John N. Deely, ‘Animal Intelligence and Concept Formation’, The Thomist 35(1) (1971), 43–93. I am
indebted to Professor Deely for suggesting this important text from the Commentary on the Metaphysics.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  241

some natural instinct is called prudence in other animals. Hence in other animals, prudence
is a natural estimate about the pursuit of what is fitting and the avoidance of what is harmful;
for example, as a lamb follows its mother and runs away from a wolf. (Commentary on the
Metaphysics, bk I, sec. 11)

More than a few passages suggest that Aquinas sought the use of ‘instinct’ as an
umbrella concept under which would fall several sensitive awarenesses found in ani-
mals. In the case of instinct, furthermore, Aquinas appears to accept some rendition of
an ‘innate idea’ position, from which follows an epistemological structure of nativism.
The animal manifests behaviour that exceeds the limits of that which is sensed directly.
Accordingly, Aquinas modifies somewhat his axiom: ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non
prius fuerit in sensu.’ Here instinct seems to be functioning as an innate cognitive struc-
ture. The concept of an intentio non sensata is apparent. This innateness functions as a
‘conditioning’ of the mental act so that the act perceives the object in a unique way; it
appears that Aquinas suggests a form of nativism for the vis aestimativa. An important
corollary concerns whether the vis cogitativa requires an innate idea in order to func-
tion; this will be addressed later. Nonetheless, the reference to the vis aestimativa in the
Summa Theologiae is one of the rare texts where Aquinas considers innate ideas.18
That Aquinas considers the vis aestimativa as instinct is clear from the following
passage: ‘But the lower animal’s awareness of individualized notions is called natural
instinct, which comes into play when a sheep, for example, recognizes its offspring by
sight, or sound, or something of that sort’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 397). The
Latin text is ‘in animali vero irrationali, fit apprehensio intentionis individualis per aesti-
mativam naturalem’ (bk II, lectio xiii). The terms ‘aestimativam naturalem’ are trans-
lated as ‘natural instinct’. However, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes that ‘nam
alia animalia percipiunt huismodi intentiones solum naturali quodam instinctu’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4). Here Aquinas uses the Latin term ‘instinctu’. In De
Veritate, he writes about the vis aestimativa: ‘Sed vis aestimativa, per quam animal
apprehendit intentiones non acceptas per sensu, ut amicitiam vel inimicitiam [ . . . ]’. The
translation of this passage is as follows:
Thus the imaginative power belongs to the sensitive soul in accordance with its own nature,
because forms received from sense are stored up in it; but the estimative power, by which an
animal apprehends intentions not received by the senses, such as friendship or hostility, is in
the sensitive soul according as it shares somewhat in reason. It is accordingly in virtue of this
estimative power that animals are said to have a sort of prudence, as is seen in the beginning of
the Metaphysics. A sheep, for example, flees from a wolf whose hostility it has never sensed. (De
Veritate, q. 25 a. 2)

In this text, Aquinas suggests that the higher animals have a sense of perceiving the
external world that differs in kind from the lower animals. There are, to reiterate, three

18
  The concern is with human and animal sensation and knowledge, and not with the issue of innate
ideas in general. In a different epistemological area, however, Aquinas argues that angels utilize only innate
ideas in their unique kind of knowing. Angelic knowledge, however, is far beyond this discussion.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

242  The Vis Cogitativa

levels of sense knowledge in non-rational animals. Here Aquinas notes that a dog, for
instance, immediately perceives a person as friendly or not friendly.19
The metaphilosophy Aquinas utilizes in discussing the vis aestimativa is consist-
ent with his holistic treatment of sensation and perception. He seeks to develop a
conceptual possibility for explanation. The effect of this suggestion is that he assumes
as a given datum of sense experience—a pre-analytic datum of awareness—that per-
ceivers undertake acts of awareness about the external world in a certain manner.
He next attempts to provide an explanatory account for these mental acts in terms of
a faculty psychology.20 Strawson and Aquinas take as a given that human knowers
perceive certain facets of the world around them. Next a philosophical attempt is
undertaken, using what Strawson referred to as ‘descriptive metaphysics’ rather than
‘revisionary metaphysics’, to set out how this procedure explains the possibility for
perceptual experience to occur. The weight of these remarks must be taken in con-
text. It is certainly a mistake as well as irrelevant to make Aquinas into a Strawsonian
or whomever. Nonetheless, while Whiggish history of philosophy is useful only up
to a point, there are important similarities in their modus operandi approaching
issues in intentionality. These metaphilosophical similarities are, moreover, illustra-
tive similarities.
In Avicenna’s texts, human persons also have a vis aestimativa, which is one
internal sense faculty where Aquinas calls for two: the vis aestimativa and the vis cog-
itativa.21 Klubertanz notes that Averroes claimed that human persons have what he
called a ‘virtus cogitativa’; moreover, Averroes interpreted the function of the vis cogi-
tativa as being so important that he referred to this inner sense faculty at times as
‘intellect’ or ‘reason’.22 Aquinas articulated his criticism of Averroes’s position on the
separated nature of the intellect. Aquinas refines his own position on the role of the
internal sensorium and its relation to the intellectus agens and the intellectus possibi-
lis.23 The faculties of the internal sensorium, like the faculties of the external senso-
rium, are always connected ontologically with a physiological organ, which is the
vehicle. Averroes, in particular, writes often about the physiological locus of the inter-
nal sense faculties.24

19
 This remark reminds one of Putnam’s dog and the beef-for-food example. See Hilary Putnam,
Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), ch. 2.
20
  Strawson’s attempt in Individuals to provide a ‘conceptual scheme’ for the ways a human knower is
aware of the world seems remarkably similar to Aquinas’s metaphilosophical approach to sensation and
perception.
21
 Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 275; this book contains an extraordinary cache of texts important
for an analysis of inner sense in medieval philosophy.
22
  This closeness of the vis cogitativa to the intellect is a concern to Frede: ‘This ability is something of an
embarrassment for it seems to be an ability that is somehow in between sense-perception and thought’:
‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, 170.
23
  Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 60.
24
  In several texts, Aquinas quotes various Arabian physicians who suggested that the vis cogitativa is
located ‘in the middle cell of the head’ (ibid.), ‘to which medical persons assign a particular organ, namely,
the middle part of the head’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  243

The Awareness of Individuals

In the case of a human perceiver in contrast with a sensing animal, Aquinas refers to an
important change regarding the act of awareness of this internal sense: what in animals
is the vis aestimativa in humans is the vis cogitativa. There is, however, at least an anal-
ogous relationship between the vis aestimativa in animal sensing and the vis cogitativa
in human knowledge. Passages in the Summa Theologiae continue the discussion of
sensation and perception:
Now, we must observe that regarding sensible forms there is no difference between human
persons and other animals. For they are similarly immuted by external sensibles. […] But there
is a difference as to the above intentions [i.e. of the internal senses and intentiones non sensa-
tae]: for other animals perceive these intentions only by some sort of natural instinct, while
human persons perceive them also by means of a certain comparison. Therefore, the power
which in other animals is called the natural aestimative in humans is called the cogitative,
which by some sort of comparison discovers these intentions. Therefore, it is also called the
particular reason, to which medical persons assign a particular organ, namely, the middle part
of the head. For it compares individual intentions, just as the intellectual reason [intellectus
possibilis] compares universal intentions. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

In this passage, Aquinas notes clearly that the vis cogitativa is neither identical nor
coextensive with the instinct associated with the vis aestimativa. It follows that,
regarding content, there are no innate ideas in the cognitive capacities in human per-
ceivers. Rather than being natural instinct, the vis cogitativa makes comparisons
regarding the awareness of individual things. The vis cogitativa is that sense faculty by
means of which the human perceiver is aware of an individual as an individual—i.e. as
a concretum—and not merely as a bundle of conjoined proper and common sensibles.
Aquinas writes about the vis cogitativa: ‘[It . . . ] distinguishes individual intentions
and compares them with one another’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 60). Aquinas
writes that a human knower may consider ‘universal notions, which belong to the
intellectual faculty, or about particular matters, which belongs to the sensitive facul-
ties [ . . . the latter being . . . ] an act of the cogitative power’ (Summa Theologiae, I–II
art. 1). It appears that the concept of ‘comparison’ is reducible to a comparison of one
individual primary substance with another. In other words, this is the faculty or cog-
nitive power with the built-in ability to be aware of a specific individual as an individ-
ual and thus, by comparison, separate one incidental object of sense from another.
One might ask whether the animal ‘perceives’ the object of which it is afraid as an
individual, or only as a collection of proper and common sensibles. Aquinas is unclear
on this distinction. It appears, however, that what is perceived—i.e. what would be the
epistemological force of the vis aestimativa—is reducible to an innate reaction,
e.g. fear, in the very act of perceiving itself. This might be similar to a Gestalt condi-
tioning of the act of awareness of a fearful object.
Aquinas writes the following about the vis cogitativa; several texts are included here
because this topic is central to the general overall theme of this study.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

244  The Vis Cogitativa

Having seen how we should speak of the absolute or essential sense objects, both common and
proper, it remains to be seen how anything is a sense object ‘incidentally’. Now for an object to
be a sense object incidentally, it must first be connected accidentally with an essential sense
object; as a human person, for instance, may happen to be white, or a white thing may happen
to be sweet. Secondly, it must be perceived by the one who is sensing. If it were connected with
the sense object without itself being perceived, it could not be said to be sensed incidentally.
But this implies that with respect to some cognitive faculty of the one sensing it, it is known, not
incidentally, but absolutely. Now this latter faculty [ . . . ] (is) the vis cogitativa. (Commentary on
the Soul, no. 395; emphasis added)

This faculty is part of the ‘machinery’ of sensation and perception for Aquinas:
But, speaking precisely, this is not in the fullest sense an incidental sense object; it is incidental
to the sense of sight, but it is essentially sensible. Now what is not perceived by any special sense
is known by the intellect, if it be a universal; yet not anything knowable by intellect in sensible
matter should be called a sense object incidentally, but only what is at once intellectually appre-
hended as soon as a sense experience occurs. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 396)

Aquinas suggests that the act of awareness of the vis cogitativa is of ‘something
incidental’:
Thus as soon as I see anyone talking or moving herself, my intellect tells me that she is alive and
I can say that I see her alive. But if this apprehension is of something individual, as when, seeing
this particular coloured thing, I perceive this particular person or beast, then the cogitative
faculty (in the case of human persons) is at work, the power which is also called the ‘particular
reason’ because it correlates individualized notions, just as the ‘universal reason’ correlates
universal ideas. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 396)

Later in the Commentary, Aquinas argues that the incidental object of sense is not
directly perceived by any external sense:
Thus I perceive indirectly that so and so is Cleon’s son, not because he is Cleon’s son, but
because he is white. Whiteness as such only happens to be connected with Cleon’s son. Being
the son of Cleon is not (like sweetness) indirectly visible in such a way as to imply its being
directly perceived by some other sense. (Commentary on the Soul, no. 580)

Aquinas writes that the vis cogitativa ‘is always of a man as this man, and of a tree as this
tree’ (no. 398). This faculty of inner sense, therefore, is aware of a human person as
this particular human person and of a tree as this particular tree. A dimension of ‘this
particular, concrete thing’ becomes important for Aquinas’s theory of perception. The
direct object of the act of awareness of the vis cogitativa is the particular individual as a
primary substance. This primary substance is not reducible to a mere collection of
incidental or essential properties. This kind of awareness is beyond the limits imposed
by a ‘bundle’ view of perception articulated by most empiricists.25

25
  In his mid-century analysis of Aquinas’s philosophy, Tranoy provided at best a muddled account of
what the object of perception is for Aquinas: ‘This is to say that from an epistemological point of view any
physical particular presents two different aspects. We can know it, first, as something sensible, and secondly,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  245

Klubertanz argues that the function of the vis cogitativa is akin structurally to the vis
aestimativa. He writes: ‘In St. Thomas, the vis cogitativa is the human estimative, con-
cerned with the singulars of action [operabilia] as standing under the intelligible light of
reason.’26 Klubertanz thus limits the vis cogitativa to ‘practical knowledge’. Hence, he also
argues that what Averroes proposed for the virtus cogitativa differs fundamentally from
what Aquinas proposes. Klubertanz suggests that for Averroes, the virtus cogitativa func-
tions in the following way: ‘[It] is a kind of aestimative and compositive imaginatio, con-
cerned with the singulars corresponding to intelligible knowledge (singular substance,
singular accidents, individual substantial differences, and so forth).’27 What the analysis
articulated in this book argues, to the contrary, is that the vis cogitativa, at its core, has
more than the practical function Klubertanz puts forward. It is akin structurally to what
Klubertanz proposed for the virtus cogitativa of Averroes. The vis cogitativa is the faculty
of inner sense whereby, by means of intentiones insensatae, the human knower is aware of
an individual—a primary substance—as an instance of a natural kind. The role of practi-
cal knowledge follows after the individual as individual is known. What is surprising is
that even Klubertanz, in sketching the differences between Averroes and Thomas on the
object of the vis cogitativa, notes that for Aquinas the object is ‘the individual as standing
under a common nature; this person as this person’.28 Yet Klubertanz, it appears, cannot
get beyond his paradigm of interpretation for the vis cogitativa as directed only towards
particular actions to be undertaken—the ‘operabilia’ of the passage noted above.
In a passage from his early Commentary on the Sentences, Aquinas, at this formative
stage of his prolific philosophical career, was cognizant of the role of a per accidens
object of sensation:
Per accidens is sensed which does not affect the sense inasmuch as it is a sense, nor as it is this
sense, but as joined to these things which of themselves affect the sense, as ‘Socrates’ and ‘the
son of Diares,’ and ‘friend’ and other like things. These things are known in the universal by the
intellect; in the particular, they are known by the discursive power [vis cogitativa] in human
persons and by the estimative [vis aestimativa] in other animals. Such things the external sense
is said to sense, even thought only per accidens, when from that which is sensed in itself, the
apprehensive power [the vis cogitativa] whose task it is to know them in themselves, immediately,
without hesitation or reasoning, knows them; as we see that someone lives from the fact that she
speaks. (In IV Sent., 49 q. 2 a. 2; emphasis added)

as something intelligible. Qua sensible, a physical particular is something material, which has (or is an
aggregate of) sensible properties: colors, smells, weight, solidity, extension, shape, etc. These are all prop-
erties that we perceive by the senses’: Kurt Tranoy, ‘Aquinas’, in D. J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of
Western Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1964), 105. It is unclear what Tranoy is referring to as the ‘phys-
ical particular’. If it is the hoc aliquid in the external world, then Tranoy has adopted a reductionist view and
posits that the physical object is nothing but ‘an aggregate of sensible properties’. This would be the bundle
view adopted by Berkeley and Hume. This denies any role for the incidental object of sense and for the vis
cogitativa in Aquinas’s account of perception. This proposal put forward by Tranoy appears consistent with
many such accounts offered of Aquinas’s analysis of sensation and perception by mid-20th-c. historians of
philosophy.
26
  Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 278–9.    27  Ibid., 278.   28  Ibid., 278.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

246  The Vis Cogitativa

Commenting on this extended passage from the Commentary on the Sentences,

Klubertanz writes: ‘St. Thomas is here writing on a problem of immediate perception.’29
Yet Klubertanz does not develop this point, which he claims is a ‘single text in the
Scriptum Super Sententiam’. In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Aquinas, how-
ever, writes: ‘This power is also called the discursive, and it has a definite organ in the
body, which is the middle cell of the head. Now it is not possible to apply the universal
judgment […] to a particular act, except through some intermediate power that appre-
hends the singular’ (De Veritate X, 5).
White initially mentions the important role that the vis cogitativa plays in Aquinas’s
account of perceiving the individual, and explains that this is a necessary condition for
explaining the abstractive process of the intellectus agens. ‘[In] the Commentary on the
Posterior Analytics […] Aquinas makes it clear that the cogitative power’s apprehen-
sion of “this human” is a necessary condition for the intellectual apprehension of
“human”. ’30 White then goes on, much like Klubertanz, to argue that the principal
function of the vis cogitativa is in determining actions to be undertaken in the here and
now (hic et nunc). He fails to pursue the important insight that he gathered from his
reading of the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, where Aquinas writes:
Then [at 100a4] Aristotle elucidates something asserted in the preceding solution, namely, that
the universal is taken from experience bearing on singulars. And he says that what was stated
above, albeit not clearly—namely, how from the experience of singulars the universal is formed
in the mind—must now be discussed again and explained more clearly. For if many singulars
are taken which are without differences as to some one item existing in them, that one item
according to which they are not different, once it is received in the mind, is the first universal,
no matter what it may be, i.e. whether it pertains to the essence of the singulars or not. For since
we find that Socrates and Plato and many others are without difference as to whiteness, we take
this one item, namely, white, as a universal, which is an accident. Similarly, because we find that
Socrates and Plato and the others are not different as to rationality, this one item in which they
do not differ, namely, rational, we take as a universal, which is an essential difference.
(Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, lect. 20)

In the next paragraph, Aquinas argues that the sense powers must render a contribu-
tion to the intellectual powers before it is possible to explain how, as Aristotle argues,
‘the universal comes to be in the soul’. Aquinas continues:
But how this one item can be taken he now explains. For it is clear that sensing is properly and
per se of the singular, but yet there is somehow even a sensing of the universal. For sense knows
Callias not only so far forth as he is Callias, but also as he is this human person; and similarly
Socrates, as he is this individual human person. As a result of such an attainment pre-existing
in the sense, the intellective soul can consider human nature in both. But if it were in the very
nature of things that sense could apprehend only that which pertains to particularity, and along
with this could in no wise apprehend the nature in the particular, it would not be possible for
universal knowledge to be caused in us from sense-apprehension.

29
  Ibid., 175–6.   30  A. Leo White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, The Thomist 66 (2002), 578.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  247

Then he manifests this same point in the process, which goes from species to genus. Hence
he adds: ‘Again in these’, namely, in human nature and horse, ‘the mind lingers in its consider-
ation, until it attains to some thing indivisible in them, which is universal’. For example, we
consider such an animal and another one, say an individual human person and an individual
horse, until we arrive at the common item, ‘animal’, which is universal; and in this genus we do
the same until we arrive at some higher genus. Therefore, since we take a knowledge of univer-
sals from singulars, he concludes that it is obviously necessary to acquire the first universal
principles by induction. For that is the way, i.e. by way of induction, that the sense introduces
the universal into the mind, inasmuch as all the singulars are considered. (Commentary on the
Posterior Analytics, lect. 20)

In these often overlooked texts from Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Aquinas
is quite specific that sense, by which he means the vis cogitativa, renders an indispensa-
ble contribution to the process of explaining abstraction in his adoption of Aristotle’s
philosophy of mind. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, often Aquinas refers explicitly to
the vis cogitativa: ‘For, since the cogitative power is operationally limited to particular
things, makes its judgements on the basis of particular intentions, and acts by means of
a bodily organ, it is not above the generic level of the sensitive soul’ (Summa Contra
Gentiles, bk II, ch. 73, no. 14). ‘Nor, again, does the cogitative power bear any ordered
relationship to the possible intellect whereby a human knower understands, except
through its act of preparing the phantasms for the operation of the agent intellect
[intellectus agens] which makes them actually intelligible and perfective of the possible
intellect’ (no. 6). ‘Moreover, the dispositions of the cogitative and imaginative powers
are relative to the object, namely, the phantasm, which, because of the well-developed
character of these powers, is prepared in such a way as to facilitate its being made actually
intelligible by the agent intellect. Now, dispositions relative to objects are not habits, but
dispositions relative to powers are habits’ (no. 28; emphasis added). ‘Even so, it can be
said that the agent intellect is, in itself, always acting, but that the phantasms are not
always made actually intelligible, but only when they are disposed to this end. Now,
they are so disposed by the act of the cogitative power, the use of which is in our power’
(Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 76, no. 8).
This role for the vis cogitativa is a necessary condition to explicate fully what Aquinas
means by perception. In his essay on ‘Instinct and Custom’, White suggests that in the
writings of Thomas, there are three roles or functions exhibited by the vis cogitativa.31
Nonetheless, White’s account, while more thorough than most classical and recent
commentaries, is but a partial rendition of the roles that the vis cogitativa exercises in
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. All three of these roles depend upon some awareness by

31
  ‘This higher level of awareness is reflected in the three roles that Aquinas attributes to the vis cogita-
tiva in humans. The first and most obvious role—one that roughly parallels that of the vis aestimativa in
brutes—is to evoke the passions that help energize our actions. The second role has to do with the way that
the cogitative power enables universal reason to apply its judgments to particular individuals during prac-
tical reasoning. The third role is the cogitative power’s preparation of the phantasm for abstraction’: ibid.,
380–81.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

248  The Vis Cogitativa

the vis cogitativa of the individual primary substance, which is the cause of these vari-
ous mental activities. Hence, a principal role of this power of inner sense is to be able to
use the intentio non sensata as a means to perceive directly the individual hoc aliquid.
Once the knowing ability of the vis cogitativa to be aware of this holistic object of per-
ception is elucidated, the other three roles mentioned by White fit together in a more
coherent and structured whole.
It is somewhat surprising that Stump spends little time and space with the internal
sensorium: ‘in what follows, I will consider only phantasia and imagination among the
internal senses.’32 Stump, it appears, does not grasp the two uses that Aquinas has for
phantasia: (a) phantasia as equivalent to the vis imaginativa, which Aquinas use in the
Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae; and (b) the use of phantasia in the Commentary
as a generic umbrella term for the three faculties of the internal sensorium: the vis
imaginativa, the vis cogitativa, and the vis memorativa. Furthermore, she appears to
identify the vis aestimativa with the vis cogitativa: ‘In human beings, the estimative
power compares “individual intentions”, as the intellect compares universal inten-
tions.’33 Kemp also blurs these two faculties.34
Pilsner too avoids discussion of the vis cogitativa as well as any analysis of the inci-
dental object of sense. While it is correct that the principal focus of Pilsner’s treatise is
on undertaking an analysis of Aquinas on moral actions, nonetheless he believes that
an analysis of the objects of sensation, perception, and intellectual understanding are
necessary conditions in order to understand fully these concepts that are foundational
in Aquinas’s overall philosophy. Pilsner provides a sophisticated analysis of the role of
the proper and common sensibles in Aquinas’s writings. He then refers to ‘a third cate-
gory of qualities [. . . that] include incidental properties which can be “sensed” only
through their association with the sensibles already mentioned’.35 What is interesting
in Pilsner’s analysis is that he suggests that it is ‘incidental properties’ that are known
by the vis cogitativa and the vis aestimativa. The argument to be explored, however,
suggests that it is the incidental object of sense—the individual primary substance also
called the hoc aliquid—that Aquinas postulated as the sensible object of the vis cogita-
tiva. Hence, it is not a set of properties that is known by the vis cogitativa, but the indi-
vidual primary substance itself existing as a hoc aliquid. Pilsner, in a rather
comprehensive table of objects, acts, and powers, does suggest that the inner sense
faculty of the vis cogitativa has as its object ‘intentions’.36 This is more than likely rooted
in a reading of Avicenna. However, Pilsner leaves this important philosophical ­concept

32
 Stump, Aquinas, 248.   33  Ibid.
34
  To quote Kemp (Medieval Psychology, 57–8): ‘Indeed, Thomas Aquinas believed that there were only
four inner senses and discarded the cogitative power completely on the grounds that the power to combine
images was unnecessary for animals, and performed by the imagination alone in humans.’ Kemp confuses
the vis imaginativa with the vis cogitativa. In the account of inner sense in the Prima Pars of the Summa
Theologiae, Aquinas explicitly keeps these two faculties of inner sense separate and distinct.
35
  Joseph Pilsner, The Specification of Human Actions in St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 93.
36
  Ibid., 100.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  249

hanging in the air, avoiding any analysis of what it might mean. Later in his chapter,
Pilsner considers a substance—what he means by a ‘primary substance’—but he avoids
any discussion about how this individual entity might be known.

The Awareness of the Individual as of a Kind

The analysis so far suggests that the vis cogitativa has two cognitive functions: (a) to be
aware of an individual as an individual; (b) to recognize an individual as a member of a
kind. Aquinas writes: ‘Hence, the vis cogitativa is aware of a human person as this
human person.’ In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas also explains
this cognitive role of the mental act of the vis cogitativa.37
In human beings, the next thing above memory is experience, which some animals have only
to a small degree. For an experience arises from the association of many singular [intentions]
received in memory. And this kind of association is proper to human beings and pertains to the
vis cogitativa [also called the particular reason], which associates particular intentions just as
universal reason associates universal ones. (Commentary on the Metaphysics, no. 15)

In his Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas brings in the notion of awareness of a nature
or natural kind. Moreover, he offers a distinction between instinct from the vis aesti-
mativa and an awareness of an individual as a natural kind from the vis cogitativa.
‘The vis cogitativa apprehends the individual thing as existing in a common nature,
and this is because it is united to intellect in one and the same subject [ . . . ] Instinct,
on the other hand, is not aware of an individual thing as in a common nature’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 398).38 Aquinas argues that the higher animals have
some degree of ‘experience’ resulting from the workings of the vis aestimativa.
Nonetheless, it is a difference qualitatively distinct from the reasoning abilities of the
human knower.
Now since animals are accustomed to pursue or avoid certain things as a result of many sensa-
tions and memory, for this reason they seem to share something of experience, even though it
be slight. But above experience, which belongs to particular reason [the vis cogitativa], human
persons have as their chief power a universal reason by means of which they live. (Commentary
on the Metaphysics, bk 2, no. 5)

This passage continues with the theme Aquinas articulated earlier that there are different
degrees of awareness in the animal world. The highest level is similar to the reasoning
ability in human knowers, but nonetheless it is qualitatively different, which he spells out
in the following passage.

37
  It is not only in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and the
Commentary on the Soul that Aquinas discussed the importance of this faculty of inner sense: references
appear throughout his texts.
38
  This passage justifies the earlier claim that Stump neglected to distinguish the vis aestimativa from the
working of the vis cogitativa.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

250  The Vis Cogitativa

Then he proves the superiority of art and science [ . . . ] Those who know the cause and reason
why a thing is so are more knowing and wiser than those who merely know that it is so but do
not know why. Now human persons of experience know that something is so but do not know
the reason, whereas human knowers who have an art know not merely that something is so but
also know its cause and reason. Hence those who have an art are wiser and more knowing than
those who have experience. (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk 1, no. 24)

Aquinas considers the reasoning ability to form intentionally and understand

­concepts with universal characteristics, which is appropriate to what he calls an art
and a science. These latter cognitive abilities are unique to human knowers, and tran-
scend the intentional possibility of knowing essences that exceeds the cognitive abili-
ties of even the higher animals. He ends this section of his Aristotelian Commentary on
the Metaphysics noted above with the following sentence: ‘For the purpose of natural
instinct in animals is to direct them in their actions and passions, so as to seek and
avoid things according to the requirements of their nature’ (Commentary on the
Metaphysics, bk I, no. 15; emphasis added). What is interesting philosophically about
this last sentence is Aquinas’s claim that the vis aestimativa works in animals ‘accord-
ing to the requirements of their nature’. This would suggest that instinct, which is a part
of the natural function of the vis aestimativa, is a component of the ‘nature’ of the
­animal and works in accord with the nature of the animal. Accordingly, it would be a
dispositional property rooted in the substantial form of the animal’s essence. One
might extrapolate from this phrase and apply it to the mental act of awareness unique
to the vis cogitativa in human persons. It is ‘according to the requirements of their
nature’ that humans are able to perceive individual particular things as members of
natural kinds. This would be part of human nature as a dispositional property of the
requisite substantial form. Without this structured awareness on the part of the vis
cogitativa, a human knower would be deficient cognitively in at least two ways:
(a)  A human knower would be unable to be directly aware of the fundamental
ontological categories in Aquinas’s metaphysics, which are individuals (primary
substances) of natural kinds. This is an awareness of the kind of entities that
constitute the fundamental ontological categories in Aquinas’s metaphysics.
(b)  A human knower would be less able to ‘abstract’ the species intelligiblis from
the phantasms in the sense memory using the intellectus agens. This process of
abstraction is a cognitive undertaking that the speculative intellect does on its
own without an explicit effort or intention by the person herself.
Without this structured awareness of the vis cogitativa, a human knower would be defi-
cient in these two ways. Aquinas, to be sure, was not one to permit philosophical deficien-
cies to appear in his ontological accounts. It is to fill this epistemological gap that Aquinas
postulates the unique act of awareness for the vis cogitativa. This saves the epistemological
realism by which Aquinas accounts for the possibility of knowing the instances of the
principal category in his ontological realism, namely, the primary substances that are indi-
viduals of natural kinds. This is an aspect of Aquinas’s explanatory methodology.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  251

Throughout these texts, it is apparent that Aquinas links animal awareness with the
rudimentary awarenesses of human beings. Aquinas is neither a Cartesian nor a dual-
ist metaphysician. In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre writes about this set of
issues, which he believes philosophers have neglected for too long a time.
But some commentators [ . . . ] have failed to ask the relevant questions about the relationship
between our rationality and our animality. They have underestimated the importance of the
fact that our bodies are animal bodies with the identity and continuities of animal bodies, and
they have failed to recognize adequately that in this present life it is true of us that we do not
merely have, but are our bodies.39

In the final chapter of Mind and World, McDowell addresses the issues that concerned
MacIntyre:
Animals are, as such, natural beings, and a familiar modern conception of nature tends to
extrude rationality from nature. The effect is that reason is separated from our animal nature,
as if being rational placed us partly outside of the animal kingdom. Specifically, the under-
standing is distanced from sensibility. And that is the source of our philosophical impasse. In
order to escape it, we need to bring understanding and sensibility, reason and nature, back
together.40

Both MacIntyre’s and McDowell’s search for better connections with the animal dispo-
sitions of human nature ring true for the fundamental ontological category of human
nature adopted by Aquinas. Given these texts on inner sense from Aquinas, one notes
immediately that Aquinas pays special attention to the knowing apparatus and the
mental acts of non-human animals. This suggests strongly the anti-dualist characteris-
tic of Thomas’s metaphilosophy. In writing ‘Anima mea non est ego’, Aquinas suggests
that in no sense of the term is he a Cartesian dualist. He is working the same side of the
ontological street as MacIntyre and McDowell. The analysis of inner sense as an inten-
tional awareness of something beyond introspection enables the medieval philoso-
phers to tease out these important non-dualist properties.41 Pasnau writes that the

39
  Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London:
Duckworth, 1999), 6; Patrick Lee argues in a similar manner in his ‘Human Beings Are Animals’, in Robert
P. George (ed.), Natural Natural Law and Moral Inquiry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
1998), 135–51.
40
  John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 108.
41
  Confronting dualism, Kerr brings to our attention the work of Maritain, which in this instance is
congruent with the ontological concerns expressed by MacIntyre and McDowell: ‘The historical signifi-
cance of Descartes was incalculable, Maritain thought: three centuries of rationalism (as he regarded
Cartesianism) was a “tragic experience”. The “sin” of Descartes is “a sign of angelism”. By this Maritain
means that Descartes conceived human thought on the model (in Thomas) of angelic thought: thought
was now regarded as intuitive, and thus freed from the burden of discursive reasoning; innate, as to its
origin, and thus independent of material things. What this “angelist psychology” introduces is nothing
less than a revolution in the very idea of mind, and thus of intelligibility, scientific understanding and
explanation. Henceforth, to understand is to separate; to be intelligible is to be capable of mathematical
reconstruction’: Fergus Kerr, OP, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 24; Kerr’s
references to Maritain are from Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (London: Sheed & Ward,
1928; repr. 1950), 195.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

252  The Vis Cogitativa

human mind is not equivalent to an angelic mind.42 It follows that any attempt to render
Aquinas’s theory of mind into a form of dualism is fraught with structural and textual
difficulties. Nonetheless, historians of psychology often treat Aquinas as a dualist.43 It
is this interpretation of Aquinas as a proto-Cartesian dualist that this study refutes.
The vis cogitativa is Aquinas’s way to provide, almost in a teleological fashion, the
necessary ingredients for a fully worked-out philosophy of mind enabling the human
knower to function within the metaphysical scheme already provided by Aquinas’s
ontological realism. What this suggests is that a human knower as knower is not cut
adrift amid a sea of primary substances without the philosophy-of-mind machinery to
know his way about. This is another indication that a modified Gibsonian method
rooted in the evolutionary development of human sense organs is found analogously
in Aquinas. Developing in this way enables a human knower to make his path around
and through the environment. While Gibson’s theory does not have an ontology of
primary substances, nonetheless he considers extensively the role the environment
plays in determining how sense organs and faculties develop and function. The same
metaphilosophy is found, mutatis mutandis, in Aquinas. To emphasize this point, we
need to reflect on how Aquinas begins the following article in the Prima Pars of the
Summa Theologiae that considers inner sense:
Since nature does not fail in necessary matters, there needs to be as many acts of the sensitive
soul as may suffice for the life of a perfect animal. If any of these acts cannot be reduced to the
same one principle, it follows that they must be assigned to diverse sensible powers. This is
because a power of the soul is nothing more that the proximate principle of the soul’s opera-
tion. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

Aquinas suggests that the way the animal has adapted to its environment determines
the number and function of the various sensitive powers—both the external and the
internal senses. This is the meaning of his claim that ‘nature does not fail in necessary
matters’. This in turn teases out the reliabilist and the externalist themes embedded in
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
According to the texts in the Aristotelian Commentary, Aquinas argues that the vis
cogitativa is aware of an individual as a member of a particular kind. This mental act,
however, is neither identical nor coextensive with the mental act of abstraction found
in the intellectus agens. An intellectual concept is an awareness of the ‘nature’ or
‘essence’ of a thing. This is the content of a natural kind; this nature is common to many

42
  ‘If the human mind worked like an angelic mind, then there would be no need for it to be united to a
body. [ . . . ] But in this life human beings are subject to an empirical constraint: we must acquire our infor-
mation through the senses. The human mind is entirely powerless without those senses; it begins as a blank
slate and would stay that way if not for the sensory information it receives’: Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas
on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a 75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 113.
43
 See Theories and Systems of Psychology, where Lundin wrote: ‘(In Aquinas) here we had the full devel-
opment of a dualistic psychology (mind and body), that is still prevalent today…. As a result of St. Thomas’
writings the mind–body problem is fully born and remains with us to the present’: R. W. Lundin, Theories
and Systems of Psychology (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1972), 34.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  253

individuals. Hence, it follows that an awareness of the individual concretum—an

awareness of a primary substance—is precluded by its cognitive function from the
mental act of the intellectus agens or the intellectus possibilis. It is precisely at this junc-
ture that the vis cogitativa comes into play. This inner sense faculty exemplifies a condi-
tioned mental act able to be aware of an individual as a member of a ‘kind’. This does
not mean that the mental act of the vis cogitativa is an awareness of a ‘nature’ or ‘essence’.
This is the role of first intentional awareness on the part of the intellectus possibilis,
which is the result of the abstractive process of the intellectus agens. In other words, the
vis cogitativa is not aware of ‘human nature as human nature’, but rather as Megan
the human person and Elin the human person.44 Suffice it to say now, however, that the
phantasm peculiar to the vis cogitativa ‘conditions’ or ‘colours’ the mental awareness of
the vis cogitativa so that it interprets the object in the external world in a unique way.
Accordingly, this is a structured act of awareness. The structure of the act of awareness
of the vis cogitativa is determined by an appropriate phantasm, which in turn comes
about only because of the range of the perceiver’s experience. In other words, the vis
cogitativa ‘interprets’ an object as an individual of a kind and not merely as a unified
concrete whole consisting of a bundle of sense qualities. This still remains an external-
ist position on mind; what is known is the individual and not a concept or ‘social con-
struction’ of an individual. Aquinas is neither an internalist nor a representationalist.
In reading him, we must realize that what he proposes has a strong ‘un-Kantian’ flavour
to it. While Aquinas does suggest a ‘structured cognitive mental act’, other aspects of a
Kantian position are avoided. There is no division between intuition and concept, no
synthetic a priori schematization of concepts, and no simultaneous assertion of tran-
scendental idealism and empirical realism. The thrust of the arguments in this study
suggests an integrated account of intentionality, perception, vis cogitativa, and intellec-
tus agens that provides a philosophically significant rival to Kantian approaches.
Aquinas’s analysis offers explanatorily powerful and plausible philosophical resources
of a significant un-Kantian kind.45 While Owens appears committed to the philo-
sophical position that one is directly aware of individuals as individuals and not as
collections of sensible qualities, it is unclear whether he would admit that the vis cogi-
tativa is the faculty of inner sense by which this is explained. Nonetheless, Owens
interprets Aquinas on perception as an externalist and as a realist.

44
  How this awareness comes about will be analysed extensively later, during the discussion of the phan-
tasm appropriate to the vis cogitativa.
45
  In considering the awareness of things rather than collections of qualities, Owens notes that one does
not ‘construct’ individual things; ‘rather, one interprets in this way the immediate object of sensation.’ He
continues: ‘Further, what is presented immediately in a single panorama is interpreted as many separate
things. Where various groupings of qualities and movements and changes are found in consistent union,
their subjects are cognized as stones and trees and dogs and houses and planets and men [sic]. Appearing
as existent and substantial, and distinguished from each other on the basis of recognizable qualities and
quantities, these groupings are regarded as each an individual thing. Still more surprisingly, one has
become habituated to project into each of them an activity analogous to the activity of which one is aware
in oneself as one thinks and acts in the course of daily life’: Joseph Owens, Cognition: An Epistemological
Inquiry (Houston, Tex.: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1992), 100, n. 24.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

254  The Vis Cogitativa

An awareness of a bundle of proper and common sensibles is the object of the sensus
communis. Hence, at the level of the intentional object of the sensus communis,
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is much like that proposed by Berkeley and Hume. It is
with the vis cogitativa, however, that Aquinas transcends the limits of British empiri-
cism. This, in effect, distinguishes the vis cogitativa from the sensus communis.
Furthermore, this is evidence for placing the sensus communis in the external senso-
rium and not in the internal sensorium, even though the sensus communis is classified
by Aquinas as an internal sense. The cognitive content of the sensus communis is lim-
ited to what is attained through the external senses. Therefore, the sensus communis is
part of the external sensorium. Because the vis cogitativa goes beyond the limits of the
external sensorium, it is part of the internal sensorium. In Aquinas’s philosophy of
mind, the distinction between the act of awareness of the sensus communis and the act
of awareness of the vis cogitativa entails a substantive distinction between sensation
and perception. Sensation is limited to an awareness of proper and common sensibles.
Perception is that intentional process by means of which a perceiver is aware of the
individual as a substantial individual of a natural kind. The paramount example of
‘inner sense’ for Aquinas, therefore, is the vis cogitativa. Nonetheless, it is instructive to
note the general lack of discussion of this role of the vis cogitativa in most philosophi-
cal discussions of Aquinas’s theory of perception.

Primary Substance and the Vis Cogitativa

An important corollary of this discussion is the role that primary substance plays in
the functioning of the vis cogitativa. For Aquinas, the fundamental category of things
in the external world is a primary substance. His ontological realism is one of individ-
ual substances in the space–time realm. A primary substance is an individual thing of a
certain natural kind. ‘Natural kind’ refers to a species or common nature, which is
determined by the substantial form of the thing. The vis cogitativa is the faculty of
inner sense by which the perceiver is aware of a primary substance as a thing and not
merely a thing reducible to a bundle of sensations. This mental awareness requires an
interpretive function on the part of the vis cogitativa. In effect, with the vis cogitativa,
inner sense is going beyond the data of the external sensorium. Moreover, inner sense
is more than the acts of introspection common to modern philosophical discussions.
Accordingly, not only does Aquinas have primary substances in his ontology, but his
philosophy of mind is structured so that it is possible for the perceiver to be aware of
these primary substances. Simply put, the vis cogitativa explains the possibility of the
awareness of individual concreta, which are primary substances. The end result is that
Aquinas affirms both that there are individual things in the external world—an aspect
of his ontological realism—and that human knowers are aware of these individual
things—an aspect of his epistemological realism. The possibility of being aware of
things as individuals is accounted for by means of the phantasm-structured vis cogita-
tiva. The external sensorium is limited to an awareness of unified wholes of proper and
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  255

common sensibles. The vis cogitativa is aware of the primary substance that renders an
awareness of the ‘unified whole’ into an awareness of an individual of a natural kind.
In discussing how an individual perceiver is aware of an individual, Stump argues
that this occurs only because of the interplay between inner sense and the intellect. She
writes: ‘for Hannah to see what is presented to her vision as a cat requires what Aquinas
calls the first operation of the intellect, namely, determining the quiddity or whatness
of a thing.’ She goes on to suggest that Aquinas uses the contemporary epistemological
distinction between ‘seeing and seeing as’. Yet ‘seeing as’ requires the intellect: ‘sensory
powers and phantasia are sufficient for seeing without being sufficient for seeing as.’46
The focus of the analysis for the vis cogitativa developed in this chapter, however, is that
on the level of perception a human agent can undertake ‘seeing as’; this results in
Aquinas being able to distinguish between sensation and perception. The vis cogitativa
has a necessary role to play in his philosophy of mind. This rendition adds a perceptual
dimension to Stump’s analysis, which requires (so she argues) the immediate working
of the intellectus possibilis.
Accordingly, Aquinas posits the vis cogitativa in order to account for human aware-
ness of what Aristotle calls the ‘incidental object of sense’.47 By ‘incidental object of
sense’, both Aristotle and Aquinas mean that a human perceiver is aware of this bun-
dle of sensations [X] as Cleon’s son and this other bundle of sensations [Y] as Cleon’s
daughter, and this white patch [P] as snow and this other white patch [Q] as flour.
This awareness goes beyond the immediate data of sensation—i.e. the ‘concrete
wholes’ that are the unified conjunctions of the proper and the common sensibles. Yet
human perception, Aquinas suggests, is not exhausted by mere sense data. He contin-
ually stresses this point: ‘But the senses have also their indirect objects, and with
regard to these they can be deceived. What seems to be white is indeed white as the
sense reports. But whether the white thing is this or that thing, is snow, for example,
or flour, is a question often answered badly by the senses, especially at a distance’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 662).
The importance of this sense faculty in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is obvious.
One of the experienced data of the perceptual lives of human knowers, the pre-analytic
data, is that perceivers are directed primarily towards an awareness of things rather
than only to an awareness of collections of qualities or qualia. Accordingly, Megan, as a
perceiver, is aware of Elin—as an individual—and not just a collection of proper and
common sensibles. Contemporary philosophers, who claim that human knowers
ordinarily talk as if they perceive things and not sense data, point out this same pre-an-
alytic datum. Aquinas undercuts the sense data theories of early twentieth-century
epistemology and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by suggesting, in
effect, that our experience is of things rather than of sense data. In addition, by using a

46
 Stump, Aquinas, 261.
47
  Often this sense object is translated as ‘the accidental object of sense’. This indicates that the meaning
of this sense object is that its content is beyond what is attained by the external senses.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

256  The Vis Cogitativa

metaphilosophical methodology entailing a faculty psychology, Aquinas provides the

philosophy-of-mind machinery necessary to explain the possibility of an act of aware-
ness of an object beyond the immediate data of the proper and the common sensibles.
Once again, there is a similarity to Strawson, who claims that particulars—individual
particular things—are the basic elements of a human perceiver’s conceptual scheme.48
Accordingly, Aquinas, like Strawson, Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Chisholm, suggests that
it is a mistake to claim that human perceivers are primarily aware of bundles of sense
data. To the contrary, human perceivers have a direct ‘thing consciousness’ or ‘individ-
ual consciousness’. Furthermore, this ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentional awareness’ are
rudimentary for human perceivers.
In order to explicate this faculty of inner sense, it is appropriate to compare the acts
of awareness of the vis cogitativa with what one common-sensibly refers to as ‘experi-
ence’. The first time Megan sees Elin, she obviously does not recognize her as Elin.
Nonetheless, Megan perceives an individual of a natural kind. As far as being Elin to
Megan the perceiver, on the level of the external sensorium alone, Elin is no more than
a mere bundle of sensations. Of course, with the structured mental act of the vis cogita-
tiva, Megan perceives an individual person of a natural kind, which is more than is
possible using the external sensorium alone. Yet after Megan has got to know Elin,
then she immediately recognizes Elin ‘as Elin’ as soon as Elin comes into view. It is
important to realize that Aquinas is not claiming that Megan remembers this particu-
lar bundle of sensations—i.e. the concrete whole—as Elin. Rather, she perceives her to
be Elin, the individual of a natural kind. Yet ‘being Elin’ is not an ontological property
that is directly perceivable in the external world. ‘Being Elin’ is not a proper or a com-
mon sensible, which are the only two categories of objects of direct sense experience in
the external sensorium. This is an important part of Aquinas’s theory of sense percep-
tion; thus, Elin is an incidental or accidental object of sensation. Accordingly, Megan is
directly aware that this ‘concrete whole’ is Elin—a particular individual of a natural
kind. That such an individual property is unperceivable per se is consistent with
Aquinas’s position on individuation. The ontological problem of individuation is
resolved in his metaphysics by the assertion that ‘materia prima signata quantitate’ is
the principle of individuation.49 Following Aquinas’s principles of intentionality, only a
form can be knowable directly. Since materia signata, which is the direct opposite of a
form, is the individuator, there is nothing as such in the external world that could be
the object of the mental act of direct sensation regarding an individual as an individ-
ual. Hence, there is no specific form of individuation per se. It is apparent that Aquinas
and Scotus differ radically on this point, given Scotus’s individual form of haeccaeitas.
Metaphilosophically, Aquinas builds his epistemology from the demands of his

48
  Chisholm referred to this as a ‘particularist epistemology’: Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the
Criterion (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1973), 12–14. Chisholm argued for the priority of
‘thing consciousness’ for epistemology rather than for a ‘bundle view’.
49
 Cf. De Ente et Essentia, ch. 2. In this early text, Aquinas considers in some detail the role matter plays
as the individuator of individuals; see also the Commentary on The Metaphysics, bk XII.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  257

­ ntology. Aquinas does not move from epistemology to ontology. Given his metaphi-
o
losophy conjoined with his ontological realism and his externalism, it would seem odd
that in his philosophy of mind he would neglect to provide the necessary machinery
for a perceiver to be aware of those very external objects that constitute a significant
primacy and fundamental role in his ontology. The active contribution on the part of
the vis cogitativa in its acts of intentional awareness enables Aquinas to account for the
perception of individuals. This structured mental act accounts for the isomorphism. It
is as if the vis cogitativa is ‘always on the go’, as it were, attempting to be aware of indi-
viduals as primary substances. Aquinas accepts the fact that this kind of awareness is a
pre-analytic datum; in other words, human perceivers have a ‘thing consciousness’ and
not a ‘quality consciousness’. The vis cogitativa accounts for the possibility of how this
pre-analytic datum—the awareness of an individual concretum—can be explained. Put
simply, the vis cogitativa is ‘hard-wired’ by intentiones insensatae to perceive the exter-
nal world in terms of individuals of natural kinds.50 Accordingly, Aquinas makes use of
the vis cogitativa as the faculty of the internal sensorium, which accomplishes our
awareness of individuals and not just of ‘concrete wholes’.51

Moving Beyond Empiricism: Intentiones Non Sensatae

This issue might be considered somewhat differently. Historians of medieval philosophy
usually place the epistemology theory of Aquinas in the category of empiricism. This
positioning normally signifies a contrast with any form of innate idea epistemology no
matter how loosely connected with Plato’s theory of recollection. Every historian of
philosophy knows that Aquinas assented to at least one epistemological principle cen-
tral to empiricism: ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.’ Obviously this
is the standard textbook position on Aquinas’s epistemology. Although this empiricist
characterization of Aquinas’s epistemology is acknowledged, nonetheless Aquinas
postulates the intellectus agens with its abstractive function transcending the sensible
particular and producing a conceptual awareness of essential or sortal properties.
Through the intellectus agens, Aquinas provides the epistemological ground necessary
to resolve Plato’s one/many problem. In the case of concept formation and the inten-
tional awareness of the conceptual content of essential properties, Aquinas transcends
the empiricism that is characteristic of later British and American philosophy, from
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to Mill, Ayer, and C. I. Lewis.
In addition to the intellectus agens, however, this chapter argues that there is another
area of Aquinas’s epistemology that also transcends classical empiricism. This addi-
tional move beyond empiricism is neglected in contemporary writings both about

50
  Once again, Haldane’s recommendation becomes important; Aquinas’s metaphilosophy is one of
explanation and not justification.
51
  The question of the nature of phantasms is of critical import here. The analysis of this concept is
forthcoming following discussion of the nature of an intentio non sensata.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

258  The Vis Cogitativa

medieval epistemology in general and Aquinas’s theory of perception in particular. An

elucidation is needed of the concepts of ‘intentiones non sensatae’ or ‘species insensatae’.
Moreover, these epistemological concepts apply to sense perception and not to the
functioning of the intellectus agens. Even a rough translation of the above concepts—­
‘intentiones non sensatae’ and ‘species insensatae’—indicates an awareness whose inten-
tional content is not grasped directly by utilization of the external senses alone. In other
words, these categories denote that a degree of intentional content is attained by some
means other than direct sensation in the classical empiricist manner. Once again, the
concept of some form of nativism is suggested.52 Aquinas established two faculties
whose function on the sense level is to provide an awareness of intentiones non sensatae:
the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa. The former is associated with brute animals;
the latter is specific to human perceivers but is in some way analogous to the vis aestima-
tiva. However, the exact nature of this awareness is not always spelled out clearly.
Given the textual evidence for the existence of cognitive structures denoted by
intentiones non sensatae, the next question now concerns an elucidation of these con-
cepts. Klubertanz argues in some detail that the intentiones non sensatae function of
the vis cogitativa is similar structurally to the vis aestimativa. Thus, as the vis aestima-
tiva is the faculty in brute animals through which the animal is able to discern the use-
ful from the harmful, so too is the vis cogitativa in humans the faculty of inner sense
that discerns the ‘good’, i.e. ‘that which is to be sought’ in specific situations. In other
words, the vis cogitativa is that sense faculty which particularizes the maxim or first
principle of the practical reason, which is ‘Good is to be done and evil avoided’.53 Put
differently, according to Klubertanz, it is the function of the vis cogitativa to grasp here
and now the particular good that is to be pursued. Klubertanz argues that the vis cogi-
tativa puts the individual action to be undertaken under a general rule.54 Several
accounts follow Klubertanz in limiting the intentional function of the vis cogitativa to
actions about to be undertaken.55 Mahoney argues, much like Klubertanz, that the vis
cogitativa has its function closely aligned with the practical knowledge of the vis aesti-
mativa.56 This limited reading of the texts neglects the important account suggested by

52
  Stump does not mention this category of an intentio non sensata; there has been little written on the
function of the vis cogitativa and its use of intentiones non sensatae.
53
  Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae q. 94 a. 2.
54
  Kneale offered the same suggestion regarding intentiones non sensatae; it is through these unsensed
intentiones that we discern the useful or the good in particular situations: ‘animals are said to have a faculty
other than sense by which they perceive intentiones of usefulness and harmfulness. But the peculiar talk of
perceiving intentiones into which St. Thomas falls here seems to have been suggested to him by the peculi-
arity of the mental occurrence we call seeing a thing as useful or harmful’: William Kneale, ‘An Analysis of
Perceiving’, in F. N. Sibley (ed.), Perception: A Philosophical Symposium (London: Methuen, 1971), 68.
55
 Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 135–8.
56
  Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Sense, Intellect, and Imagination in Albert, Thomas and Siger’, in N. Kretzmann,
A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 602–22. Kemp also accepts this general account of the vis cogitativa. Leahey claims
that the principal function of this inner sense faculty is to have an awareness of particular actions to be under-
taken or of things to be appreciated: ‘It intuits harm or benefit of object.’ Sorabji, moreover, interprets the vis
cogitativa in this restrictive way. In his ‘Intentionality and Proto-thoughts’, Michon comments: ‘If we consider
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  259

Averroes and developed by Aquinas in his Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul,

where the vis cogitativa is that faculty of inner sense that is aware of individual primary
substances.57 In his several studies on the vis cogitativa, White too appears to place the
vis cogitativa in the realm of human prudence and practical reason.58 While this practi-
cal function elucidated by Klubertanz, Kneale, Michon, White, and others might be a
partial function of the vis cogitativa, nonetheless this faculty of internal sense plays an
important function related specifically to Aquinas’s theory of perception.
In distinguishing sensation from perception, Aquinas offers an analysis much like
what Reid proposed. In early modern philosophy, the term ‘perception’ ceased to have
any clear meaning. This, to be sure, is not Aquinas’s account. Aquinas renders a distinc-
tion between sensation and perception, and this would entail that perception is not an
‘omnibus word’, which Kneale suggested Hume had proposed. Although Aquinas does
not make explicit the formal distinctions common to contemporary perception mono-
graphs, nonetheless the structure of his treatment suggests that this category difference
between sensation and perception is a significant part of his epistemological realism.

De Principio Individuationis: A Neglected Aquinas Text

In addition to his Commentary on the Soul, in his De Principio Individuationis, among
other texts, Aquinas indicates that the function of the vis cogitativa is to perceive an
individual as an individual of a natural kind. An elucidation of this aspect of the vis
cogitativa in De Principio Individuationis is necessary in order to account for this
important cognitive and realist dimension of Aquinas’s epistemology. Historians of
medieval philosophy, especially those interested in perception theory, have often over-
looked this dimension. In De Principio Individuationis, Aquinas sums up nicely the
issues under consideration in this part of the analysis.
However, the quiddity of a particular thing in its particularity does not fall under [is not seen as]
a per se object for the exterior senses, because the quiddity itself is a substance and not an acci-
dent, nor does it pertain to the intellect as a per se object on account of its materiality. Therefore,
the quiddity of a material thing in its very particularity is the object of the particular reason,
whose task it is to confront particular intentions, and whose place in brutes is the natural aes-
timative power. This power on account of its conjunction with the intellect—where is found the
very reason which treats of universals—participates as a collective power; but because it is a
part of the sensitive order, it does not completely abstract from all matter. Hence its proper
object remains a quiddity of a material particular. That which falls under the particular reason

this humanized rather than human faculty, we are inclined to think of it, as in the case of the estimative power,
in terms of practical knowledge’: Cyrille Michon, ‘Intentionality and Proto-thoughts’, in D. Perler (ed.),
Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 337.
57
  Moreover, Leahey suggests that this account of human estimation through the vis cogitativa removes
the need for an account of the practical intellect in Aquinas. This claim is, of course, inconsistent with
many of Aquinas’s texts on moral reasoning.
58
  A. Leo White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, The Thomist 66(4) (2002), 577–605.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

260  The Vis Cogitativa

is an individual [hoc aliquid] found in a material nature [per naturam materiae]; what falls
under the external senses is through quantity. (De Principio Individuationis, ch. 2 (Parma edi-
tion), xvi; emphasis added)59

Although some commentators on Aquinas suggest that the De Principio Individuationis

is not an authentic work, that need not be of great concern here.60 The above passage
ties together structurally and summarizes well what Aquinas claimed in his
Commentary on the Soul. In the above passage, he affirms that the proper object of the
vis cogitativa is a material thing, which is the primary substance of his ontology. This is
a hoc aliquid. In addition, in other texts, he refers to the vis cogitativa as the ‘particular
reason’ (ratio particularis). This is consistent with the text of De Principio
Individuationis. Aquinas in turn probably owes this nomenclature to Averroes. Cajetan
accepted the authenticity of this work, and also argued that a ‘singular substance
according to quantified matter is known by the vis cogitativa’:61
Substantiam particularem percipi a cogitativa [ . . . ] Nec loquitur de substantia in communi,
sed de substanatia singulari [ . . . ] Ilud quidem de substantia individuali secundum materiam
signatam quantitate: hoc autem de substantia ut habet modum essendi purae substantiae. (In
Tertiam Partem Summae, q. 76 a. 7, in Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 297, n. 6)62

This passage provides evidence for the interpretation put forward in this analysis of
the vis cogitativa. The individuated substance, the hoc aliquid, would be what Cajetan
refers to as ‘hoc aliquid de substantia ut habet modem essendi purae substantiae’. This
would be a primary substance, which is the individual of a natural kind existing here
and now in rerum naturae. Klubertanz, however, is, to use a Wittgensteinian paradig-
matic claim for philosophical stoppage: ‘trapped by a picture’. He holds that ‘sense is
of the external accidents, while intellect penetrates to the interior of a thing, and
attains the essence’.63 In one fell swoop, Klubertanz appears to render insignificant
what Aquinas writes about the intentio insensata as applied to the vis cogitativa.
Klubertanz is not alone in holding this interpretation, as this model appears all too
often in the writings of twentieth-century Neo-Thomist historians of philosophy.64

59
  This text is found in the Latin in Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, pp. 296–7, along with Klubertanz’s
commentary; there does not appear to be an English translation of this opusculum.
60
  Klubertanz spends a brief time examining the claims for the authenticity or inauthenticity of this
opusculum. He notes that in the early 20th c., Mandonnet and Roland-Gosselin both called this mono-
graph spurious, while Grabmann includes De Principio Individuationis in his ‘list of works as certainly
genuine’. Furthermore, Klubertanz notes in discussing the consideration of the vis cogitativa in this opus-
culum that there is evidence for the position articulated in Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima.
61
 Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 297.
62
  ‘A specific [primary] substance is perceived by the vis cogitativa. [. . .] Here a common substance is not
the object of discussion but a singular substance. [. . .] Indeed, the individual substance comes to be [exists]
according to matter signed by quantity; this position on substance has the mode of existing as indeed a
“pure” substance.’
63
 Klubertanz, The Discursive Power, 297–8.
64
  Klubertanz writes: ‘Cajetan’s preference for the De Principio Individuationis (is) a key text to explain
all others (i.e. the internal sense faculties).’ The interested reader might consult Klubertanz’s worries in
ibid., 276–7, n. 56.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  261

Cajetan’s position is the one defended in this study. In the end, Klubertanz suggests
that the De Principio Individuationis is ‘doubtfully authentic’ and is to be considered
only as ‘an experiment of St. Thomas’s in the direction of Averroes’.65 It is unclear
where this point of Klubertanz takes us.66
Since this passage from De Principio Individuationis is akin structurally to what
Aquinas argues elsewhere, it is evident that in his theory of perception, he transcends
the limits dictated by classical British empiricism. The hoc aliquid, the individual
thing, is not just a collection of proper and common sensibles, what empiricists call a
bundle of sensations or sense data. If this were the case, then the individual would
be reducible to the collection of proper and common sensibles. Hence, it could be
known through the external senses alone. There would be no need to postulate
the vis cogitativa and the incidental object of sense. But Aquinas denies that such
reducibility occurs.

Seven Summary Propositions

In this discussion of Aquinas and the perception of individuals, the following seven
propositions may be affirmed:
(a) The vis cogitativa is the faculty, which perceives the individuals of the world. In
Aquinas’s ontology, these would be the primary substances, each of which is a
hoc aliquid.
(b) The perception is of an individual of a natural kind.67
(c) This awareness transcends the limits of the external senses. The external senses
are limited, given the structure of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, to an aware-
ness of proper and common sensibles.
(d) The awareness by the vis cogitativa is an ‘active contribution’ to the perceiving
process necessary to be aware of individuals as individuals and not bundles of
sensations.
(e) It follows from (a)–(d) above that Aquinas developed a philosophy of mind on
the perceptual level necessary to provide for an awareness of individuals.

65
  Ibid., 298.
66
  Torrell puts this treatise in a list of ‘unauthentic works or works of doubtful authenticity’: Jean-Pierre
Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 360–61. Eschmann suggests that ‘the authenticity [. . .] is espe-
cially debated and debatable, and at the present moment can be neither definitely accepted nor rejected’:
I. T. Eschmann, OP, ‘A Catalogue of St. Thomas’s Works’, in E. Gilson (ed.), The Christian Philosophy of
St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), 381. Weisheipl notes that the authenticity of this
work, along with several others of this sort, ‘has been debated with considerable vigor for more than half a
century’: Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 403.
Tugwell does not address this set of issues.
67
  In my judgement, in Aquinas’s ontology sortal properties (rooted in the formal cause) apply univo-
cally only to natural kinds. Accordingly, there are no sortal properties for artefacts. For artefacts, the use of
sortal properties would be an analogical use of a formal cause.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

262  The Vis Cogitativa

(f) This account of the awareness of an individual is in addition to the usual

account of the reflexive awareness of the intellect so common to explications of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. (Cf. Summa Theologiae, I q. 86 a 1: ‘Whether the
Intellect knows Particulars’—i.e. Utrum Cognoscat Singularia.)
(g) It follows that Aquinas offers an account for the awareness of individuals as
individual hoc aliquids on the level of sense perception.
The texts from the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, the Commentary on
the Soul, and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate that justify this account are noted
above. Hence, the incidental object of sense is an example of an intentio non sensata.
Its awareness comes through the intentional activity—the mental act—of the vis cogi-
tativa. While in some texts the particular reason is equated with the vis cogitativa, in
none of these texts is the ratio particularis identified with the intellectus possibilis.
The important question concerns the significance of all of this for Aquinas’s theory of
sensation and perception. It appears that he provides a structured cognitive account for
the perception of the individual. Since the intentiones non sensatae cannot come about
through the external senses, there must be some active contribution—what might be
called a ‘conditioning’ or ‘structuring’ of the mental act—on the part of the vis cogitativa
which enables it to perceive individuals as substantival wholes of a natural kind and not
just as mere bundles of sensations. In this case, Aquinas’s epistemological account is
not a reception of a form immaterially in a simple-minded isomorphic way. There is a
kind of isomorphism. But it is with the essence determining principle—the forma
substantialis—in the individual. This individual is an individual of a natural kind. In other
words, what the vis cogitativa knows as an individual is isomorphic with the primary
substance existing outside the mind. The vis cogitativa permits Aquinas’s philosophy of
mind to be realist and externalist and avoids the pitfalls of representationalism.
It appears that the vis cogitativa is the crucial sense faculty in Aquinas’s account of
perception. It is by the conditioned awareness of this faculty that the individuals of the
world, which in effect are the primary substances in the principal category of his ontol-
ogy, are perceived. Insofar as Aquinas affirms the ontological existence of a world of
individuals, he also provides the epistemological and philosophy-of-mind machinery
necessary for a perceiver to be aware of these individuals. Furthermore, because a pri-
mary substance is an individual of a kind, which natural kind in Aquinas’s ontology is
determined by a substantial form, the vis cogitativa is also aware of an individual as one
belonging to a natural kind. The vis cogitativa explains, but in an un-Kantian fashion,
the possibility for the perception of primary substances, which are the hoc aliquids of
the world. In his Commentary on the Metaphysics, Thomas argues explicitly for the
substantive existence of a hoc aliquid as a natured individual and not reducible to a
Berkeleyian ‘heap of properties’ (bk XII, lect. 3, nos 2441–54).
This explicatio textus of Aquinas on the vis cogitativa, therefore, offers a way to
account for the awareness of individuals independent of and quite different from the
complex account of the reflexive act of the intellect, which Aquinas discusses in the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  263

Summa Theologiae. This text is often used as the only one in which he considers how an
individual as such is known. On the level of sense perception utilizing the internal
sense of the vis cogitativa together with the notion of intentiones non sensatae, he tran-
scends the limits of traditional empiricism. In this way, he would in principle accept
the category difference between sensation and perception and thus agree with
Wisdom’s distinction between ‘sense statements’ and ‘thing statements’. This all occurs,
it must be emphasized, on the level of sense perception.68
If this analysis of Aquinas’s theory of perception is correct, then it poses an extremely
interesting issue for students of the history of philosophy. Often Scotus is seen in oppo-
sition to Aquinas in that Aquinas did not, so the common argument goes, provide a
way to account for direct knowledge of individuals. Hence Scotus, so the story devel-
ops, postulated the necessity for the individuator form, which he called haeccaeitas
(thisness). If the account of Aquinas argued for above is correct, then it follows that he
did possess the epistemological and philosophy-of-mind machinery in his philosophy
of knowing necessary to explain the possibility for knowledge of individuals, at least
on the perceptual level beyond the limits of the external sensorium. It would follow
from this analysis that a difference between Aquinas and Scotus on the knowledge of
individuals would be, not that Aquinas failed to provide such an account, but that the
nature of the mental act differs in each philosopher’s analysis. In the manner of adopt-
ing a cognitive structure, Aquinas opts for a ‘structured mental act’. Scotus, on the
other hand, apparently offers a ‘diaphanous mental act’, which directly intuits the form
of haeccaeitas. Haeccaeitas is needed as an object of the mental act for the awareness of
individuals. With his acceptance of matter as the principle of individuation, it is not
open to Aquinas to adopt an individuating form like the haeccaeitas of Scotus.

Ontological Realism
This interpretation of inner sense saves the ontological realism on which Aquinas builds
his philosophical system.69 To save this realism is not an arcane or idle philosophical

68
  It would appear that Haldane in his 1983 essay on Aquinas and perception failed to appreciate this ver-
sion of the vis cogitativa. Haldane expressed some concern that Aquinas could not reconcile the demands of
the senses for discrete material-laden sensations with the universal aspect of the intellectus possibilis and the
abstractive function of the intellectus agens. In this he falls prey to the same set of worries expressed by Frede
in her analysis of inner sense in Aquinas. Haldane commented on the physicalist analysis of Aquinas put
forward by Cohen: ‘Aquinas’s talk of “two grades of immaterial experience”, one fully fledged, the other “the
half-way state of sensible being” is simply a vain attempt to combine incompatible features’: John Haldane,
‘Aquinas on Sense-Perception’, Philosophical Review 92(2) (1983), 233–9. The position articulated in this
chapter elucidating the function of the vis cogitativa in terms of a structured mental act provides a way around
the misgivings that Haldane expressed about Aquinas’s supposed lack of connection between the sensible
image in the imagination and the abstracted conceptus in the intellectus possibilis. Haldane appears to consider
only the vis imaginativa as an inner sense in Aquinas’s array of internal sense faculties.
69
  For a complete analysis of Aquinas’s metaphysical thesis of ontological realism, see John F. Wippel,
The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2000).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

264  The Vis Cogitativa

question. Writing in New Blackfriars, Pickstock, adopting a postmodernist position of

internalism and anti-realism, asks the following question, and many contemporary
philosophers think not rhetorically: ‘How should one respond to the death of realism,
the death of the idea that thoughts in our minds can represent to us the way things
actually are in the world? For such a death seems to be widely proclaimed by contem-
porary philosophers.’70
A response to an internalist position like that articulated by Pickstock and
defended by MacDonald would go something like this. Aquinas, like Gibson,
assumes that there is a world around us. He asks, as Gibson does, what must be nec-
essary in order for us to know and understand this world of individuals. Gibson
would appeal to evolutionary development in order to explain how our perceptual
apparatus developed. Nonetheless, Gibson and Aquinas adopt the same metaphilo-
sophical approach: how do philosophers explain the common-sense awareness of
the world around us?71 The vis cogitativa assists Aquinas in maintaining this philo-
sophical realism in opposition to the postmodernist argument of Pickstock. This
account renders more persuasive the structural connection between the vis cogita-
tiva and its phantasms, the sense memory and its phantasms, and the power of
abstraction with the intellectus agens. If the sense memory stores the acts of aware-
ness of the vis cogitativa, then this provides a more perspicuous array of phantasms
on which the intellectus agens might act in ‘abstracting’ the species intelligiblis, which
permits the intellectus possibilis to know the sortal properties that determine a natu-
ral kind. Moreover, this interpretation renders more understandable the famous
‘army in retreat’ metaphor that Aristotle uses in Book II of the Posterior Analytics
and on which Aquinas comments.
In opposition to Moore’s ‘diaphanous arrow of consciousness’, Aristotle and Aquinas
adopt a ‘structured mental act’. There are two important intentional structures embed-
ded in cognitive faculties in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind:
(a) the intellectus agens;
(b) the vis cogitativa.
Both these intentional structures are necessary conditions in order for Aquinas to pro-
vide an explanatory account of an awareness of essential properties. Both get beyond
the direct data from the external senses. In discussing Gilson on Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind, Peterson wrote that ‘the senses carry a message which they cannot themselves
interpret’. Peterson and Gilson refer here only to the intellectus agens. This chapter
argues unequivocally that the vis cogitativa must be included in this discussion.72

70
 Catherine Pickstock, ‘Imitating God: The Truth of Things According to Thomas Aquinas’, New
Blackfriars 81(953/954) (2000), 308.
71
  While this analysis suggests a cognitive structuralism on inner sense, this does not entail that the
analysis Aquinas provides on the vis cogitativa is either connected with or dependent upon what has been
called ‘Transcendental Thomism’.
72
  See John Peterson, Realism and Logical Atomism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976), 7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  265

The Sense Memory

The last faculty of the internal sensorium to be considered is the sense memory (vis
memorativa). Textually, Aquinas is explicit about the cognitive use of this faculty. A
few introductory remarks might help avoid needless confusion. In ordinary linguistic
usage, memory often means a ‘calling to mind of an image’. In other words, memory is
a mental visualizing about something that is not here and now present. Aquinas, how-
ever, has a much narrower meaning for the sense memory. In effect, it is not only the
faculty that has the capacity to recollect images, because the imagination also performs
this intentional function. The sense memory is the internal sense by which the human
knower recollects an image of a particular thing in a certain past time. The imagination
is the storehouse of sensations; i.e. the concrete wholes synthesized by the sensus com-
munis from the discrete data of the external senses in the form of a collection—a
heap—of proper and common sensibles. The sense memory, on the other hand, is the
storehouse of perceived individual things or objects. The sense memory is to the vis
cogitativa as the imagination is to the sensus communis. On this relation, Aquinas
writes: ‘Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions that are not received through
the senses, the aestimative power [or vis cogitativa] is appointed; and for their preser-
vation the memorative power, which is a storehouse [thesaurus] of such intentions’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4). In order to illustrate this point further, it is worthwhile
noting again that Aquinas uses the same term, thesaurus, in referring to both of these
sense operations; often translated as ‘storehouse’ or ‘treasure house’, the word covers
both the imagination and the sense memory. The same role for the sense memory is
found in the Summa Contra Gentiles: ‘Some of the sensitive powers only receive—the
external senses, for instance; while some retain, as imagination and memory, which
are therefore called storehouses’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 73, no. 34). In the
Summa Contra Gentiles, one finds another similar passage: ‘The imagination, which is
the storehouse of forms apprehended by the senses, and the memory, which […] is the
storehouse of intentions apprehended without the senses, as when the sheep appre-
hends the enmity of the wolf ’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 74).
In addition to storing the mental objects of the vis cogitativa, which would be the
various experiences of incidental objects of sense, the sense memory in human per-
ceivers also has the ability to ‘reminisce’. The following passage brings out this point:
‘As to the memorative power, a human knower has not only memory, as other animals
have, in the sudden recollection of the past, but also reminiscence, by seeking syllogis-
tically, as it were, for a recollection of the past by the application of individual inten-
tions’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4). What Aquinas appears to account for here is the
pre-analytic data that human knowers have the ability to search with their memories of
individuals in order to discover a fact. For example, Aquinas argues that this mental
activity is undertaken when a person tries to think of a name or a person whose
‘memory image’ is quite clear and distinct. This is what a person does in trying to recall
the name of a person when one cannot think of it right away. When, for example, an
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

266  The Vis Cogitativa

individual begins to advance into middle age, all too often one hears—‘Her name is on
the tip of my tongue!’ Reminiscence is, therefore, the ability to attempt to locate within
one’s past experiences of individuals some particular piece of knowledge. This ability is
part of the sense memory.
These considerations underline the crucial fact that the sense memory has for its
object individual ‘intentions’ that had been perceived by the vis cogitativa. This par-
ticular note of ‘at a particular or specific past time’ is crucial, as Aquinas notes in De
Memoria et Reminiscentia: ‘memory is of past things’ (I, no. 307). In this same work,
Aquinas considers further how this faculty functions: ‘The memorative power retains,
about which a thing is to be remembered not in any way whatsoever, but only in so far
as it has been apprehended by a sense in the past’ (no. 321). This point is reiterated in
the Summa Contra Gentiles: ‘Now the memory is located in the sensitive part of the
soul, because its scope is limited to things subject to determinate times; there is mem-
ory only of what is past. Therefore [ . . . ] the memory does not abstract from singular
conditions’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 74, no. 17). The sense memory, therefore,
is that faculty by means of which a human knower is aware of individuals previously
experienced. In effect, it serves as the storehouse for the awareness of the incidental
objects of sensation.
If this analysis of the role of the sense memory is correct, then this explicatio textus
should explain further Aristotle’s remarks in the Posterior Analytics about the univer-
sal’s ‘coming to be’ in the soul. A principal part of that account is the role of experience
and memory. In commenting on the Posterior Analytics, Aquinas agrees with Aristotle
on the role of the memorative faculty in discussing the process of concept formation.
Aristotle shows in the foregoing how the knowledge of first principles comes about within us.
He concludes from what has been said that memory arises out of sensation; that is so in the
case of those animals in whom the sensible impression endures, as was said above. Then, out
of memory, that has been produced many times concerning the same thing [under a variety of
different individual conditions, however], there comes experience; for experience is obviously
nothing but the taking of something from many instances retained in memory.
Nonetheless, experience requires some reasoning about particulars, by which it relates one
item to another, and that is characteristic of reason. For instance, when it is remembered that a
certain herb has many times cured many people of fever, we say that it is our experience that
there is such a remedy for fever. (Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, II, lect. 20)

MacDonald in his account of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge refers to these passages in

the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics. Here, Aquinas refers to knowing ‘Callias.’
These are the examples Aristotle use in the De Anima and Aquinas in his Commentary
on the Soul. MacDonald translates this passage as follows: ‘It is clear, strictly speaking
and per se, one senses a particular. Nevertheless, in a certain respect sense perception is
on the universal itself, for it cognizes Callias not only insofar as he is Callias but also
insofar as he is this particular human being.’73

  MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, 183.

73
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  267

What is interesting, however, is that MacDonald does not appear to pick up on

Aquinas’s arguments about the human perceiver knowing the individual directly. This
is, of course, the role for the vis cogitativa. It is the vis memorativa, as a storehouse or
thesaurus, which keeps the perceptions of the vis cogitativa ready to undergo the pro-
cess of abstraction through the intellectus agens.
Memory, therefore, functions as the storehouse of experienced ‘individuals’, not of
experienced ‘bundles of sensations’. This is important because Aquinas, like Aristotle
before him, suggests that the universal comes to be in the ‘soul’ by repeated experience
of individual things. ‘Soul’ here refers to the intellectus possibilis. If human persons do
have experience of things, then there must be some way to distinguish this experience
from the experience of bundles of sense qualities, which, of course, would be the ‘con-
crete wholes’ composed of discrete proper and common sensibles. For if the only
object of experience were the proper and common sensibles, then this type of experi-
ence would seem much too fleeting for an ‘universal’ ever to come to be in the soul.
Aquinas postulates the epistemological machinery necessary to explain the possibility
for a human perceiver to be aware of individual things, which are the primary sub-
stances in his ontology. In other words, a human perceiver does have a ‘thing con-
sciousness’. This unique mental awareness is had by means of the vis cogitativa, whose
objects are stored intentionally in the sense memory. With the stored repertoire of
‘individual intentions’, i.e. intentions of individuals and of individuals of a kind, from
these individuals, it is more readily apparent how the mind can ‘form’ or ‘make’ the
species intelligibilis from such individual intentions by means of the intellectus agens.
Often in the texts Aquinas refers to the intellectus agens as an ‘efficient cause’. In other
words, the sense memory is the foundation for the many individualized intentions
from which the mind ‘makes’ the universal. If the perceiver were not aware of individ-
uals but merely of bundles of sensations, then it would be quite difficult for Aristotle
and Aquinas to explain the possibility of the universal’s ‘coming to be’ in the mind.74
That the sense memory is concerned with individualized intentions is substantiated
by the passage considered above from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Posterior Analytics.
There the object of the sense memory is the ‘herbs’—the individuals of a natural kind—
and not a bundle of sense qualities, which were observed by the external senses in
conjunction with the sensus communis.
In concluding this extended and extensive discussion, one might recall the passage
from the Commentary on the Metaphysics. Aquinas discusses the role of the vis cogita-
tiva, the sense memory, and ‘experience’ in the following manner:
In human knowers, the next thing above memory is experience, which some animals have only
to a small degree. For an experience arises from the association of many singular [intentions]
received in memory. And this kind of association is proper to a human knower, and pertains to
the vis cogitativa, which is also called sometimes the particular reason—this is the faculty that

74
  Parenthetically, it may be due to Berkeley’s denial of an awareness of an individual as such but only of
‘bundles of sensations’ that he found it impossible to talk about ‘abstract ideas’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

268  The Vis Cogitativa

associates particular intentions just as universal reason associates universal ones. Above
experience, which belongs to particular reason, human knowers have as their power, a universal
reason by means of which they live. (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk I, lect. 1).

It appears, therefore, that the sense memory is a critical faculty in Aquinas’s philoso-
phy of mind. It is distinguished from the imagination in that it is a storehouse of sensed
individuals; it is not merely a storehouse of sense qualities put together as concrete
wholes by the sensus communis. This faculty, furthermore, as evidenced by the passage
above from Aquinas’s comments on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, serves a most
important role in the ‘coming to be’ of the universal in the mind. This suggests the
un-Kantian direction of the theory of mind that Aquinas offers.75

Back to Aristotle’s De Anima

If this analysis of Aquinas on inner sense is correct, especially in regard to the vis
­cogitativa, then this indicates at least one place where Aquinas, as a philosopher,
is dependent upon yet goes beyond what he finds in Aristotle’s texts on the philoso-
phy of mind. Modrak appears to be one of the few philosophers who suggest that
Aristotle might have some sense of the intentiones non sensatae. In discussing the
proper and the common sensibles in Aristotle (kath’ hauta), Modrak proposes
that the incidental object of sense (kata sumbebekos) is categorically distinct from
the proper and common sensibles. She writes: ‘The sensory basis for the perception
of an individual object does not fully determine the content of the perception.’ She
goes on to suggest:
the percipient plays an active role in shaping the content of an individual perception. Also,
the perception of an incidental object arises spontaneously in the perception when past and
present experiences are conducive to the apprehension of the incidental object in question. [. . .]
Moreover, there is no textual evidence for attributing to Aristotle a narrow notion of percep-
tion that would exclude interpretation.76

However, Aristotle, in his De Anima, does not build the philosophy of mind
machinery needed to account for this act of awareness, but Aquinas does. Frede too
notes this development in Aquinas’s analysis.77 Aquinas, in contrast to Aristotle,
builds this mental machinery, and this explains the important cognitive role of the
vis cogitativa.
This concludes the explicatio textus into the somewhat murky region of inner sense
in Thomas Aquinas. This is a bit of philosophy of mind rooted in Aristotle’s De Anima,

75
  This latter question is very important for Aquinas, although that exciting epistemological narrative is
beyond the scope of this inquiry. Nonetheless, the last part of the final chapter offers some suggestions
about how this bit of philosophy-of-mind theory might be articulated.
76
  Deborah K. W. Modrak, Aristotle: The Power of Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 69–70.
77
  Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  269

but an account developed so much further. This account is sufficiently perspicuous so

that it might help meet the charge that Haldane suggested as ‘one of the tasks for the
next century’. In addition, this analysis suggests why the vis cogitativa is significant
for Aquinas’s theory of mind and not what Frede called ‘an embarrassment’. To the
contrary, without the vis cogitativa, Aquinas’s philosophy of mind would be an embar-
rassment. What remains now is an analysis of that elusive concept of ‘phantasm’ in
Thomas. To that set of issues the final chapters turn. The vis cogitativa is far from the
‘embarrassment’ articulated by Frede, is different structurally from the proto-­judgement
suggested by Michon, and functions in an important manner neglected in Pasnau’s
extended study.

appendix 1
Transcending the Limits of British Empiricism
Given the explicatio textus provided in this study, Aquinas developed the philosophy-­of-mind
machinery necessary to transcend the limits of British empiricism. It is now time to spell this
out with texts from the empiricist tradition. The Aquinas texts considered indicate that he,
following Aristotle, adopts a threefold division for the objects of sense knowledge: the proper
sensibles, the common sensibles, and the incidental object of sense. There is no analogue in
classical British empiricism for the incidental object of sense. Given the ‘bundle’ view of
perception—what is sometimes referred to as the ‘heap theory’—espoused by Berkeley in The
Principles and Hume in The Enquiry, among other places, theoretically there is no room left for
the incidental object of sense. Berkeley and Hume analyse an individual in terms of a collection
of sensible properties. Berkeley wrote as follows in The Principles: ‘Thus, for example, a certain
colour, taste, smell, figure and consistency, having been observed to go together, are accounted
one distinct thing, signified by the name “apple”. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a
tree, a book, and like sensible things.’78 In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
Hume uses the same analysis, substituting a peach for an apple: ‘As our idea of any body, a
peach, for instance, is only that of a particular taste, colour, figure, size, consistency, etc., so our
idea of any mind is only that of particular perceptions without the notion of anything we call
substance, either simple or compound.’79 Writing on the bundle view of perception, Chisholm
once noted the following:

Thus Hume virtually concedes that, if you are going to be an empiricist, the only matters of fact
that you can really know about pertain to the existence of sensations [. . . Hume] meant you
cannot know whether there are any physical things—whether there are trees, or houses, or
bodies, much less whether there are atoms or other such microscopic particles [. . .] [one] can
know only that there are certain sensations here and now.80

78
  George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding, no. 1.
79
  David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 194.
80
 Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion, 17–18.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

270  The Vis Cogitativa

Aquinas would accept this Chisholm view about Humean empiricism and, like Chisholm,
would adopt an affirmative statement accepting an ontological realism of particular things.
In his On the Soul, Aristotle spells out in some detail the structure and content of the proper
and the common sensibles. But, as noted earlier, when Aristotle comes to the incidental object
of sense, he has precious little to say. Aquinas argues that it is the vis cogitativa that explains the
perception of the incidental object of sense; in this, he goes beyond the limits found in
Aristotle’s account of sensation and perception. Frede too notes this amplification in Aquinas
from the limits of Aristotle’s texts: ‘Though St. Thomas goes along with the later Aristotelian
tradition in assigning different capacities to the inner sense, he seems to regard these additions
as mere clarifications where “The Philosopher” had left the faculties of the inner sense
unspecified.’81 The argument elaborated in this study, however, suggests that Aquinas,
influenced by the Arabian philosophers, added substantively to the Aristotelian analysis in the
De Anima and offered far more than the ‘mere clarification’ proposed by Frede. Textual support
for these claims concerning the role of the vis cogitativa and the perception of individuals has
been provided.

appendix 2
Jörg Tellkamp on Aquinas and Perception Theory
Leo White utilizes the recent work on perceptual theory in Aquinas by Jörg Tellkamp as a foil
for his own exposition.82 Tellkamp discusses the role of sensibles per accidens, which would be
the objects of the vis cogitativa, what have been called intentiones insensatae. Tellkamp suggests
that this awareness may be propositional in nature.83 He argues, in agreement with several
claims put forward in this study, that much of the analysis of Aquinas’s epistemology and
philosophy of mind has been directed towards the faculty of understanding, which would be
the functioning of the intellectus possibilis. Tellkamp too seeks to redirect the efforts towards
unpacking Aquinas’s theory of perception.
White suggests that Tellkamp, in considering the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa along
with the concept of a sensible per accidens, seeks to find a conceptual unity among the various
roles that Aquinas in his many texts mentions for these powers of inner sense. Tellkamp
suggests that what all the various mental acts of these two internal sense faculties undertake is
reducible to considering a ‘state of affairs’ (Sachverhalt). White’s analysis proceeds then in terms
of attempting to render this account compatible with his own view that the vis cogitativa is
structurally like the vis aestimativa and searches for the useful and the harmful, the good and
the bad, for the exercise of practical reason.
What is more interesting, however, is Tellkamp’s position regarding the act of perception
of  the vis cogitativa. Tellkamp, as White indicates, ‘distinguishes the sentient awareness of

81
  Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, 171.
82
  White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, 583; the author is indebted to Professor White for bringing to his atten-
tion the important work of Tellkamp.
83
  This important analysis by Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp of Aquinas on perception, Sinne, Gegenstände
und Sensibilia: zur Wahrnehmungslehre des Thomas von Aquin (Leiden: Brill, 1999), has not been translated
into English. The Tellkamp passages used in this chapter are from White’s essay. White has done all of us an
immense favour by his translation.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Vis Cogitativa  271

sensibilia per accidens from the intellectual awareness of the same’.84 Tellkamp writes: ‘In any
case, there is a kind of complex knowledge that is connected with universal structures but
which does not refer immediately to intellectual knowledge [ . . . ] The sensibilia per accidens are,
it seems, propositional in nature.’85 This position appears reducible to the claim that a sensibile
per accidens—or an intentio insensata—is a complex object of perception. In Tellkamp’s views,
both the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa share this kind of complex structure to their
respective objects of perception. He next reflects on the differences between the mental acts of
the vis aestimativa as compared with the mental acts of the vis cogitativa.
In one respect, sheep and humans are alike in forming perceptual awareness: by means of using their senses
they achieve knowledge of a particular object, which is not grasped under a perceptible—i.e. sensitive—
aspect. This (non-perceptible) aspect is summed up in the concept of intentio, which contains either prac-
tically or cognitively relevant states of affairs.86

Tellkamp appears to limit the concept of intentio to an intentio insensata. One suspects that he
is reading too much Avicenna and Averroes into the Aquinas texts and thus limiting the
concept of ‘intentio’. Aquinas, however, uses esse intentionale to apply to the mental functioning
of any mental act, be it of the external senses, the internal senses, or the intellect.
Tellkamp next considers how the mental act of the vis aestimativa differs in kind from the
mental act of the vis cogitativa. He begins with the tried and true example Aquinas uses so often
of the wolf and the sheep.
The wolf is in any case perceived, not as an individual being under a universal aspect [sub natura com-
muni], but rather as a terminus or endpoint of a sensible striving.
The object of human knowledge is exclusively the universal, and this [universal] comes into play at the
level of perception in a sensible per accidens in so far as the latter embodies an object under the aspect of a
common nature [sub natura communi]. This [fact] suggests, as we have seen, the characteristic [that
belongs to] intellectual activities.87

Tellkamp’s analysis is roughly similar to that offered in this study. The object of the vis cogitativa
is a particular individual perceived as belonging to a natural kind.88 Aquinas’s De Principio
Individuationis is similar structurally to the analysis put forward by Tellkamp; the early
renaissance commentator on Aquinas, Thomas de Vio Cajetan provides a similar analysis.
Kenny too worries about these two functions of the vis cogitativa—the one related to the vis
aestimativa and the other the ascription of ‘discursive reason’ to this faculty.
In humans the activity to guess and verify what is dangerous and useful for the individual in this way is
called the vis cogitativa. We are told also that the cogitativa is the faculty whereby he makes general judg-
ments; it may be called the passive intellect or the particular reason [ . . . ] I know of no passage where St.
Thomas makes clear how this faculty thus defined is the same as the faculty introduced by reference to the
notions of danger and utility.89

84
  White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, 582, n. 16.
85
 Tellkamp, Sinne, Gegenstände und Sensibilia, 171, in White, ‘Instinct and Custom’.
86
 Tellkamp, Sinne, Gegenstände und Sensibilia, 173, in White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, 582–3.
87
 Tellkamp, Sinne, Gegenstände und Sensibilia, 172, 173, in White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, 583, n. 21.
88
  Later this study discusses how this analysis of the object perceived by means of the structured
awareness of the vis cogitativa assists in Thomas’s account of abstraction via the intellectus agens.
This  will be a necessary condition for such an abstraction process central to Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind.
89
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), 37.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

272  The Vis Cogitativa

Aquinas offers a view of inner sense beyond that put forward by Aristotle in his De Anima and
one essentially different from the Cartesian forebears of modern epistemology. Furthermore,
this book suggests that Aquinas offers a Gestalt-like analysis of inner sense with the vis
cogitativa, which is a necessary condition for making good sense out of the whole process of
perception and the dependent process of abstraction with the intellectus agens. Hence the vis
cogitativa is a necessary condition for making Aquinas’s entire philosophy of mind hang
together in a coherent and structurally ­significant way. It is through this inner sense faculty
that Aquinas saves his epistemological realism by providing a mechanism to account for a
direct awareness of individual primary substances, which substances are individuals of
a natural kind.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

11
The Role of Phantasms
in Inner Sense
Part 1

In reading the epistemology and philosophy of mind texts of Thomas Aquinas, one
frequently encounters the term ‘phantasm’. Thomas’s philosophy-of-mind account of
the direct perception of individuals, inner sense, formation of a species intelligibilis,
and concept formation and exercise is rooted fundamentally in the notion of phantas-
mata. In order to understand better the intricacies of Aquinas’s theory of perceptual
and conceptual intentionality, a careful and critical elucidation of the structure of a
phantasm is of fundamental importance.
There are at least four significant reasons for undertaking a conceptual analysis of
phantasms:
(a) An elucidation of the structure of phantasms is important in light of mid-­
twentieth century and later critiques of Aquinas’s theory of perceptual
intentionality. Several elucidations of Aquinas’s theory of perception reduce
his perceptual theory to representationalism by means of a structural interpre-
tation of phantasms. Often a phantasm has been interpreted to be either a
sense datum or an image. Both the sense datum and the image are construed
as the object of direct awareness. Accordingly, phantasms become the direct
object of perception distinct from the physical object. Some interpretations
given to his texts using phantasms lead to distorted accounts of Aquinas’s the-
ory of perception.
(b) A phantasm is connected structurally with the functioning of the internal
senses. That there has been much philosophical discussion about the nature of
inner sense since the mid-twentieth century publication of Ryle’s The Concept
of the Mind is obvious. If the internal sensorium of Aquinas’s epistemology is
to be elucidated adequately, this will depend necessarily upon a correct analysis
of phantasms. Aquinas means more by ‘inner sense’ than mere self-reflection
and introspection. A passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles is illustrative
of several texts in which Aquinas considers the locus of the phantasms: ‘the
powers in which phantasms reside [ . . . are . . . ] the imagination, the memory
and the vis cogitativa’ (bk. II, ch. 73, no. 11).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

274  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

(c) Aquinas argues that phantasms are necessary conditions both for the formation
of a species intelligibilis and for concept formation and concept exercise. The
intellectus agens ‘scans’ the phantasms in the process of forming an intelligible
species, from which the intellectus possibilis forms a ‘conceptus’. In many texts,
Aquinas speaks of the abstraction of concepts from phantasms: ‘on the part
of  phantasms, intellectual knowledge is caused by the senses. But because
phantasms cannot of themselves impress the intellectus possibilis, but instead
require to be made actually intelligible by the intellectus agens’ (Summa
Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 6); ‘Therefore, material things must be understood only
insofar as they are abstracted from matter and from material likenesses,
namely, phantasms’ ( I q. 85 a. 1, sed contra).
(d) Phantasms, moreover, are necessary for the awareness of ‘essences’ by the
mental act of the intellectus possibilis. Aquinas refers to this relation as the
‘conversio ad phantasmata’.1 One of the goals of the present inquiry will be
to take some of the metaphorical nature away from an understanding of
phantasms. The claim that phantasms are necessary conditions for concept
exercise is expressed in the following passages: ‘we do not understand the
things whose species are in the intellectus possibilis without the presence
of  phantasms disposed for this purpose’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II,
ch. 73, no. 40);
In the present conditions of human earthly existence, the mind cannot actually understand
anything except by reference to phantasms [nisi convertendo se ad phantasmata] [ . . . ] Yet in
understanding, either freshly or summoning knowledge already acquired, the mind’s activity
must be accompanied by the activity of the vis imaginativa and of the other sense powers.
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 4)

A conceptual analysis of the nature and structure of a phantasm, therefore, is by no

means a moot point. First, given the suggestions philosophers have put forward con-
necting phantasms with representationalism, if Aquinas’s theory of perception is
direct realism, a thorough analysis of the role phantasms play in perception is neces-
sary. Secondly, an elucidation of the intricate workings of inner sense require an analy-
sis of the ‘logic’ of phantasms. And lastly, this study might shed light for a future
analysis on the role phantasms play in the abstractive process of the intellectus agens
and the mental act of the intellectus possibilis.

Direct Realism Redux

The claim that Aquinas is a direct realist is central to the twin claims about his ontolog-
ical realism and his epistemological realism conjoined with his externalism. If the
1
  Geach in Mental Acts suggests that this ‘conversio’ relation is a difficult bit of philosophy to elucidate
conceptually. Geach refers to the conversio ad phantasmata phrase as being metaphor though certainly
important metaphor.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  275

phantasm becomes a direct object of knowledge with the external sensorium, then
Aquinas is a representationalist and not an externalist. Passages from several texts note
that Aquinas claims that the ‘thing’ or ‘quality’ in the physical world is the object of
knowledge and not the ‘idea’ of the thing or quality: ‘The sense objects, which actuate
the sense faculties—the visible, the audible, etc.—exist outside the perceiver. Thus,
actual perception attains to the things, which exist in the external world’ (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 375; emphasis added); ‘Sense faculties are passive. They are immuted
by the sensible objects existing in the external world. Thus, the exterior cause of the
immutation in the sense faculty is per se that which is perceived by the sense faculties’
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 3).
One passage from the Summa Theologiae offers textual evidence that Aquinas
denied explicitly that the sensation or idea itself is the direct object of knowledge. This
entails a fortiori a denial of representationalist theory, and indicates the externalism
and the corresponding epistemological realism central to Aquinas’s philosophy
of mind.2
The relevance of Aquinas’s objections lies in the explicit claim that a mental state itself
as a tertium quid is not the direct object of knowledge. He affirms some common-sense
observations about the epistemological ramifications of representationalism; he
suggests that if mental states themselves are the direct objects of knowledge, then
two odd philosophical conclusions follow:
(a) A perceiver could never know anything beyond her mental states, and thus
every inquiry would be nothing more than a psychological inquiry into inner
sense.
(b) If sensations themselves and not the objects in the world were the direct ref-
erent of mental acts, then Protagoras’s relativist dictum ‘Man is the measure
of all things’ would become the established epistemological norm.
By indicating in a dialectical manner what philosophically odd conclusions follow
necessarily from any representationalist theory (i.e. one that has as the direct
object of a mental act the very mental entity itself), Aquinas provides a reductio ad
absurdum argument against representationalism.3 What concerns him is that if
one does not get beyond the mental state, then one is never aware of the external
world. That this is the heart of the realism/idealism and the externalist/internalist
issues is obvious. In effect, Aquinas states precisely where certain philosophical
problems lie with representative realism; i.e. how to connect the representation
with that which is represented.4 He suggests that representative realism is a priori

2
  Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2; this text appears in Ch. 7.
3
  Aquinas’s method here reminds one of Austin’s trenchant remarks directed against the ‘quirkiness’ of
sense data theories.
4
  Putnam expressed these same concerns when he criticized what he called the ‘inner theatre of the
mind’ position exemplified in most representationalism. Ryle too expressed these worries.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

276  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

untenable. This entails the acceptance of some form of epistemological realism.5

In his Medieval Philosophy, Kenny argues for the direct realism and externalism
in Aquinas.6
‘Phantasm’ is an often-used term in the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet the
‘logic’ of the analysis of this concept is difficult to unpack consistently. In her Aquinas,
Stump writes about the difficulty of sorting out exactly what Aquinas may have meant
by the concept of ‘phantasm’: ‘But Aquinas’s views about phantasms are a perplexing
part of his account of cognition, since, at first glance, phantasms seem entirely super-
fluous as regards the cognition of extra mental reality.’7 In this context, Stump appears
concerned about how Aquinas uses phantasms when he considers the abstraction by
means of the intellectus agens of an intelligible species from the phantasms as well as
the exercise of the concepts by the intellectus possibilis once abstraction has occurred.
In his Aquinas on Mind, Kenny notes: ‘how much else is covered by the word [phan-
tasm] is difficult to determine.’8 In his ‘Intentionality: Aquinas and Wittgenstein’,
Kenny reminds us of the difficulties encountered in providing a consistent analysis of
the ‘logic’ of the concept of phantasm in the texts of Aquinas:
It is not altogether clear what Aquinas means by phantasmata: I have been translating his
references to them by vague and benign phrases such as ‘reference to a content of sense and
imagination’. I believe that in Aquinas’s dicta about phantasms there is combined a correct and
important insight about the relation between the intellect on the one hand and the imagination
on the other, with a confused theory about the nature of the imagination and the character of
mental imagery.9

In discussing the nature and structure of phantasms, there are at least three possible
alternative accounts. Each of these accounts can be interpreted as an explicatio textus
providing a conceptual analysis of a phantasm. Two of these positions have been
argued for explicitly or are at least implied by various philosophers who have provided
an analysis of Aquinas’s theory of perception. In the next chapter, a third position will
be offered reconstructing the ‘logic’ of the use of ‘phantasm’; this entails that the other
two accounts interpreting phantasms are untenable structurally and inconsistent

5
  Texts from Kerr’s After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism suggest the radical incompatibility of Thomas’s
position with early modern representationalism. On the charge of question-begging in such matters, see
Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1973).
6
  ‘Some philosophers believe that in sense-experience we do not directly observe objects or properties
in the external world, but rather perceive private sense-data from which we infer the nature of external
objects and properties. In Aquinas, there are no such intermediaries between perceiver and perceived. In
sensation the faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the object; it becomes itself like the
object by taking on its form. This is summed up in the slogan taken from Aristotle: the sense-faculty in
operation is identical with the sense-object in action (sensu in actu est sensible in actu)’: Anthony Kenny,
Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 234.
7
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 256.
8
  Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993), 93.
9
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Intentionality: Aquinas and Wittgenstein’, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), 71; repr. in Brian Davies, OP (ed.), Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary
Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 243–56.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  277

t­ extually. The positions argued against are stated generally as follows: (a) a phantasm is
structurally identical to a ‘sense datum’, and (b) a phantasm is always to be identified
with a ‘sense image’.
Although both these positions are fundamentally mistaken, nonetheless some texts
found in the writings of Aquinas suggest each of them. The problem, therefore, is to
provide a structural elucidation consistent with the whole of his theory of knowledge
and philosophy of mind. This present inquiry can be regarded as a conceptual analysis,
first of all, attempting to disprove both of the above positions, and secondly, elucidat-
ing a consistent account of the nature of a phantasm. Needless to say, a definitive
account of the logic of the concept of a phantasm is difficult. Aquinas is limited in what
he writes constructively about this intentional entity. Contemporary readers almost
have the impression that Aquinas was certain that the nature of a phantasm was a per-
vasive term in thirteenth-century philosophy and common parlance in epistemologi-
cal discussions; hence, there was no need to offer a further explication of this concept.10
The lack of elucidation on Aquinas’s part forces the contemporary philosopher into
reconstructing an explanatory account. This conceptual analysis, insofar as it is a
reconstruction, must be reconcilable with the other texts of Aquinas that treat issues in
the philosophy of mind. One sees the range of texts Aquinas employs when using
phantasms.

The Sense Data or ‘Qualia’ Position

The first account of a phantasm to be discussed is the ‘sense data position’, which is
based upon how Aquinas describes briefly the function of phantasms in his
Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul: ‘Circa quod sciendum est, quod “phos” in graeco
idem est quod lux; et inde venit “phanos” quod est apparitio, vel illuminatio et phantasia.’
This passage is rendered into English as follows: ‘Aristotle explains the name phantasia:
“Note that phos is the Greek for ‘light’. Therefore, the term ‘phanos’ is derived, i.e.
‘appearance’ or ‘enlightening’, and phantasia” ’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 668).
Given this textual evidence, it is not difficult to place emphasis on ‘apparitio’, which
is  translated and obviously can mean ‘appearance’. Early on, Kenny suggested this
approach: ‘[in] interpreting the notion of phantasm, there are many passages in
Aquinas [. . .] where translations such as “sense appearance” or “sense impressions”
suggest themselves.’11 Kenny’s later work, however, argues for externalism in Aquinas
rejecting a sense datum interpretation. An emphasis placed upon ‘appearance’ or ‘sense
impression’ suggests that the phantasm is a sense datum as employed by twentieth-­
century British and American philosophers. For example, in a general discussion of

10
  One possible area for further research on phantasms might be discovered in the medieval Arabian
philosophers; Aquinas often refers to Avicenna and Averroes.
11
  Anthony Kenny, ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’, in Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 273–93. Nonetheless, in these earlier critiques
of phantasms, Kenny vacillated between an image and a sense datum position.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

278  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

phantasms, Sellars once used phantasms to elucidate epiphenomenalism: ‘“phantasms”

or “sensa” we might call them.’12
Furthermore, the above passage from the Commentary on the Soul is not an isolated
instance in which Aquinas uses the term ‘appearance’: ‘The word “imagining” [phan-
tasia] is itself taken from seeing or appearing’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 632).
‘Aristotle suggests that phantasia is a sort of movement: that just as the sensing subject
is moved by sensible objects, so, in imagining [the use of phantasia], one is moved
by certain appearances called phantasms’ (no. 56). In addition to this use of appearance,
when considering the formation of the species intelligiblis by means of abstraction
with the intellectus agens leading towards the formation of a concept in the intellec-
tus possibilis, Aquinas speaks of phantasms as ‘likenesses’ of physical objects:
‘Therefore, material things must be understood according as they are abstracted
from matter and from material likenesses, namely, phantasms’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 85 a. 1). 13
Given texts like these, it is not terribly difficult to suggest that a phantasm is nothing
more than a sense datum, which puts Aquinas under the indirect realism umbrella
articulated by several early and mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophers. However,
this placement is erroneous textually and structurally. While few philosophers now
adopt sense data positions, this interpretation of Aquinas’s account is still moderately
lively. Hence, it is useful to indicate the problems with this kind of ascription lest
further misreadings and misinterpretations continue. Moreover, rejecting the sense
data analysis is a further claim against a tertium quid analysis of Aquinas’s account of
sensation and perception.
In order to explicate this position rendering phantasms and sense data coextensive,
one must consider passages from the writings of various early and mid-twentieth-­
century epistemologists providing elucidations of the nature of sense data. The
classic exposition of the sense data theory is found Moore’s Some Main Problems
of Philosophy:
I hold up this envelope: I look at it [ . . . ] what has happened? We should certainly say that we all
saw that envelope. [ . . . ] But now what happened to each of us, when we saw that envelope? I saw
a patch of a particular colour, having a certain size, and a certain shape, a shape with rather sharp
angles or corners and bound by fairly straight lines. These things: this patch of whitish color and
its size and shape I did actually see. And I propose to call these things—the colour and size and
shape—sense data, things given or presented by the senses—given in this case, by my sense of
sight. [ . . . ] Now all of this seems to me to show very clearly that, if we did all see the same
envelope, the envelope which we saw was not identical with the sense data which we saw.14

12
  Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Humanities Press, 1963), 101. Sellars did not
mention Aquinas’s account of phantasms in particular. One gets the impression, however, that he provided
a generic notion of phantasms under which Aquinas’s account would be subsumed.
13
  A detailed analysis of likeness (similitudo) will be offered later in this chapter.
14
  G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 30–31.
Other arguments for a sense data epistemology are found in e.g. Russell, Price, and Ayer.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  279

Moore’s philosophical text indicates that a sense datum is the direct object of an act
of perception. Moreover, sense data accounts indicate that sense data philosophers
adopted a ‘relational’ model of perception. Besides claiming that a sense datum is a
term of a private act of direct acquaintance, Moore suggests that a sense datum and the
external object are distinct entities. In other words, a sense datum is what is presented
to a perceiver when she is in a relational act of awareness; this datum is not identical
with the physical object. Moore argued explicitly that sense data are entities wedged
between the mental act and the physical object; accordingly, Moore accepted this
non-identification of sense data and physical object.15
On this perceptual model entailing sense data, which is reducible to a form of
representationalism, the important structural question concerns going from the sense
datum to the material object. Of course, philosophers have offered several purported
resolutions for this problem, ranging from ‘instinctive beliefs’ to ‘constructs’ to ‘con-
victions from common sense’ to ‘permanent possibilities of sensations’. These various
solutions, however, are not the present concern. What is of concern is the difference
between a phantasm and a sense datum when used in direct sensation. It is in order to
argue effectively for this difference that this discussion of sense data has been provided.
Analysing the nature of a sense datum in direct sensation as elucidated by some of the
many twentieth-century philosophers who entertained seriously the philosophical
import of this epistemological entity enables the discussion to advance, indicating the
logical and structural differences between a sense datum and a phantasm.
Two propositions concerning phantasms and sense data require discussion:
(a) A sense datum approach destroys the direct realism of Aquinas’s theory of
perception.
(b) A phantasm is never connected with the workings of the external sensorium
alone, so a fortiori, a phantasm cannot be a sense datum; i.e. the paradigm case
for a sense datum is direct sensation.
The structured analysis offered establishes the soundness and textual significance
for Proposition-2. One might question this proposition by referring to no. 664 in the
Commentary, where Aquinas writes: ‘I mean, at least so long as the sensible object is
present and the image-movement is simultaneous with the sense-movement’ (empha-
sis added). The Latin is ‘quando motus phantasiae est simul cum motu sensus’. However,

15
  Klemke once discussed this problem in Moore’s theory of perception, which is similar in structure to
Aquinas’s worries: ‘Moore’s views on perception, although occupying more pages than any other single
epistemological topic, contain the greatest number of unresolved problems of all. Taking the “problem of
sense data” first, on only one point is Moore consistent: there are sense data. Why so? Because they are
objects of certain sorts of awareness, and one cannot (Moore thinks) have an awareness without an object.
But would not physical objects fit the bill? Moore thinks not, for then we could not satisfactorily account
for the phenomenon of illusion, hallucination, after-images, and perspectival visual sensings. Moore over-
looks the view that we could say that certain things (e.g. coins) look certain ways (e.g. elliptical) without
requiring that there be sense data as entities.’ See E. D. Klemke, The Epistemology of G. E. Moore (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 190. See also Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

280  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

this passage is a causal statement about an image being produced in the imagination,
not a claim that the image is a sense datum in direct perception. In no. 667, further-
more, Aquinas writes: ‘it seems necessary for there to be a phantasm-producing or
imaginative power different from sense.’ Thus, passage no. 664 does not refute the
thrust of Proposition-2.
In regard to Proposition-1, however, the following remarks are important. If a phan-
tasm is to be equated with a sense datum and if a sense datum is the direct object of
perception and thus distinguished from the material object itself, then it follows that
Aquinas faces the same consequences for his theory of perception that any sense
datum theory entails. The principal consequence of a sense datum theory is driving a
wedge between the object of perception and the physical thing itself. Accordingly, if a
phantasm is interpreted as a sense datum, then serious structural difficulties arise
because Aquinas argues for epistemological realism. His texts for the external senses
indicate repeatedly that the object of sensation is the physical quality itself—either a
proper or a common sensible—and not an intermediary entity or a tertium quid. This
‘thing consciousness’ and ‘quality consciousness’ linguistic usage is reiterated over and
over in the Aquinian texts. To adopt a sense datum theory entails a drastic modifica-
tion to this realistic theory of perception. If a phantasm is identified with a sense
datum, then Aquinas’s theory of perception is accordingly so modified. This entails
that the phantasm is the direct object of sensation, and this in turn entails some form of
representationalism.
Approaching Proposition-2 begins with sense datum interpretations of a phantasm
as found in contemporary studies of Aquinas. In addition to the text from Kenny’s
essay, Hamlyn proposed a sense datum approach.16 Both Hamlyn and Ayer claimed
that a sense datum belongs to the same category of epistemological entities as the ideas
and impressions of the British empiricists. Hamlyn suggested that a phantasm is a
mental entity needed in any mental act of direct awareness, which follows from a sense
datum account of perception. If a sense datum interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of
sensation holds, then it follows that a phantasm is involved necessarily with every
mental act of sensation using the external sensorium. Often Aquinas is interpreted by
analytic philosophers as claiming that phantasms are part of the perceptual process
involved with each external sense. Early on, Kenny vacillated on this account:
But it also appears that he [Aquinas] thinks that whenever we see something we have at the
same time a phantasm of what we see; and he explains sensory illusions by saying that the
senses themselves are not deceived, but only the phantasia on which they act. It seems odd to
suggest that whenever we see a horse we have at the same time a mental image of a horse.
Perhaps the theory is that if we see accurately our phantasm of a horse is a sense-impression; if
we are mistaken about what we see, and there is no horse there at all, then our phantasm is
a mental image. This theory seems to be confused in several ways, but it is hard to be sure

16
  See D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 30–31.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  281

whether Aquinas held it or not. At all events it seems clear that he did not mean by ‘phantasm’
simply a mental image.17

While Kenny’s example is somewhat confusing, nonetheless it is precisely this necessary

connection with the external sensorium that Aquinas denies explicitly. In opposition
to the position presented above, Aquinas never uses the term ‘phantasm’ when dis-
cussing either direct sensation involving only the external senses or any mental act
involving the sensus communis. On the other hand, he mentions explicitly the powers
or sense faculties of inner sense in which the phantasm is found, conspicuously omitting
any reference to the sensus communis. In considering the relation between phantasms
and the external sensorium, one must take seriously the passage noted above, which
is one among many found in the Summa Contra Gentiles: ‘the powers in which the
phantasms reside [. . . are . . .] namely, the imagination, the sense memory, and the vis
cogitativa’ (bk II, ch. 73, no. 11). In the Commentary on the Soul, moreover, Aquinas
claims that the locus of the phantasms is the internal sensorium, or what he calls the
phantasia: ‘It is by the phantasia that we become conscious of phantasms’ (no. 638).
Furthermore, the second quotation given above is qualified immediately by the follow-
ing words: ‘unless the term “phantasm” is being used metaphorically’ (no. 638). This
indicates that above and beyond the functions of the faculties of the internal sensorium,
the phantasm does not have a non-metaphorical function in Aquinas’s epistemology
and philosophy of mind.18 Because Aquinas discusses the internal senses where phan-
tasms reside, it would be odd to omit the sensus communis if a phantasm did ‘reside’
with this internal sense. Moreover, it must be emphasized that one looks in vain for
passages in which Aquinas posits phantasms as the intentional object of the sensus
communis.19

The Sensus Communis and the External Sensorium

In order to resolve this quandary over historical interpretations of Aquinas on perception,
one must recall the distinction between ‘the external sense faculties’ and ‘the external
sensorium’. All along, Aquinas includes the sensus communis among his list of internal
senses. ‘So there is no need to assign more than four internal powers of the sensitive
part—namely, the sensus communis, the imagination, and the aestimativa (or the
vis cogitativa in human beings) and the memorativa powers’ (Summa Theologiae,

17
 Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 38.
18
  One must recall that in comparing the Summa Theologiae with the Commentary on the Soul, there is
a marked difference in the use of phantasia. In the Summa, ‘phantasia’ refers to the vis imaginativa, whereas
in the Commentary, ‘phantasia’ refers to the workings of the entire internal sensorium. In this chapter, the
Commentary will be followed and ‘phantasia’ will refer to the entire internal sensorium; i.e. the vis imagi-
nativa, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory.
19
  Earlier historians of philosophy like Hamlyn and Weinberg and later students of Aquinas like Kemp
and Pasnau have possibly confused the ‘sensible species’ with the phantasm. These two epistemological
concepts, however, are neither identical nor coextensive.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

282  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

Ia q. 87 a. 4).20 In De Veritate, Aquinas writes: ‘the organs of the power of imagination,
of memory, and of the vis cogitativa, are in the brain itself, which is the place of greatest
moistness in the human body.’
Aquinas places the sensus communis with the internal sense faculties because the
physiology he adopted, most probably from the Arabian philosophers, asserts that the
bodily organ or vehicle where the sensus communis is found is located somewhere in
the brain. With this physiological location, it could not be classified an external sense
organ. Structurally, however, the sensus communis is part of the external sensorium
because its object is the collection of proper and common sensibles that are the sensi-
ble objects of the external senses. Its object is not an image, phantasm, or any type of
post-sensation mental entity. The object of the sensus communis is a concrete whole
unified from the discrete data—the assorted collection of proper and common sensi-
bles of the external senses.
The division between internal and external sensoria, on the other hand, is deter-
mined by means of the function of the corresponding mental acts. The function of the
external sensorium is to be aware of the sensible qualities in the external world—
rooted in the primary substances of natural kinds—which are present immediately to
the perceiver in a causally efficacious way. These, of course, are the proper and com-
mon sensibles. If there were no sensible objects, then there would be no mental acts
with the external sensorium. The internal sensorium, on the other hand, has the ability
both to ‘remember’ what has been perceived and to ‘interpret’ what is presently experi-
enced. Both these functions go beyond the immediate data of the external sensorium.
What distinguishes the internal from the external sensorium is the presence of phan-
tasms. In other words, the role of phantasms is a necessary condition for inner sense
in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. However, a phantasm is never connected only with
the external sensorium. Kemp’s analysis entails placing the sensus communis with the
internal sensorium. If this were the case, then it follows that images or phantasms are
necessary conditions for the sensus communis. If the sensus communis did have a
phantasm as the direct object of its mental act, it would follow that Aquinas is a rep-
resentationalist. It appears that those historians of philosophy who suggest that a
phantasm is the direct object of the sensus communis fail to reconcile the ramifica-
tions of this consequent representationalism with Aquinas’s strong assertion of direct
realism and externalism. Furthermore, there do not appear to be any texts in which
Aquinas places a phantasm with a mental act of the sensus communis.
These two categories of sense and sensorium, noted earlier, are neither equivalent
nor coextensive.21 In other words, the external senses are not to be equated with the
external sensorium; neither are the internal senses to be equated with the internal sen-
sorium; the difference consists in the conceptual analysis of the sensus communis. The

20
  Aquinas notes that Avicenna held that there were five internal sense faculties.
21
  In his lecture notes on Aquinas and inner sense, Michael Stock rendered this distinction between
sense and sensorium: Psychologia (Dover, Mass.: St Stephen’s College, 1960). Stock’s work is one of the few
Aquinas studies where this distinction is discussed.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  283

sensus communis, although an internal sense, is part of the external sensorium and not
part of the internal sensorium.22 This claim separating the sensus communis from the
internal sensorium depends upon the placement of a phantasm. The internal sensorium
makes use of a phantasm in all three of its faculties. Insofar as the sensus communis
lacks a phantasm, then it cannot be a part of the internal sensorium or inner sense. To
conclude, the external sensorium has for objects of its act of awareness the various
proper and common sensibles. The internal sensorium, by means of phantasms, has
retentive and interpretive functions to perform. These mental acts of inner sense are
distinct structurally from the external sensorium. The phantasm, therefore, is the
critical epistemological entity grounding the distinction between the external and
the internal sensorium.

Aquinas’s Texts on Phantasm

In addition to the passages mentioned above, there are texts located in the Commentary
on the Soul, the Summa Theologiae, and the Summa Contra Gentiles, where Aquinas
argues that the phantasm is a ‘second movement’ whereas sensation is a ‘first movement’.
Classifying a phantasm as a movement distinct from sensation entails an inconsist-
ency if one claims that an awareness of phantasms is identical with or reducible to the
acts of awareness from the external sensorium. The following passages indicate that
phantasm awareness is necessarily distinct from, though dependent upon, the external
sensorium: ‘The phantasm is not the first but a second perfection, for the imagination
is a “movement” resulting from the exercise of a sense power’ (Summa Contra Gentiles,
bk II, ch. 73, no. 11); ‘[there is . . .] an affinity between the phantasia and the senses in
that the phantasia presupposes sensation and is found in sentient beings or animals’
(Commentary on the Soul, no. 657); ‘those animals have phantasia, in the precise sense
of phantasia, which retain an imprint of things even while they are not sensing ‘exteri-
orly’ things’ (no. 390). ‘The outer senses in the act of sensing are always truthful; they
cannot err about their proper object. But phantasms are very often deceptive, when
there is nothing real that corresponds to them. Therefore, the phantasia is distinct
from every sense in act’ (no. 645). And a final passage:
Aristotle distinguishes phantasia [. . .] first of all from sensation. [. . .] Regarding sensation,
he begins by proving that the phantasia is not one of the senses [i.e. not one of the exterior
senses], either potentially or actually. For phantasia is active during sleep. This cannot be
due to any sense as in potency, in which state [i.e. in sleep] the senses are aware of nothing
at all; nor to any sense as in act, for in sleep the senses are not in act. Thus, phantasms are
neither an [external] sense in potency nor an [external] sense in act. (Commentary on the
Soul, no. 641)

22
  Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4. In article 4, ‘Utrum Interiores Sensus Convenienter Distinguantur’, the
sensus communis is listed as one of the internal senses.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

284  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

Other texts assert much the same regarding the non-identity of phantasm knowing
and direct perception with the external sensorium: ‘Therefore, the phantasia is dis-
tinct from every sense in act’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 645). ‘The phantasia is a
movement resulting from an active exercise of a sense faculty’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 84 a. 6 ad 2).
This textual evidence establishes that two propositions follow concerning the relation
between the exercise of the external sensorium and the formation of phantasms:
(a) Sensations of the external sensorium are necessary conditions for the intentional
existence of any phantasm in the internal sensorium.
(b) Sensations from the external sensorium are distinct structurally from the
phantasms of the internal sensorium.
The passages above indicate that a phantasm, belonging to the internal sensorium,
(i.e. the imagination, vis cogitativa, or sense memory) is a constituent of a mental pro-
cess that follows from and depends upon sensation with the external sensorium.
However a phantasm is neither equivalent to nor coextensive with the external senso-
rium. What is important textually and significant philosophically about the above
passages is Aquinas’s claim that the phantasm is neither a sensation entity nor a sensa-
tion medium concurrent with a perceiver’s awareness of the external world by means
of the external sensorium alone. A phantasm, therefore, is neither concomitant with
nor coextensive with sensation. On the other hand, it results or is derived from the
mental acts of sensation. The following passage further substantiates the claim that
sensation awareness and phantasm-awareness are distinct and quite different species
of awareness: ‘[P]hantasms . . . dwell within in the absence of sensible objects, as traces of
actual sensations; therefore, just as sensations arouse appetitive impulses while the
sensed objects are present, so do phantasms when these are absent’ (Commentary on
the Soul no. 669; emphasis added).
In addition to passages indicating that the phantasm is not present in sensation,
Aquinas, in discussing the formation of the species intelligiblis with the intellectus
agens, considers the faculties that have phantasms. The phantasms serve as the object
of the ‘scanning’ by the intellectus agens. No reference to either the sensus communis or
to the external senses can be found: ‘By the vis cogitativa, together with the imagina-
tion and the sense memory, the phantasms are prepared to receive the action of the
intellectus agens’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, ch. 60, no. 1). ‘The disposition of the
vis cogitativa and the imagination are relative to the object, which is the phantasm.
Because of the well-developed character of these powers, the phantasm is prepared
in such a manner as to facilitate its being used to be made actually intelligible by the
process of abstraction characteristic of the intellectus agens’ (bk. II, ch. 73, no. 28).
A phantasm, accordingly, is never involved with the direct act of sensation with the
external sensorium alone. Insofar as a sense datum account of perception entails nec-
essarily that a sense datum has a relation with the external senses, it follows that a
phantasm cannot be reduced to a sense datum. Accordingly, a correct elucidation of
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  285

Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception entails that a sense datum interpretation
of a phantasm is both textually inconsistent and structurally inconsistent.

The Image Account: Position A

An analysis for such an illusive philosophy-of-mind entity as a phantasm, of course,
results in the construction of different and alternative accounts. One alternative inter-
pretation of the phantasm is as an image or imago. There are two categories, however,
for this image interpretation. The first position, ‘Position-A’, was developed by Sheehan
and also suggested by Kenny in an early essay.23 Both philosophers attempt a structural
account of the phantasm, which leads to equating the phantasm with an image pro-
duced during the process of direct awareness. This position, in effect, reduces Aquinas
to a representationalist. This is Sheehan’s purpose, as he indicates in the following
passage:
For it has become clear that if Aquinas’ doctrine is applied to our problem, then what makes
my thought one of this X rather than some other X (of this man or horse rather than some
other man or horse) is the fact that certain phantasms or images are somehow involved. This
account, however it is more fully filled out, would seem to be susceptible to the arguments
already brought forward against the image or symbol view.24

Throughout his analysis, Sheehan attempts to reduce Aquinas to a representationalist.

Since, in the beginning of his article, he argues in principle against representative views
of perception, it follows that if Aquinas’s theory of intentionality reduces to a representa-
tional account, then Sheehan’s philosophical refutation befalls Aquinas’s theory.
Kenny provides the following account of Position-A: ‘There are some passages in
which St. Thomas seems to suggest that whenever we see something we have at the
same time a phantasm of what we see.’25 This image position still holds sway in discus-
sions of Aquinas on perception. For example, Kemp adopts this position: ‘The images
produced in the common sense are stored in the imagination.’ He also writes: ‘in nor-
mal waking life the images that are presented to the common sense [. . .] arise from
perceiving the world [. . .].’26 Kemp refers several times to ‘images in the common sense’.
Gilson too places images in the sensus communis: ‘Let us suppose that subsequent to
the operations described above, a sensible body impressed its image in the common

23
  Peter Sheehan, ‘Aquinas on Intentionality’, in Kenny, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, 307–21;
Kenny: ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’.
24
  Sheehan, ‘Aquinas on Intentionality’, 320–21.
25
  Kenny, ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’, 294. Concerning the image position, Kenny remarks:
‘it is hard to be sure whether St. Thomas held it or not.’ However, Kenny suggests that the image position is
one possible interpretation of the nature of a phantasm.
26
  Simon Kemp, ‘The Inner Senses: A Medieval Theory of Cognitive Functioning in the Ventricles of the
Brain’, in Wolfgang G. Bringmann, Helmut E. Luck, Rudolf Miller, and Charles E. Early (eds), A Pictorial
History of Psychology (Chicago: Quintessence, 1997), 9. See also Simon Kemp (with Garth J. O. Fletcher),
‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, American Journal of Psychology 106(4) (1993), 559–76.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

286  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

sense.’ His discussion of the role of inner sense in Thomas is somewhat muddled.
In  addition, he defines a phantasm, like many neo-Thomist philosophers of the
mid-twentieth century, as an image: ‘What, indeed, is a phantasm? It is the image of a
particular thing: similitudo rei particularis. Still more accurately, phantasms are images
of particular things, impressed or preserved in corporeal organs.’27 It is unclear how
Gilson reconciled this placement of an image in the sensus communis with Aquinas’s
overall theory of direct realism and its dependent externalism. Furthermore, Pasnau,
in translation and commentary on Aquinas’s theory of human nature, appears to adopt
the same position. In an illustration of the internal senses, Pasnau holds that phantasms
belong to the sensus communis.28 In his Metaphysics of Mind, Kenny refers to phan-
tasms as ‘the images of inner vision’.29 However, Kenny remarks that Aquinas is far
from clear regarding an exact account of a phantasm. In his Aquinas on Mind, Kenny
writes: ‘it seems clear that [Aquinas] did not mean by “phantasm” simply a mental
image.’30 Furthermore, Kenny notes: ‘how much else is covered by the word (phan-
tasm) is difficult to determine.’31 In his ‘Intentionality: Aquinas and Wittgenstein’,
Kenny wrote: ‘it is not altogether clear what Aquinas means by phantasmata.’32 Given
this textual evidence, it is fair to say that Position-A is exemplified in the writings of
Sheehan and Kemp, and at times in Kenny and Pasnau, among others. These various
texts suggest further that while phantasm is an often-used term in the writings of
Aquinas, nonetheless the ‘logic’ of this concept is difficult to unravel. This chapter
attempts to unravel these conceptual muddles.
What the passages noted above suggest is that the awareness of a ‘complete whole’ by
the sensus communis is done by means of a phantasm. In other words, the ‘conjunction’
of discrete proper and common sensibles accomplished by the sensus communis pro-
duces a phantasm, which is the object of the awareness of the sensus communis itself. In
effect, this entails that the sensus communis has for its direct object a phantasm. These
commentators construe the phantasm as a necessary condition in direct perception
involving the external senses. They conclude that a phantasm is either produced in
the external senses or else is the ‘synthesis’ produced by the sensus communis from
the  discrete data—the proper and common sensibles—from the external senses.
Accordingly, the phantasm is the direct object of the mental act of sensation.

The Image Account: Position B

The second version of an ‘image’ position for a phantasm, which shall be called
‘Position-B’, argues that a phantasm is an image. However, the image is only found
within and employed by the internal sensorium. In contrast to Position-A, the phantasm

27
  E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Herder, 1939), 217.
28
 Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 281.
29
 Kenny, Metaphysics of Mind, 90.   30 Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 38.   31  Ibid., 93.
32
  Kenny, ‘Intentionality: Aquinas and Wittgenstein’, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  287

is not a constituent component of the process of direct sensation. Many commentators

in the scholastic tradition have argued for this position. The following definition is
found in the glossary of volume 12 of the Blackfriars English translation of the Summa
Theologiae: ‘Sense images [phantasmata], material likenesses of material things [ . . . ]
the products of the three internal senses, often the result of a synthesizing process.’33 In
considering phantasms, Copleston once offered the following ‘image’ account: ‘The
phantasm, or image, which arises in the imagination and which represents the particu-
lar material object perceived by the senses, is itself particular [. . . and . . .] the interior
images or phantasms of men or trees are always particular.’34 Furthermore, the
neo-scholastic manual author Gredt defined a phantasm simply as an ‘imago rei in
phantasia existens’.35 In ‘Phantasia in the Philosophy of Aristotle’, Philippe adopted a
position similar to that of Gredt: ‘The imagination produces an image, a phantasm.
This image exists only for and in this act; it does not exist previously.’36 Peifer seems
to concur with this interpretation: ‘With the exception of the sensus communis, the rest
of the internal senses have not only impressed species, but they also produce an
expressed species or image, called by the general name of “phantasm”. ’37 In his analysis
of Aquinas’s epistemology, Preller also identified the phantasm with an image: ‘I shall
use the terms “mental image” and “phantasm” interchangeably.’38 Martin writes: ‘we
are able to make up out of the diverse information coming from the senses a sense
image (phantasma) of what is sensed.’39 Pasnau writes:
Phantasms, for Aquinas, are the images or representations produced by phantasia (imagination).
Phantasia is a sensory power that uses a corporeal organ (the brain); consequently, phantasms
represent particular remembered or imagined sensory experiences. Such phantasms, as Aquinas
indicates here, are the basis for intellective cognition.40

Pasnau, like many commentators on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, neglects the fact
that Aquinas appears to have two uses of phantasia: (a) the position in the Summa
Theologiae that identifies the phantasia with the imagination; (b) the alternative posi-
tion in the Commentary on the Soul in which he appears to use phantasia as a general
umbrella category covering all three faculties of the internal sensorium.

33
 ‘Human Intelligence’, Summa Theologiae vol. 12 (I qq. 84–9), trans. Paul Durbin (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 145; Durbin’s appendices are excellent.
34
  Frederick C. Copleston, SJ, History of Philosophy, vol. 2, pt 2 (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1962), 109.
35
  Josephus Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae Aristelico-Thomisticae (Barcelona: Herder, 1961), 418, para. 497.
36
  M.-D. Philippe, ‘Phantasia in the Philosophy of Aristotle’, The Thomist 35(1) ( 1971), 24.
37
  J. F. Peifer, The Mystery of Knowledge (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1964), 107.
38
  Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 40.
39
  Christopher Martin, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Introductory Readings (London: Routledge,
1988), 118. Moreover, nearly every definition of phantasm as rendered by a commentator on Aquinas’s
epistemology found in the Intelex Past Masters CD-ROM of the Omnia Opera of Thomas suggests that a
phantasm is an image.
40
  Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1999), 14.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

288  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

Position-B does not claim, it must be emphasized, that a phantasm is an intentional

component of direct sensation. Thus, Position-B is not an affirmation of Cartesian
indirect realism, representationalism, or any other tertium quid interpretation.
Position-B does not entail internalism. Rather, a phantasm is a mental image, which is
the product of the internal senses of the internal sensorium. Part of the Position-B
interpretation, it should be noted, will be accepted as a correct analysis of phantasm.
A phantasm, however, is not necessarily a ‘sense image’. In other words, it is a sufficient
condition that a phantasm is a sense image, but it is not a necessary condition for a
phantasm’s existence that it be a sense image. Hence, a phantasm is neither coextensive
nor identical with a sense image.
In considering the phantasm as an image, therefore, there are two philosophy-of-mind
interpretations. Of these two positions, one is acceptable in part while the other
should be rejected completely. Position-A destroys the direct realism of Aquinas’s
epistemology. It asserts that a phantasm is some type of image within which a per-
ceiver is aware during his mental acts of the external senses. Position-B asserts that
the phantasm is an image in which a perceiver undertakes either of the two following
kinds of mental acts:
(a) A perceiver reflects on some object of past experience—as when I think about
my deceased Aunt Milly and her wonderful sense of humour.
(b) A perceiver constructs a complex image of something never perceived per se—
as when I think about Hume’s ‘golden mountain’ or a ‘beer garden’ in Westerville.41
Position-A and Position-B, therefore, are neither identical nor coextensive. Moreover,
neither is reducible to the other. Although Position-A entails Position-B, Position-B can
stand alone and is not dependent upon Position-A. In other words, a direct realist can
claim that there is a creative ability and a memorative ability to inner sense without
being a representationalist in direct sensation. On the other hand, if one is a represent-
ative realist in direct sensation, then any functioning of the internal senses necessarily
follows from that representationalism function. If an image is a necessary condition for
direct sensation, it follows that it will be a necessary condition for the proper functioning
of the imagination and memory. Obviously, representationalism blurs fundamentally
the distinction between the external and the internal senses. This is apparent from several
passages from early modern philosophers. In such a theory, the problem of connecting
the image of direct perception with the physical object is critical.42
However, if one were to elucidate a phantasm in terms of Position-A, in order to sub-
stantiate this interpretation, tremendous textual difficulties would arise immediately.

41
  Bear in mind that Westerville, Ohio, was what American midwesterners called a ‘dry town’. Another
example of this intentional process is a recent advertisement for a well-known brand of Scotch suggesting
that ‘Imagination cannot be confined’!
42
  Reading Descartes’s Sixth Meditation or the last section of Moore’s ‘A Defence of Common Sense’
indicates that such attempts can be futile. Furthermore, in contemporary discussions, Putnam, Ross, and
McDowell have criticized this tertium quid account of perception.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  289

Position-A is untenable as an adequate elucidation of a phantasm for the following two

reasons:
(a) As noted earlier, Aquinas provides an account of representationalism and
rejects it.
(b) Position-A must be considered in view of the passages in which Aquinas
denies explicitly that a phantasm is connected with direct sensation.
However, it has already been established that:
(a) Aquinas does not drive an ontological wedge between the mental act of sensa-
tion and its physical object.
(b) The phantasm is not a part of the process utilizing the external sensorium.

Aquinas and the Concept of ‘Imago’

Translators often render phantasmata into English as ‘image’.43 Textually, however, as
far as research into this topic has been able to determine, Aquinas does not use the
Latin term imago when developing discussions in the philosophy of mind elucidating
his own theory. Aquinas, however, had the term imago in his philosophical lexicon.
When discussing Democritus’s position in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, quoting
Augustine and Aristotle, does use imago in one text and then idolum in the next:
Democritus enim posuit quod ‘nulla est alia causa cuiuslibet nostrae cogitationis, nisi cum ab
his corporibus quae cogitamus veniunt atque intrant imagines in animas nostras’, ut Augustinus
dicit. Et Aristotles etiam dicit quod Democritus posuit cogitationes fiere ‘per idola et deflux-
iones’. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 6)44

Theoretically Democritus, like all atomists, is a representative realist. Both imago and
idolum are suitable objects for an atomist perception theory.
Beyond the limits of his strictly epistemological and philosophy of mind discussions,
however, Aquinas does make use of the term imago. Imago is found in several theolog-
ical discussions in the Summa Theologiae. In this case, Aquinas offers an interpretation
of how human beings are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’: ‘Ergo, imago in
divines relative dicitur’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 35 a. 1, sed contra). The structural anal-
ysis of imago is connected directly with an ontological representation. If Aquinas had
chosen imago to be the object of perception, then given the logic of imago, he would be
a representationalist. Necessarily an imago is a derived entity, which will become clear
as this analysis unfolds. This elucidation does not pretend to deny, as noted earlier,

43
  In vols 1 and 12 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae, Suttor and Durbin translate
‘phantasmata’ as ‘images’: Summa Theologiae (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964, 1976).
44
  According to Augustine, Democritus held: ‘There is no other cause for knowledge than from the fact
that images come into our souls from the bodies about which we think.’ Aristotle also says that Democritus
held that knowledge comes about by means of images and emanations.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

290  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

that, when reading various English translations of Aquinas’s different treatises on

knowledge and mind, one discovers that the term ‘image’ frequently occurs. In the
Summa Theologiae, however, often this is a translation for the Latin term similitudo.
Furthermore, the Latin term idolum occurs at least twice in epistemological discus-
sions. Different translators often render idolum into English as ‘image’. The point
remains, however, that even though the English term ‘image’ occurs often in different
English translations of Aquinas’s epistemological texts and discussions in the philoso-
phy of mind, this is the translator’s preference for phantasmata, similitudo, or idolum
and possibly other terms too. Research undertaken into this topic suggests that the
Latin term imago is distinctly absent from any of the texts in which Aquinas elucidates
his own theory of sensation and perception.
More importantly, there appears to be no textual evidence that Aquinas defined a
phantasm as an imago. Contrary to Kenny’s suggestion, texts in which Aquinas writes
that a phantasm is an image in the Cartesian sense are difficult to find. For example, in
the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas defines the phantasm in the following manner: ‘the
phantasm is the likeness of an individual thing’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 7 ad 2).
Furthermore, the term translated here as likeness is similitudo and not imago. The term
similitudo occurs frequently in Aquinas’s texts and several translators have rendered
similitudo into English as image. However, this is nothing but a translator’s interpreta-
tive preference. This English rendition has no textual basis in the Latin work. The point
of this discussion is that when developing his own position on sensation and percep-
tion, Aquinas never uses the term imago. Moreover, this omission on his part is not
accidental. Quite the contrary, there are significant structural differences between the
analysis of a similitudo and the analysis of an imago. It is to a careful elucidation of
these structural differences that this chapter now turns.
That Aquinas definitely had the term imago in his philosophical lexicon is not diffi-
cult to establish; its use is evident in the Summa Theologiae. In the following passage,
he describes the function of an imago:
The idea of image includes likeness. Not any kind of likeness, however, suffices for elucidating
the nature of an image, but only likenesses of a species, or at least of some specific sign. In
corporeal things, the specific sign seems to be especially the figure. For we see that the species
of different animals are of different figures, but not of different colors. Hence if the color of
anything is depicted on a wall, this is not called an image unless the figure is likewise depicted.
But neither the likeness of species nor that of figure is enough for an image for it requires also
the idea of origin; because, as Augustine has claimed, ‘One egg is not the image of another,
because it is not derived from it’. Thus, for a true and adequate image, it is necessary the one
thing proceeds from another like it in species, or at least in specific sign. (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 35 a. 1; empasis added)

Aquinas continues: ‘Image, properly speaking, means whatever proceeds forth in

­likeness to another. That from which something proceeds and to which it is a likeness
is called the “exemplar” ’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 35 a. 1 ad 1). In the succeeding article
in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas makes the following twofold distinction: ‘An image
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  291

of a thing may be found in something in two ways. In one way, it is found in something
of the same specific nature; for example, the image of a king is found in his son. In
another way, it is found in something of a different nature, as, for example, the image of
the king is found on a coin’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 35 a. 2 ad 3.
These rather lengthy passages are included because it is important, first of all, to
demonstrate unequivocally that Aquinas possessed the term imago in his philosophi-
cal vocabulary. Secondly, it is necessary to spell out conceptually the structural and
logical differences between imago and similitudo. The logic of each concept is impor-
tant. Not only is the first claim self-evident upon reading the above passages, but it is
important to realize that Aquinas did not use the term imago just once or twice. On the
contrary, he wrote two articles about the structure of images, under the title De
Imagine, in question 35 of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. Therefore, if he had
need to utilize the term imago when referring to direct perception involving the external
sensorium, he could easily have made that choice. The term and its unique meaning were
at his disposal. Given Aquinas’s customary cautious care in using appropriate language in
philosophical discussions, that he did not use imago is not without significance.
The above texts indicate, it would appear, that in Aquinas’s ontology and philosophy
of mind, imago has a unique function. This function is as a derivative entity dependent
upon another entity. Although an imago is a derived entity, it is still a separate entity
distinct from the entity of its origin. This is brought out explicitly in the second passage
quoted above from the Summa Theologiae. There Aquinas refers to the ontological
entity from which an image proceeds as an ‘exemplar’. The image itself, which is the
likeness/similitudo derived from the exemplar, is an ontological entity in its own right.
An imago is necessarily a similitudo, but a similitudo need not be an imago. In order for
representationalism—Position-A above—to hold in Aquinas’s theory of perception,
every similitudo, which is a phantasm, must necessarily be an imago.45 Aquinas, how-
ever, neither articulates nor defends this position. Beyond the actual appearance of
this term in his texts, one must realize the ontological function of an imago. In effect,
his position on the nature of imago is coextensive with Descartes’s account on the pre-
cise epistemological import of an image. An imago is an additional entity, which not
only resembles the original as a similitudo but is necessarily derived from the original
entity. The logical structure of ‘being derived’ is a necessary condition for an imago. In
any discussion of an image, therefore, it is a necessary condition that there are two
entities under analysis: the image or copy itself—the imago; and the thing from which
the image or copy originates—what Aquinas refers to as the exemplar. An imago is not
only a similitudo. Rather, it is a similitudo, which necessarily is derived from an origi-
nating principle and which exists, in the philosophy of mind, as an additional, separate
intentional entity. Obviously, this is important for the present discussion. If Aquinas
had intended to be a representationalist and not an epistemological realist, he could
easily have used imago when referring to the direct object of sense perception. An

45
 ‘ipsum phantasma est similitudo rei particularis’: Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

292  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

imago in intentionality would be a separate intentional entity—a tertium quid—whose

existence depends upon a set of causal factors in the external world. An imago is an
entity separate from and uniquely distinct from the causal factors. Aquinas, to the con-
trary, never uses the term imago when discussing his own theory of sensation and per-
ception. It is obvious, however, that when analysing sensation and perception, he could
have used this term if it expressed what he meant to convey. The result of this analysis
suggests that, for Aquinas, there is no distinct tertium quid entity in sensation or per-
ception. A phantasm can function as an image, when it is the direct object of the vis
imaginativa—the ‘golden mountain’ or ‘leprechaun’ examples; nonetheless, research
undertaken for this project has not discovered any text where a phantasm is equated
with an imago. The point remains, nonetheless, that Aquinas did have the term imago
in his philosophical lexicon.
A similitudo used in direct perception functions as an ‘intentional modification’
(esse intentionale) of a sense faculty and never as a distinct, separate intentional entity.
Aquinas does use the term similitudo when discussing direct sensation. However, this
is to be taken as a species impressa, if one uses the terminology of John of St Thomas; a
species impressa is that by means of which the sense faculty is rendered able to be aware
of a proper or common sensible. The species impressa, however, is not the direct object
of knowledge itself. In other words, the species impressa is not what is perceived (the id
quod) but rather that by which or the means by which (the a quo) the sense faculty is
rendered disposed to perceive.46
This analysis concerning the function of imago is important in illustrating why
Aquinas purposefully did not use this term when he developed the intentionality of
sense perception. However, when discussing sensation and perception, there are
important structural reasons for his not using imago. The burden of proof for any claim
of representationalism in Aquinas’s theory of perception, therefore, is placed on the
one making this claim. This claim of indirect realism, however, must take into consid-
eration the texts in which Aquinas defines the nature of an imago. Furthermore, if one
places him in the camp of representationalists, then one must argue successfully why
he did not utilize imago in explicating his epistemology and philosophy of mind,
because this concept is tailor-made for elucidating a position of representative realism.
In effect, an imago in sensation theory destroys Aquinas’s epistemological realism and
his externalism.
In the next section, the point will be made that Aquinas uses similitudo in discuss-
ing both sensation exercise and phantasm formation. Nonetheless, this intentional
use of similitudo is neither identical nor coextensive with the use of similitudo Aquinas
spoke about in the passages elucidating the nature of an imago. A similitudo as imago
is necessarily a separately existing intentional entity—a tertium quid—whereas the

46
 The epistemological structure of the species impressa is discussed later. See John N. Deely, New
Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1994), 133–4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  293

similitudo used in sensation does not entail this separate intentional existence as an
intermediary entity.

The Three Categories of Similitudo

In discussing the mental acts both of sensation with the external sensorium and of
phantasm formation with the internal sensorium, Aquinas frequently uses ‘similitudo’.
As noted above, this term is used in one definition of phantasm: ‘dicendum quod etiam
ipsum phantasma est similitudo rei particularis’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 84 a. 2). In
order to be understood successfully, the concept of similitudo, like the concept of
phantasm itself, requires careful elucidation. In her Aquinas, Stump is one of the
few commentators on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind who expresses any theoretical
concern about the concept of similitudo: ‘The Latin “similitudo” is commonly trans-
lated as “likeness,” and this translation has given some readers the impression that a
similitude pictorially resembles the thing of which it is a similitude.’47 She goes on to
suggest: ‘But this is at best a very misleading impression.’ She offers the significant
insight that in some way a similitudo is ‘an agreement in or sharing of forms’. Aquinas
writes: ‘There is a similitudo between two things insofar as there is agreement in form’
(De Veritate, q. 8 a. 8). In the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas devotes an
entire article in question 3 on the concept of similitudo and how creatures are like God.
This entire article will not be considered here, but its opening sentence is important for
this discussion. ‘Since similitudo is based upon agreement or communication in form,
similitudo varies according to the many modes of communication in form’ (Summa
Theologiae, Ia q. 4 a. 3). Stump’s development of this theme is important in understand-
ing the nature of a similitudo; but she does not go far enough in her analysis of this
important concept.
In addition to the above definition, the following texts denote a reference to
‘likeness’ or ‘similitudo’. ‘However, phantasms are likenesses of individuals and exist
in bodily organs of sense’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 1 ad 3). ‘Thus, material things
must be understood insofar as they are abstracted from material likenesses, that is,
phantasms’ (I q. 85 a. 1). In these passages, the phantasm is used as a kind of likeness or
resemblance originating from an individual, material object in the external world.
Insofar as this would be an image, it would refer partially to Position-B. The likeness is
a composite resemblance of the individual thing, which has been sensed. In effect,
structurally this use of likeness as a phantasm would be a ‘residue’ of the unified com-
posite whole sensed by the sensus communis from the discrete data received from the
external senses. The precise analysis of ‘residue’ will occur later where it refers to a
‘retaining’ of the content of a direct awareness by the external sensorium. This residue,
however, is not an object of direct awareness by means of the external sensorium.

47
 Stump, Aquinas, 255.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

294  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

This use of likeness as phantasm, however, is not the only use of the term found in
the writings of Aquinas. The following passages indicate a new twist given to the very
same term: ‘Hence that by which the sight sees is the likeness of the visible thing. [ . . . ]
The likeness of a sensible thing is the form of the sense in act’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 85 a. 2). ‘However, the sensible species or likeness is not what is perceived, but rather
that by which the sense perceives’ (I q. 85 a. 2, sed contra; emphasis added).
In these passages, Aquinas uses likeness, or sensible species, in reference to direct
sensation. It is correct that a sensible species48 is the immaterial likeness of an immedi-
ate datum of sensation; accordingly, a red or a square, or any other of the proper or
common sensibles, is a likeness obtained in direct sensation. If the previous discussion
of the phantasm is correct—i.e. a phantasm is never found during the functioning of
the external sensorium alone—then this likeness which occurs during direct percep-
tion must be different from the likeness that Aquinas used in considering phantasms.
A phantasm, it has been established, is never utilized during direct sensation.
Accordingly, there must be at least two different senses of likeness at work in Aquinas’s
theory of sensation and perception.
There is, however, one more example of likeness/similitudo, which should be
considered albeit briefly. Aquinas also uses likeness in discussing concept formation.49
However, since he employs the term similitudo in that discussion, it is appropriate
to consider this additional function for similitudo in Aquinas’s theory of knowledge.
The following texts illustrate Aquinas’s use of likeness in considering the process of
‘understanding’: ‘The likeness through which we understand is the species [like-
ness] of the thing known in the knower’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 8 ad 3); the
Latin text is very clear on this use of similitudo: ‘conceptio intellectus est similitudo
rei intellectus’ (I q. 27 a. 2). In this discussion two different philosophical categories
are being treated: the intelligible species and the concept, which later scholastics
refer to as the species expressa—sometimes referred to as the ‘verbum mentis’—in
the intellectus possibilis. In this respect, Aquinas suggests that the intellectual spe-
cies is that by means of which a knower is able to have intellectual or conceptual
knowledge. To use medieval terminology, this use of likeness is the means by which
a knower is aware of essences or attains to a knowledge of a quidditas. It is the ‘a quo’
through which intellectual awareness takes place. John of St Thomas refers to this as
an ‘intellectual’ species impressa. It is a means by which a person knows a concept,
not the intentional object of the concept itself.
In light of the above textual evidence, it appears that Aquinas has three distinct and
different uses of similitudo. This set can be delineated in the following way: Likeness-1,
Likeness-2, and Likeness-3. Textually, Aquinas himself appears not to have distin-
guished these various uses. John of St Thomas (Poinsot) introduced the terms ‘species

48
  ‘Sensible species’ is being used here, referring to the terminology of John of St. Thomas (Poinsot),
to  mean a ‘species impressa’. The sense organ and the sense faculty distinction is important in direct
sensation.
49
  A detailed analysis of concept formation is beyond the bounds of this present inquiry.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  295

impressa’ and ‘species expressa’.50 Although helpful, these distinctions of John of

St Thomas, which have been adopted generally by latter-day scholastic philosophers,
alone do not offer a complete explanatory account of likeness. This point should
become clear as this discussion unfolds.
Likeness-1 is the actual disposition of the sense faculty following from the efficient
and formal causal influence of the sensible quality as an active causal power on the
sense organ, which is received from the sensible object in the external world. This
disposition makes the sense faculty of sight, for example, ready and able to perceive
‘red’ rather than ‘purple’. This uses of Likeness-1 entails that it is a means or necessary
condition for sensation.51 Likeness-1, however, is not the object of sensation. Therefore,
Likeness-1 is not an imago as used in Cartesian epistemology, nor a sense datum as
used in early twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
Likeness-2 is the ‘remnant’ or ‘residue’ of the actual sensation that occurs by means
of the external sensorium. It will be analysed in terms of the necessary conditions of
perception for the external sensorium. Generally speaking, Likeness-2 is what one
might common-sensibly refer to as ‘experience’, as when one distinguishes the sea-
soned veteran from the rookie in that the former has more ‘know-how’ than the latter.
This sense of likeness is an important aspect for what the next chapter suggests is the
correct analysis of phantasm. Likeness-2, when phantasms are considered directly, will
be sub-divided further into Phantasm-1, Phantasm-2, and Phantasm-3.
Likeness-3 is the intellectual species, which is the ability or means to possess intellec-
tual knowledge and thus form concepts in the intellectus possibilis as expressed in
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind by having a ‘conceptus’. In the Commentary on the Soul,
Likeness-3 is what Aquinas refers to as an acquired intellectual disposition. One prob-
ably needs to make a further distinction regarding Likeness-3. Likeness-3a is the deter-
mination of the intellectus agens through the process of abstraction by means of which
the species intelligibilis is made. Likeness-3b is the similitudo that is the conceptus in the
intellectus possibilis, which is the means by which one understands the essence existing
in the primary substance of a natural kind. Furthermore, Likeness-3b is what Geach,
in Mental Acts, referred to as a ‘capacity’ or ‘disposition’.52 A dispositional property is
Geach’s analysis of an acquired concept. To put the matter differently, this ‘acquired

50
  Although the terms species impressa and species expressa are commonly attributed to the writings of
Aquinas, it is difficult to discover these exact terms in any text of Aquinas. However, they are found often
in the writings of John of St Thomas. Cf. Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus ‘Philosophia Naturalis’, IV q. 11
a. 1, p. 362.
51
  In the analysis of sensation via the external sensorium considered earlier, a necessary triadic relation
was introduced for sensation; in schematic notation [NC (O-M-F)] refers to the necessary conditions of
every mental act of sensation by the external sensorium. These conditions, it will be recalled, are: (a) an
object in the external world, (b) an adequate medium, and (c) a properly disposed sense organ and faculty.
The sense faculty is dependent on the disposed sense organ. ‘Likeness-1’ refers to the ‘F’ in the schematic
notation. Likeness-1 is the disposed faculty dependent on the sense organ, which is ‘able to perceive’ when
joined with the other two necessary terms of the triadic relation. It must be emphasized that Likeness-1 is
never a tertium quid.
52
  Peter Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 11–18, 33–8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

296  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

intellectual disposition’ or Likeness-3b is what Geach understood to be Aquinas’s ana­

lysis of ‘having a concept’; this would be an example of Disposition-II/Act-I.
Likeness-3b is that by means of which humans know the essence or natural kind or the
set of sortal properties of an individual primary substance.53
One further comment must be made concerning Likeness-2. To illustrate this point,
one must consider again the following passage from the Summa Theologiae:
In a human person’s sensitive knowledge, there are two operations. One is limited to immuta-
tion. This operation of the senses occurs when the sensible object in the external world
impresses the senses. The other operation is formation. The imagination, for example, forms for
itself an image of an object, which is absent, or even of an object, which was never seen before.
(Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a. 2 ad 3; emphasis added)

The first operation, what Aquinas refers to as ‘immutation’, is Likeness-1. This is the
likeness formed in the sense faculty by the causally efficacious sensible object outside
of the mind. This likeness is what renders the faculty disposed for sensation of a
specific proper or common sensible. The second operation, what Aquinas refers to as
‘formation’ in the above passage, forms an image (imago or indolum) or species expressa:
e.g. ‘Pegasus’ or ‘golden mountain’. This analysis argues that this formed image, however,
is not per se the phantasm either. This image is a sufficient condition for the existence
of a phantasm but it is not a necessary condition. It is interesting to note that the text
considered here uses the Latin term idolum, and not similitudo. Accordingly, idolum is
the result of the creative capacity of the vis imaginativa.
The next chapter, when considering the logic of phantasm as a Likeness-2, will note
four aspects that are included under the concept of ‘phantasm’:
(a) the idolum itself;
(b) the sensible material content—i.e. the residue—from sensation from which the
vis imaginativa creatively forms an idolum;
(c) a structured awareness of an individual by means of the vis cogitativa;
(d) the sensible material content stored in the vis memorativa from the vis cog-
itativa and that from which the intellectus agens abstracts or ‘makes’ a species
intelligibilis.
Structurally, (a) and (d) above are quite similar. Their difference consists in
­ ifferent inner knowing faculties operating on a ‘residue’. In the first case, the vis
d
imaginativa is active on the residue from the sensus communis and stored in the
imaginatio; in the second case, the intellectus agens is active on the residue from
the vis cogitativa and stored in the vis memorativa. The next chapter distinguishes
the different uses of phantasm in some detail. In effect, however, any view that
reduces a phantasm merely to an image alone is not an adequate structural analysis
of Aquinas’s theory of mind. Likewise, any reductive or eliminative attempt to render

53
  I am much indebted to James South for indicating a muddle on ‘intellectual species’ and ‘concept’ in
an earlier draft of this chapter.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)  297

phantasms into sense data is inconsistent textually and structurally with Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind.

appendix
The Phantasm in Modern and Contemporary
Philosophy
In contrast to the above discussion and analysis, various commentators on Aquinas’s theory of
perception have suggested that the sensus communis is the faculty by which a phantasm is
formed. Consider the following passage from Weinberg:
An object external to the human organism causes the medium between the object and the sense organ to
have duplicates of the forms of the object. In turn, the medium communicates forms to the sense organs
and thence to the faculties of sense. These various forms thus received are brought together by the internal
sense into a common image or phantasm.54

This interpretation is the result of a conceptual blurring of the distinction between the sensus
communis and the vis imaginativa. This blurring, moreover, is found in the philosophical
writings of several early modern philosophers. In Leviathan, Hobbes, for example, has the
following to say: ‘All qualities, called sensible, are in the object that causes them as so many
several motions of the matter, by which it presses against our organs diversely [. . .] But their
appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking that dreaming’ (Leviathan, pt 2, ch. 1). Hobbes used
‘Fancy’ as an English derivative from phantasia. Gilson, moreover, appropriates the term ‘fancy’
in discussing the role of the vis imaginativa: ‘The power to preserve is called fancy or
imagination.’55 It is interesting philosophically to note that in the passage from Hobbes, the
‘Fancy’ is the identical faculty, which is directly aware of both sensations from the external world
and images perceived during a dream: ‘their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking that
dreaming’. Hobbes assigns identical perceptual functions to two internal senses that Aquinas
kept distinct and separate regarding function. This separation of function in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind requires not assigning a phantasm to the sensus communis. If this distinction
between these two internal sense faculties is denied, then it is easy to have a phantasm become
the object of both imagination (Fancy) and sensus communis. This structural blurring of these
two faculties leads directly to indirect realism and representationalism. The phantasm becomes
the tertium quid, which is the direct object of knowledge in the sensus  communis. While Suárez
may have held this position on the epistemological placement of the phantasm, Aquinas did not.
To render a phantasm the direct object of the sensus communis in Aquinas is to render Aquinas’s
theory into the account possibly put forward by Suarez.
Hobbes certainly is not alone in this conflation of internal sense faculties. In the Second
Meditation, Descartes, like one interpretation of Suárez, confounds the same two epistemological
powers: ‘I knew it by means of the external senses themselves, or, at all events, by the common
sense [sensus communis], as it is called, that is, by the imaginative faculty’ (Meditation II;
emphasis added). In explicating his famous ‘wax example’, in the Latin text, Descartes uses the

54
  J. R. Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1964), 207.
55
 Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 205.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

298  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (1)

term ‘sensus communis’. Furthermore, the identification of the sensus communis with the vis
imaginativa is unequivocally stated. While the structural history of this conflation of internal
sense faculties is no doubt complex, nonetheless it seems that by the seventeenth century, the
precise and functional distinction between the sensus communis and the vis imaginativa, which
Aquinas maintained but which Suárez may have and Descartes most certainly conflated,
had become blurred. Moreover, this structural identity of faculties and functions can account
for the claim that the phantasm is the direct object of knowledge. This claim is found in
commentators like Hamlyn, the early Kenny, and Weinberg. One suspects, as noted in
Chapter  9, that a root cause for this interpretation of Aquinas is using seventeenth-century
accounts of epistemological powers while working with thirteenth-century texts. That the
direct object of knowledge was a phantasm for some seventeenth-century philosophers is
stated clearly, for instance, in the following passage from Locke’s Essay: ‘“idea” [. . .] is that term
which [. . .] I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species [. . .].’56
Furthermore, these claims are connected directly with representationalism. Historically,
representative realism came to prominence in epistemological discussions with the rise of the
‘new science’ and its corresponding mechanism. Several medieval Arabian and Christian
philosophers, noted earlier, did conflate the distinction between the sensus communis and the
phantasia. Aquinas did not, however. Structurally, if one adopts a faculty psychology based upon
the medieval epistemologies, then an identification of the sensus communis and the vis imaginativa
is a necessary condition for establishing representationalism and denying epistemological realism
and externalism. If the direct object of perception is to be an image, an obvious way to account
for this epistemological demand is to have the inner sense that is associated with images now
become responsible structurally and logically for direct sensation without losing its need for
images. The identification of the sensus communis and the vis imaginativa serves this need
admirably.57 Suárez possibly adopted an ‘image position’ for his account of phantasm. Deely notes
that in regard to the ‘ontological status of sense qualities’, Suárez held that ‘the qualities are images
formed by the mind under the influence of things and known as such’.58 Deely suggests that
Suárez’s position, as developed in his 1597 work Dispositiones Metaphysicae, ‘became the standard
one for Descartes and Locke’. If Deely is correct in this analysis, then it follows that Suárez’s
position greatly influenced early modern philosophy. Accordingly to Deely, Suárez’s account of
phantasm is opposed diametrically to that proposed by Aquinas. South, among others, rejects
this tertium quid analysis of Suárez on sensation and perception.
Accordingly, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes—and possibly Suárez—were not using the
categories found in the writings of Aquinas, and in those of several of his successors, as Aquinas
himself had used them. Furthermore, a misinterpretation of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind
results from transferring an elucidation of terminology and function from the theories of mind
proposed by the early modern philosophers to the philosophy of mind of Aquinas. Such an
appropriation of a conceptual analysis from a later period of philosophy renders plausible the
interpretation of a phantasm as a sense datum. To demonstrate that this is a mistaken, albeit
moderately prevalent, interpretation is one aim of this chapter.

56
  John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, introduction.
57
  South suggests that this identification of ‘sensus communis’ with ‘imaginative faculty’ in Descartes is
because, like Suárez, Descartes thinks that there is only one faculty of internal sense.
58
 Deely, New Beginnings, 130; these distinctions were used earlier in this book.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

12
The Role of Phantasms
in Inner Sense
Part 2

The preceding chapter was a propaedeutic exercise leading up to an in-depth discussion

of the nature and logic of the concept of phantasm as used in Aquinas’s theory of sensa-
tion and perception. This chapter begins the somewhat laborious task of elucidating
this concept. Once again, textual reference is a significant scholarly lode in this analysis.
A listing of texts alone, however, is not a sufficient condition for beginning this project.
This chapter undertakes the process of ‘reconstructing’ the nature and ‘logic’ of a
phantasm, which is justified textually and verified consistently within the writings
of Aquinas.

Phantasms
Having considered what a phantasm is not, next on the agenda is to propose a
reconstructive analysis for the logic of this crucial yet highly nebulous epistemological
concept. This conceptual elucidation dwells heavily on the previous discussions con-
cerning phantasms as well as on some important passages from the Commentary on
the Soul. Recall the following text:
Aristotle explains that the actions and passions of animals are governed by the phantasia.
Phantasms dwell within the absence of sensible objects as traces of actual sensations. Thus, just as
sensations arouse impulses of desire when a sensible object is present, so too do phantasms
when these sensible objects are absent from direct perception. (Commentary On The Soul,
no. 669; emphasis added)

In analysing this passage, attention needs to be focused on the following words: ‘phan-
tasms [. . .] dwell within as traces of actual sensations.’ This analysis proposes that the
term ‘phantasm’ refers to three different aspects of a process of ‘dwelling within’ in the
internal sensorium:
(a) Phantasm-1 is connected with the imagination—i.e. the vis imaginativa.
(b) Phantasm-2 is connected with the vis cogitativa.
(c) Phantasm-3 is connected with the sense memory—i.e. the vis memorativa.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

300  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

This is consistent with the proposition noted earlier that the sense faculties of the
internal sensorium are the only faculties to which phantasms belong: ‘the powers in
which the phantasms reside [. . . are . . .] imagination, sense memory, and vis cogitativa’
(Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, no. 73). The Latin is: ‘sed a virtutibus in quibus sunt
phantasmata, scilicet imaginativa, memorativa et cogitativa.’ All three divisions of
phantasm, moreover, are grouped under the category of Likeness-2 as elucidated in the
preceding chapter.1

Phantasm-1
The functioning of the external sensorium is a necessary but not a sufficient condition
for the intentional existence of each type of phantasm. An earlier chapter suggested
that the most perspicuous way to characterize Aquinas’s theory of sensation is by
means of a three-term necessary relation. This necessary triadic relation has for
its terms the following: (a) the disposed sense organ and faculty; (b) an adequate
medium; and (c) a proper or common sensible existing as an active causal factor in
the external world.
In order for perception to occur within the external sensorium, a referent for each of
these terms is necessary. For example, in order for sensation to occur with the mental
act of seeing, the sight perceiver must meet the following three conditions: (a) The
perceiver must have a sense organ and a sense faculty capable of seeing colour;
(b) there must be a sufficient intensity of light; and (c) there must be a coloured object
existing as a causal factor in the external world.
This account renders Aquinas an objective relativist in his theory of sensation.2
This would be in agreement with Stump’s claim that Aquinas is best categorized as an
externalist with a reliabilist thrust.3 The combination of these factors, which is the
triadic relation, is a necessary condition for the functioning of the external sensorium
but not a sufficient condition. This is the case because the sensus communis is also a
necessary condition. Therefore, this necessary triadic relation together with the func-
tioning of the sensus communis establish a sufficient condition for acts of awareness to
occur in the external sensorium. In other words, the conjunction of the necessary
triadic relations together with the functioning of the sensus communis is the sufficient
condition for sensation with the external sensorium. Schematically, this necessary
triadic relation might be expressed as follows: [NC (O-M-F)]. Quite perspicuously,

1
  The texts of Aquinas often refer to the claim that a phantasm is found in the vis cogitativa. For example:
‘Virtus cogitativa non habet ordinem ad intellectum posibilium, quo intelligit homo nisi per suum actum quo
praeparantur phantasmata.’ Also: ‘Et quia per hanc virtutem [vis cogitativa] simul cum imaginativa et mem-
orativa praeparantur phantasmata’ (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, no. 60).
2
  ‘Objective relativist’ refers to that epistemological theory which ascribes real objectivity to all perspec-
tives of physical objects. This is not ‘naive realism’, however. A necessary triadic relation requires that all
three elements determine the nature of each act of awareness, and not merely the object with a causal
relation to a sense faculty.
3
  Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 235.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  301

this refers to a necessary triadic relation encompassing as terms the object as a causal
factor in the external world, an adequate medium, and a properly disposed organ
and faculty
This descriptive account of the workings of the external sensorium is necessary in
order to understand the following elucidation of the structure for Phantasm-1; the
vis imaginativa is referred to by Aquinas as a ‘storehouse’ of the sensible forms.
for the reception of sensible forms, the proper sense and the sensus communis [i.e. the external
sensorium] are necessary. [. . .] But for the retention and preservation of the forms perceived
by the external sensorium, the phantasia or imagination [vis imaginativa] is necessary. The
imagination is, as it were, a storehouse [thesaurus] for the forms received through the external
sensorium. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4)

This passage implies that there is a ‘residue’ or ‘remnant’ left from each mental aware-
ness of the external sensorium. Phantasm-1 is this residue or remnant of what was
perceived in accord with the necessary conditions of sensation using the external
sensorium. The intentional residue itself is not necessarily an object of awareness.
It is merely the intentional remnant of an actual mental act of awareness by means
of  the external sensorium. It is possible, however, for Phantasm-1 to become an
object of knowledge. This will be the case when Phantasm-1 functions as an idolum
or imago or what the latter scholastics called a species expressa. Yet a Phantasm-1
need not have this epistemological status. It is sufficient that it just serve as an
‘unconscious’ remnant or imprint of a previous mental act of the external senso-
rium. When this type of imprint of a prior awareness itself becomes the object of an
additional act of awareness, then Phantasm-1 functions as an imago. This point will
be discussed later.
Phantasm-1, however, must not be confused with Likeness-1. Likeness-1 is one of
the necessary conditions for sensation; to be more specific, it is the properly disposed
sense organ and faculty. Sensation itself by means of the external sensorium, on the
other hand, demands all three necessary conditions (the properly disposed organ and
faculty, an adequate medium, and an appropriate active causal object or power in the
external world) together with the mental act of the sensus communis. What is stored in
the imagination, therefore, is a residue or remnant of the content sensed through the
external sensorium. Each awareness of a proper or common sensible is attained pre-
cisely insofar as it is an instantiation of this necessary triadic relation. The content
as sensed through the sensus communis is a conjunction of sensations determined by a
series of necessary triadic relations. The product of this conjunction, which is the way a
bundle of qualities is perceived by the external sensorium, is what, as an intentional
residue, becomes Phantasm-1. The structural similarity between the conjunction as
perceived through the sensus communis and the ‘bundle of sensations’ spoken of by
Berkeley and Hume is obvious. But whereas both Berkeley and Hume stop their ana­
lyses of perception with the awareness of a ‘bundle of sensations’, Aquinas—by means
of a structured awareness using another aspect of phantasms, Phantasm-2—greatly
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

302  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

refines this account of sense perception. This last point will be developed later in this
chapter with the analysis of what will be called Phantasm-2.
Phantasm-1, therefore, functions as an imprint in the vis imaginativa whose
­content is the product of the conjunction of a series of sensations determined by a
necessary triadic relation for each sense experience. In other words, the sensible
species or intentional form in the sensus communis is ‘implanted’, as it were, in the
internal sense dispositions of the vis imaginativa. This implanted sensible species
becomes an acquired cognitive disposition, which is an instance of Disposition-II/
Act I. This product is what is implanted in the vis imaginativa. This interpretation is
in accord with Aquinas’s textual claim that the imagination is a ‘thesaurus’ for the
sensible forms received from the external sensorium. Accordingly, Phantasm-1 is a
token of a type of Likeness-2.
Upon examining the philosophical narratives concerning the role phantasms play
in Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception, most commentators, both within the
traditional scholastic school and philosophers from the analytic tradition, have dwelt
primarily on this one aspect of the phantasm. There is more to a complete elucidation
of the nature of phantasms, however, than this one function. In addition, some stu-
dents of scholasticism have written as if the species impressa is equated with the phan-
tasm. This, however, cannot be the case. The species impressa is both identical and
coextensive with Likeness-1. Likeness-1, in turn, is only one of the necessary condi-
tions of a three-term necessary relation for external sensation. It follows that the phan-
tasm and the species impressa are categorically different and distinct epistemological
categories. Secondly, the phantasm is neither a sense datum nor necessarily an inten-
tional image. Some commentators have implied that the phantasm is to be understood
at all times as an image. This is Position-B discussed in the preceding chapter. Neither
of these positions is acceptable in toto because Phantasm-1 is to be understood as the
residue or remnant of a sensation implanted in the cognitive dispositional power of the
imagination. This imprint is beyond actual sensation or direct awareness by the exter-
nal sensorium. A Phantasm-1 does not need to be an object of awareness. It is merely a
residue of a prior act of direct sensation.
Before considering Phantasm-2, one further aspect of the vis imaginativa requires
clarification. Aquinas provides the vis imaginativa with three functions:
(a) The first function is the already considered thesaurus capacity for retaining
imprints of sensations attained by the external sensorium; this is Wolfson’s
‘retentive’ function.
(b) The second function is when the phantasm becomes a direct object of an act of
awareness; this would be one’s remembering a direct sensation—a combination
of proper and common sensibles—from an earlier awareness.
(c) In addition, the imagination has a creative cognitive capacity. Using this capacity,
it can form compound images from the experienced data imprinted within the
thesaurus itself; this is Wolfson’s ‘compositive’ function.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  303

With this third intentional function, one can form, for example, the image of Hume’s
famous ‘golden mountain’. ‘Human perceivers have knowing powers that, from like-
nesses first perceived, can form others—as when we use the imagination to form an
image of a golden mountain from those of gold and a mountain’ (Summa Theologiae,
I q. 12 a. 9 ad 2).4
The second and third functions are also uses of a phantasm. In accordance with the
discussion in the last chapter, however, it is more properly called an idolum or an imago.5
Aquinas is somewhat blurry on this matter of idolum or species versus phantasm. In the
Commentary on the Soul, he writes: ‘Phantasms come during sleep when the senses are
not in act’ (Commentary on the Soul, no. 647). Aristotle renders this distinction:
‘Imagination is the movement engendered by sensation in act, and the dream appears
to be a certain phantasm, since we call the dream the phantasm in sleep’ (De Anima,
459a170). Accordingly, a dream image as well as a formed image of something never
seen belong to the mental acts of the imagination. A phantasm may also be a remem-
bered image of an earlier sensation. If these are also instances of a phantasm, then they
must be distinguished from Phantasm-1. One might call these uses Phantasm-la and
Phantasm-1b. However, it might be preferable to classify the remembered image, the
dream image, and the ‘created image’—daydreaming, as it were—as an idolum, and
thus not introduce a further analytic distinction into this conceptual analysis of
phantasms. Suffice it to say that a Phantasm-1 need not always be the object of an
act of direct awareness by the imagination. However, when it is an object of direct
awareness, either in remembering, dreaming, or imagining, then the phantasm
functions as an idolum or an imago. An idolum is what John of St Thomas referred to
as a species expressa.
Yet Phantasm-1 can occur without being an object of direct awareness. It can just be
‘there’, as it were. Phantasm-1 utilizes the thesaurus function of retaining the residue
in  the imagination from a prior direct perception by the external sensorium. The
imagination itself is the cognitive potency; Phantasm-1 is there as a residue which can
become an object of awareness should the imagination direct attention to this residue,
e.g. an idolum. When a Phantasm-1 functions as an idolum, a new act of awareness
is required for which the idolum is its intentional object. But a Phantasm-1 need not

4
  Frede also notes this distinction: ‘While the initial generation of phantasiai is not “up to us” but follows
on sense perceptions, once the images are in the soul, it is open to us to manipulate them in various
ways: we can recall them at will, we can add to them, or combine them in other ways. This is the gist of
St.  Thomas’s comments on the impressions of golden mountains or the burning of Jerusalem, or other
events in the past that we may wish to embellish or dramatise later’: Dorothea Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’,
in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 164.
5
  It should be noted that in Summa Theologiae (I q. 12 a. 9 ad 2), Aquinas uses ‘species’ rather than
‘idolum’. This is probably the source of the scholastic term ‘species expressa’. Nonetheless, as indicated
above, idolum and species expressa have coextensive perceptual functions. Furthermore, in Summa
Theologiae (I q. 85 a. 2 ad 3), Aquinas uses the term ‘idolum’ in considering the result of the functioning of
the vis imaginativa in forming an image of something never directly perceived: ‘vis imaginativa format sibi
aliquod idolum rei absentis, vel etiam numquam visae.’
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

304  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

have this second act of awareness in order to have epistemological status in Aquinas’s
philosophy of mind. It is a sufficient condition that a Phantasm-1 is an image, but it is
not a necessary condition. A Phantasm-1 satisfies the epistemological demands for
its intentional existence merely by having esse intentionale as a residue without being
the object of an additional act of awareness. Therefore, an additional act of awareness
is necessary for a Phantasm-1 to function as an idolum; Phantasm-1 can function as a
residue without this act of awareness. Not every Phantasm-1 is a species expressa and
it never is a species impressa. However, a Phantasm-1 becomes an idolum, imago, or
species expressa if it becomes the intentional object of a second mental act of direct
awareness of the vis imaginativa. This might be (as noted above) called a Phantasm-1a.
It is important to realize that it is only in this idolum or species expressa function that a
Phantasm-1 serves as an object of an act of direct awareness. If the image interpreta-
tion of a phantasm were correct, then the phantasm would always be a direct object of
knowledge. Phantasm-1 is only a direct object of knowledge when it functions as an
idolum or species expressa, i.e. as an object of an act of awareness by the vis imaginativa.
Therefore, Phantasm-1 cannot be used in support of the claim that Aquinas is a representa-
tionalist in perception. Furthermore, neither can it be used to support the claim that
the phantasm is always an image. Therefore, Phantasm-1 cannot be used for substanti-
ating either Position-A or Position-B when considering the status of image discussed
in the preceding chapter. That a phantasm is never involved in a direct act of perception
by means of the external sensorium refutes Position-A. That a phantasm can function
as a mere residue and not as an idolum refutes a strict interpretation of Position-B.
Yet Position-B is partially correct in that a phantasm does have the idolum function.
Nonetheless, the idolum function is not a necessary condition for a phantasm’s exist-
ence. The consideration of Phantasm-2 next will provide additional support for the
claim against a strict interpretation of Position-B.

Phantasm-2
Phantasm-2 is involved in the process by which the perceiver, utilizing the vis cogita-
tiva, is aware of an external object as an individual object of a certain natural kind. In
the Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas wrote: ‘If an apprehension is of some individual
object, as when a perceiver sees this particular coloured thing, he perceives this par-
ticular man or beast, then the vis cogitativa is at work’ (no. 396).
With the vis cogitativa, an object is not perceived merely as a bundle of sensations.
The vis cogitativa is a mental faculty of inner sense. This inner sense faculty so condi-
tions an act of direct awareness that an individual object in the external world is not
perceived only as a bundle of sensible qualities, which is the result of sensation by
means of the external sensorium alone. Through the vis cogitativa, the individual is
perceived as a unitary, substantial individual object or thing.6 It is by means of the
6
  This individual object is what Leibniz called a ‘concretum’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  305

structured awareness of the vis cogitativa that Aquinas differs radically in matters
of sense perception from the classical British empiricists. That the object of direct per-
ception for the early British empiricists is a bundle of sensations, i.e. a collection of
primary and secondary qualities, is obvious from even a cursory reading of Berkeley
and Hume. The vis cogitativa, by means of Phantasm-2, so structures an act of direct
awareness that the object in the external world, the concretum, is interpreted perceptu-
ally as a specific, unified whole of a particular kind, and not merely as a collection of
proper and common sensibles. The vis cogitativa contributes an additional aspect to
direct perception above and beyond that accounted for by means of the external senso-
rium alone. In order to explicate further this suggestion, it is important to recall the
following important passage from the Summa Theologiae:

Sense powers know things by being impressed with their likeness [similitudo]. However, this
likeness can be understood in three different stages.
First, immediately and directly; this is when the likeness of colour is in the faculty of sight.
This is true of all the other proper sensibles in their appropriate sense faculties.
Secondly, directly, but not immediately, as when the likeness of shape or size is in the sight.
This is true of all the other common sensibles shared through several different senses.
Thirdly, neither immediately nor directly, as when the likeness of a man is in the faculty of
sight. He is there [i.e. in the faculty of sight] not because he is a ‘man’ but rather because he is a
coloured object. (Summa Theologiae, I q. 17 a. 2; emphasis and bold added)

This passage is interesting, informative and challenging philosophically. It speaks to

the differences in the use of similitudo considered at the end of the preceding chapter.
The similitudo, which Aquinas considers when treating of both the proper and the
common sensibles, is Likeness-1. Both of these are caused directly by the sensible
qualities existing as causal factors in the external world. However, Aquinas considers
the incidental object of sense, which in the above passage is also spoken of as a like-
ness; this object is not being caused by the object as directly perceived or perceivable.
In other words, the similitudo of ‘this man’, what both Aristotle and Aquinas call
the ‘incidental object of sense’, is not directly and exhaustively a result of the causal
factors of the sensible qualities existing in the external world. Some translations ren-
der this sensible object as a per accidens object of sense. Note how Aquinas refers
to the objects of direct perception in the above passage: ‘as when the likeness of a
man is in the faculty of sight. He is there [. . .] not because he is a “man” but rather
because he is a coloured object.’ In other words, the external senses in conjunction
with the sensus communis do not perceive ‘man’ as such. Rather they perceive a collec-
tion of sensible qualities. This is the product of a conjunction of a series of necessary
triadic relations.
In Aquinas’s theory of sensation, the external sensorium has for its object—the con-
junction of the series of necessary triadic relations—the same type of collection as
Berkeley speaks of in the Principles and Hume in the Enquiry. However, it is important to
note that none of the terms of this series of necessary relations is identified with the
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

306  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

similitudo of ‘man’, which is the incidental object of sense. In some way, therefore, in
order to account for the possibility that a human perceiver has an awareness of individ-
uals of a kind and not merely as a bundle of sensations, a contribution or interpretive
dimension by means of the internal sensorium is a necessary condition. This act of
awareness is explicable only if the vis cogitativa itself contributes an interpretive element
to the act of direct awareness. The result is that a bundle of sensations can be perceived as
an individual and not merely as a collection of sense qualities. The vis cogitativa, there-
fore, is an active contributor to direct awareness. This active contribution is explained
structurally by Phantasm-2. Therefore, Phantasm-2 is the vehicle of inner sense, which
provides a ‘conditioned awareness’ of bundles of sensations in order that these bun-
dles might be perceived as individuals of a kind. It is with this inner sense—the vis
cogitativa—that Aquinas goes beyond the analysis of perception proposed by Berkeley,
Hume, and most empiricists in modern and contemporary philosophy.
In offering this analysis of perception, Aquinas is aligned structurally with Thomas
Reid. Like Reid, Aquinas, to be sure, is not a Humean by any stretch of the imagination.
Aquinas’s account has a philosophical affinity with Reid; neither is an empiricist or a
closet Kantian. The suggestion put forward here is that Aquinas accepts the distinction
between sensation and perception. In addition, he would argue that a category differ-
ence exists between these two types of sense knowledge. To help explicate how this
occurs in the texts of Aquinas is the goal of much of what remains in this chapter. The
importance of the present discussion is the link made between the act of awareness
proper to the vis cogitativa and the role of Phantasm-2 in this mental act of the vis
cogitativa.
It must be emphasized that, given the structure of Aquinas’s epistemology, the con-
ditioned awareness of the vis cogitativa is not a direct datum of experience provided by
the external sensorium. An individual as an individual, which is the ‘incidental object
of sense’, is incapable of being a causally efficacious object. In the following passage
from the Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas indicates explicitly this non-causal rela-
tion, which is characteristic of the incidental object of sense:

We might [. . .] call Diarus or Socrates incidentally a sense object because each happens to be
white: What is sensed incidentally happens to belong to what is sensed absolutely [per se]. It is
incidental to the white thing, which is sensed absolutely, that it should be Diarus; thus, Diarus
is a sense object incidentally. He does not as such act upon the sense faculties at all. (Commentary
on the Soul, no. 387; emphasis added)

In the external world, the individual as an individual is not reducible to one of the
terms of the triadic relation necessary for the exercise of the external senses. Another
text indicates the non-causal efficacy of the incidental object of sense: ‘But whatever
makes no difference to the immediate modification of the sense faculty we call an inci-
dental object of sense. Therefore, Aristotle says explicitly that the senses are not affected
at all by the incidental object of sense as such’ (no. 393; emphasis added).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  307

This sense of similitudo associated with the vis cogitativa must be a different
intentional category from the use of similitudo found with the proper and common
sensibles, which is Likeness-1. This likeness associated with the incidental object
of sense is an example of Likeness-2. Yet it cannot be coextensive with Phantasm-1.
Phantasm-1 has no more content than that given by the external sensorium. The inci-
dental object of sense is by its very nature, however, something more than the data
sensed through the external sensorium. Accordingly, the incidental object of sense
must have a phantasm, which is distinct from Phantasm-1. This different phantasm is
what this analysis proposes calling Phantasm-2. In other words, it is by means of
Phantasm-2 that a perceiver is able to recognize Megan as Megan the person and not
just as a specific bundle of proper and common sensibles. Nonetheless, Phantasm-2
is not an object of direct awareness. Phantasm-2 does not function as an idolum or
species expressa. If this were to occur, then Phantasm-2 would be a tertium quid, and
Aquinas’s position would devolve into representationalism. The act of awareness of
the vis cogitativa, therefore, is not of a phantasm as an object. On the contrary,
Phantasm-2 structures the very act of awareness of the vis cogitativa so that a bundle
of proper and common sensibles can be perceived as an individual. In other words,
Phantasm-2 is a ‘conditioning’ or ‘structuring’ of the mental act of the vis cogitativa.
This ‘conditioning’ enables the perceiver to interpret an individually sensed bundle
of sensible qualities as this particular object of this natural kind. Accordingly, the
incidental object of sense is an object of the conditioned awareness of the vis cogitativa.
If this conditioning accomplished by means of Phantasm-2 is omitted, then so too
is the incidental object of sense as an object of knowledge. Phantasm-2 and the
incidental object of sense are not equivalent. Rather, Phantasm-2 is a necessary condi-
tion for the awareness of the incidental object of sense through the vis cogitativa.
Phantasm-2 is a process structure through which human perceivers are aware of
individual primary substances.
The incidental object of sense corresponds to the particular thing in the external
world which both Aristotle and Aquinas call a ‘primary substance’. In the Commentary
on the Metaphysics, Aquinas writes explicitly that ‘videtur esse substantia et hoc aliq-
uid’ (bk XII, lect. 3). This primary substance, however, cannot be perceived by means
of the external sensorium alone. As the classical British empiricists taught genera-
tions of Western philosophers, the external sensorium obtains only a grasp of the
collection of sensible qualities. The textual evidence provided above should substan-
tiate this claim. It is by means of Phantasm-2, however, conditioning or structuring
the act of the vis cogitativa, that the incidental object of sense can become an object of
knowledge. The epistemological import of Phantasm-2 is in enabling an act of aware-
ness to interpret a particular bundle of sensations in a certain way. Thus, Phantasm-2
is not an object at all. Rather, it is what constitutes the structured awareness of a
set of proper and common sensibles. This ‘conditioning’ of an act of awareness via
Phantasm-2 is an instance of a ‘structured mental act’. Parenthetically, both Wisdom
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

308  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

and Chisholm share this concern about perceiving ‘things’ rather than merely
‘­collections of sensible qualities’.7
There is a connection between Phantasm-1 and Phantasm-2. Phantasm-1 is a necessary
condition for Phantasm-2. Phantasm-2 cannot occur unless previous sense experiences
through the external sensorium have taken place, which produced Phantasms-1. One
might look at the vis cogitativa as utilizing the residue stored in the thesaurus of the vis
imaginativa in producing its own structured awareness via Phantasm-2. In other words,
Phantasm-2 cannot occur in a vacuum. This is analogous to Kant’s claim that reason
without sense is blind.8 The structured awareness of the vis cogitativa via Phantasms-2
builds upon the content of Phantasm-1. However, Phantasm-1 does not exhaust the con-
tent of Phantasm-2. The vis cogitativa utilizes Phantasms-1 in producing its structured
awareness of the data presented to it by the external sensorium. Accordingly, Phantasms-1
are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the production of the structured
awareness contributed by Phantasm-2. It must be emphasized that Phantasm-1 is not a
sufficient condition for Phantasm-2. This merely reiterates the claim that the internal
sensorium is itself an active contributor and is not just a passive receptor of sensations or
impressions.9 The internal sensorium, because of the vis cogitativa, is an active process
structurally interpreting the collections of sensations, which have been unified in the
external sensorium. In the case of the conditioned awareness of the vis cogitativa, this
internal sense actively interprets a certain set of data—which is the collection of proper
and common sensibles—as a particular thing of a specific kind.
The foil for this elucidation of Aquinas on inner sense is the set of texts rooted in
classical British empiricism, with special reference to Berkeley and Hume; this became
known as the ‘bundle view’ of perception, and was articulated with philosophical vehe-
mence. While Reid offered a critique of this position, he nevertheless failed to offer an
analysis other than by wishful thinking concerning how his position transcends what
Berkeley and Hume proposed. Aquinas’s account of the vis cogitativa, on the other
hand, provides a structural account of how the perception of the individual as opposed
to merely an awareness of a bundle of sensations is possible. This analysis, therefore, is
an elucidation—an explicatio textus—of the claim that a necessary condition for per-
ception in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is the working of the vis cogitativa.10

7
  This is not to suggest that Wisdom, Chisholm, and Aquinas provide identical or even similar explanatory
accounts of perception. It does suggest, however, that these philosophers were concerned over the possibility of
perceiving things as unitary, substantival objects and not merely as bundles of sensations. See Roderick
Chisholm, ‘On the Observability of the Self ’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1969), 7–21.
8
  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929,
A103ff.; B147ff.
9
  Hume claimed that the distinction between impressions from the external sense and ideas of the
inner sense was that the latter were nothing more than faint copies of the former. The essential passivity
of sensation is paramount in the psychological atomism of Hume. Such passivity is foreign to Aquinas’s
notion of inner sense.
10
  In his Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), John N. Deely
considers this neglected set of issues in classical Thomism and introduces the work of John Poinsot
(John of St Thomas) as offering a response to this aporia in Aquinas’s texts.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  309

Reid Redux
Aquinas articulates structural connections with Reid’s philosophy of mind. In
­considering the role of common sense as foundational for the philosophical enter-
prise, Aquinas is akin philosophically to Reid. On matters of perception, Aquinas—
and, as Deely argues, John Poinsot—are kindred spirits with Reid in differing
radically from Hume.11 Deely remarks perspicuously that Reid ‘was, as it were, the
one man of the eighteenth century who stood up and said: “the emperor has no
clothes on” ’.12
The explicatio textus of sense organ and faculty found in the Commentary is
remarkably similar to the method articulated by Gibson in discussing the evolu-
tionary development of human sense organs. Aquinas adopts a similar metaphilosophy
in approaching issues in sensation and perception. This interpretation gives a cer-
tain value to Aquinas’s oft-repeated claim that ‘nature does not act in vain’ and ‘the
knowing faculty is made for the act of knowing, which in turn is made for the object
of knowing’. These teleological claims in Aquinas may be his mode of introducing
‘epistemological naturalism’ into the philosophy-of-mind discussion of cognitive
faculties. In other words, human knowing faculties are made—or develop—for a
particular environment (which is Gibson’s claim). The external and the internal
sense faculties are what they are because the objects of sensation and perception are
what they are.
In addition, what is important for this discussion is Reid’s consistent affirmation
of the distinction between sensation and perception. Mental acts of perception are
aware cognitively of individual things and not of discrete sensibles or sense data.
Furthermore, Reid argues that only perception is cognitive. The important philosoph-
ical question, however, concerns what grounds Reid offers to justify philosophically
this distinction between sensation and perception.13 Reid, in discussing how a human
perceiver is aware directly of things and not ideas, suggests that it is by means of
‘natural signs’ that a perceiver ‘comprehends those [things] which, though we never
before had any notion or conception of the thing signified, do suggest it, or conjure
it up, as it were, by a natural kind of magic’.14 Reid goes on to suggest that ‘by all
rules of just reasoning, we must conclude that this connection [i.e. between mind
and thing] is the effect of our constitution, and ought to be considered as an original
principle of human nature’.15
11
  Haldane commingled Reid with Aquinas on perception: ‘Like Thomas Reid […] Aquinas himself is
simply trying to identify at the level of a metaphysical description what is implicit in our everyday dealings
with the world’: John Haldane, ‘Forms of Thought’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick
M. Chisholm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 167.
12
 Deely, Four Ages of Understanding, 548.
13
  Haldane once observed wryly that at the end of the day, Reid throws up his hands and utters
something like: ‘It’s magic!’
14
 Thomas Reid, Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1983), 43–4.
15
  Ibid.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

310  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

Structurally, Aquinas adopts Reid’s position in rooting cognitive abilities in

human nature, but his naturalism attempts to spell out how these cognitive abilities
develop and work. The vis cogitativa is rooted in human nature through the innate
cognitive dispositions grounded in the substantial form of the human natural kind.
Throughout his entire analysis of direct perception of things in the external world,
Reid dismisses as philosophically faulty any theory of representationalism. He wrote
that representationalism ‘will not solve the problem [. . .] for who will interpret
the  [representation or symbol]; [. . .] symbols without an interpretation have no
value [and it is] clear that the hypothesis of ideas [representationalism] increases the
difficulties of perception and meaning and in no way diminishes them, and for this
reason it is scarcely suitable for an explanation or elucidation of the phenomena of
these [cognitive] faculties.’16
In order to provide some semblance of an account for these ‘faculties’, Reid appeals
to the ‘Author of nature’ who set up our perceptual apparatus so that it can function in
a common sense manner. Reid writes: ‘The wise Author of our nature intended that a
great and necessary part of our knowledge should be derived from experience before
we are capable of remembering, and he hath provided means perfectly adequate to this
intention.’17 Deely is concerned about this lack of philosophical analysis on Reid’s part
justifying the distinction between sensation and perception.18
This present conceptual elucidation proposes that the mental act of the vis cogitativa
enables Aquinas to affirm the distinction between sensation of accidental qualities—
the proper and the common sensibles—and the perception of the individual primary
substance as a thing. This entails postulating an internal cognitive structure to the
mental act of the vis cogitativa that permits it to perceive an individual primary sub-
stance as such and not merely as a collection or bundle of sense qualities.19

16
  The Philosophical Orations of Thomas Reid, ed. D. D. Todd (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1989), 62.
17
  Thomas Reid, ‘An Inquiry into the Human Mind’, in Louis Schneider (ed.), The Scottish Moralists on
Human Nature and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 25. Stump, in referring to a divine
justification for reliabilism in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, appears to adopt a position similar to Reid’s
justification. McDonald hints at such a possible resolution to the reliabilism problem in Aquinas.
18
  Deely wrote: ‘Reid’s valiant effort to establish principles of common sense in modern philosophy,
viewed in the light of earlier Latin developments in epistemology, had one great shortcoming which
uncorrected, could only doom the effort. While Reid rejected the proposition that we directly know
only our own ideas, which is the bedrock of modern epistemology, he did so without having a way
effectively to discriminate between sensation and perception as such. Hence, he made his case of direct
knowledge of physical things so strong as to be unable to deal as a matter of principle with the fundamental
difference between perceptual objects in their objective constitution through relations and perceptual
objects in what they have of a subjective constitution as things accessible in sensation’ (Four Ages of
Understanding, 548; emphasis added). For a more detailed discussion of Deely’s account of sensation
and perception, with special reference to John Poinsot, see Anthony J. Lisska, ‘Deely, Aquinas and
Poinsot: How the Intentionality of Inner Sense Transcends the Limits of Empiricism’, Semiotica 178
(2010), 135–67.
19
  In discussing the perception/sensation distinction, Deely writes precious little about the vis cogitativa.
Nonetheless, he is one of a small group of philosophers considering medieval texts who pay serious atten-
tion to Aquinas’s distinction between perception and sensation.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  311

The Phantasm and the Vis Cogitativa

This extended interpretation of the workings of the vis cogitativa in perceiving the
individual primary substance can be looked upon in a twofold manner. First, there is a
labelling process in which the individual thing is given a name. Secondly, this name,
which in this case will be reminiscent analogically of a Russellian use of a ‘proper name’
attached to a definite individual subject, will be further joined with a conditioning or
structured awareness which places the individual into a certain class or kind. As
Aquinas noted, it is through the vis cogitativa that we recognize Diarus, not as a bundle
of sensations, but rather as Diarus the individual man.
In his discussion of the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa, White argues that
what  Aquinas adopts in explaining perception is a holistic theory of perception.20
White’s suggestion for holism is in opposition to any form of an atomistic theory
of perception—often called ‘psychological atomism’—in which the ultimate data of
sensation are discrete, simple, sensible particulars that are combined through some
other sensitive power or faculty. White acknowledges this comparison between
Aquinas and Hume: ‘One very significant difference between the two [Aquinas and
Hume], however, is that Aquinas’s theory of perception is, at the level of the vis cogitativa,
thoroughly holistic, while Hume’s analysis of the laws of the mind is at its foundation
atomistic.’21 What, of course, needs to be explained is how this mental act takes place in
the vis cogitativa. It is in providing such an explanation that the structured mental act
utilizing Phantasm-II falls into place. Because of this structured awareness, Aquinas is
able to provide for a perceptual holism or a substantive unity transcending the limits
of psychological atomism.
In many places in this present treatise on Aquinas and perception, the concepts of
a formal analysis have been contrasted with a material analysis.22 In his Quaestiones
Disputatae de Virtutibus, Aquinas renders a conceptual elucidation regarding how this
Aristotelian distinction holds for sensation. One will note that here Aquinas distin-
guishes between the formal aspect of the sensible object and the primary substance—
the hoc aliquid—in which the sensible object belongs as an accidental quality.
In the sensible object, there is something considered as formal and another considered as
material. What is formal in the object is that according to which the object is referred to the
sensible power or habit; the material aspect on the other hand, is that in which this formal
aspect is founded or grounded; in other words, if we speak of the object of the power of vision,
its formal object is colour, because insofar as something is coloured, it is visible. On the other

20
  A. Leo White, ‘Instinct and Custom’, The Thomist 66(4) ( 2002), 594.
21
  Ibid., 601, n. 81. In this informative footnote, White tells his readers that there is some historical evi-
dence that Hume possessed a copy of Aquinas’s Aristotelian commentary on De Memoria et Reminiscentia.
White refers to an older essay: John K. Ryan, ‘Aquinas and Hume on the Laws of Association’, New
Scholasticism 12(4) (1938), 366–77.
22
  Pilsner emphasized that Aquinas refers to both a formal and a material aspect of a sensible object.
This distinction, which is important as this analysis of the vis cogitativa develops, is often overlooked by
commentators on Aquinas’s account of sense knowledge.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

312  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

hand, what is material in the object is that body in which the colour is found. From this it is
clear that a power or habit is referred to the formal aspect [formalis ratio] of the object per se,
and to that which is material in the object per accidens. And since what is per accidens does
not differentiate something but only what is per se, it follows therefore that the material diver-
sity of an object does not diversify the power or habit; this, however, is accomplished only by
the formal aspect. For the visual power by which we see stones, men, and the heavens is one,
because this diversity of objects is material, and not according to the formal aspect [formalis
ratio] of the visible. (Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus, q. 2 a. 4)

What is important in this passage, which appeared earlier, is that Aquinas argues
explicitly that the formal aspect is a necessary condition for an act of knowing to
occur. Of course, here Aquinas considers the sensible objects, which have as a formal
aspect the proper sensibles; this is why these sensibles are called ‘proper’ or ‘objecta
propria’. The question now comes into play: what is the formal element in the mental
act of the vis cogitativa? For Aquinas, there is no form of individuation for the primary
substance such as one finds in the writings of Scotus with the form of haecceitas,
often translated as ‘thisness’. The suggestion put forward here is that the Gestalt-like
mental act of the vis cogitativa provides this formal aspect in permitting this act
of  inner sense to perceive this hoc aliquid as an existing primary substance. The
Phantasms-1 stored in the vis imaginativa provide the material component for
which the vis cogitativa provides the structural awareness by means of its mental
act through Phantasm-2. In a similar manner, the mental act of abstraction central
to the intellectus agens provides the formal aspect of interpretation in making the
species intelligibilis that then informs the  intellectus possibilis so that intellectual
understanding can take place. One can understand the structural account offered
by Aquinas in terms of powers, acts, and objects. The formal aspect of colour—a
‘designata’, as Aquinas would say—determines the structure of the visual power so
that the act of seeing might occur. Since there is no formal principle of individuality
for the hoc aliquid—for Aquinas, the principle of individuation is materia signata
quantitate—a formal element must be provided. This is the important role for the vis
cogitativa in human perception. A similar case occurs in intellectual understanding,
which is (as both Aristotle and Aquinas propose) about the universal and not the
singular. There are no universalia ante res in Aquinas’s ontology; hence, in Aquinas’s
ontology, unlike in that of Plato, subsisting universals in a mind-independent realm
are not possible. If there are no universalia ante res in Aquinas, then how is it possible
to have an understanding of a universal if there is no subsistent object external to
the mind? It is for this reason that the intellectus agens is a necessary condition for
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. The intellectus agens provides the formal aspect to the
array of Phantasms-3 stored in the vis memorativa. Both the vis cogitativa and the
intellectus agens are two innate cognitive structures that are necessary conditions
for Aquinas’s Aristotelian philosophy of mind to fit together holistically. To remove
either of these innate cognitive structures renders Aquinas’s philosophy of mind
unworkable and explanatorily vacuous.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  313

Michon adopts a different strategy for offering an analysis of the vis cogitativa,
remarking that some sense of judgement is necessary for the workings of this cognitive
faculty of inner sense: ‘The presentation of phantasms to the intellect, for abstraction
or conversion, does not involve any kind of judgement. However, the cogitative power
is needed for a direct and non-intellectual knowledge of the singular, which is a complex
knowledge, a judgement.’23 Michon incorporates recent work in analytic philosophy
from Davidson and others on the matter of proto-thoughts. He suggests that the
workings of the vis cogitativa would be an example of a proto-thought mechanism.
What this chapter argues, however, is that while a proto-thought mechanism might be
appropriate for Thomas’s analysis of the vis cogitativa, nonetheless the awareness is
not a judgement. Rather, it is a direct awareness through a Gestalt-like structure ena-
bling the perceiver to be aware of an individual as a member of a natural kind. Michon
is correct in suggesting that there is a non-intellectual knowledge—i.e. not pertaining
to the intellect—of the particular individual, which would be an awareness of a pri-
mary substance. However, the claim of the analysis in this chapter is that this aware-
ness is not a judgement but rather a Gestalt-like perception based on a structured
mental act using Phantasm-2. In these texts, Aquinas does not refer to a ‘judgement’
in the same sense that he considers this mental act of the possible intellect. The pro-
posal here, on the other hand, is that a ‘conditioning’ or ‘structuring’ of the mental act
in a Gestalt manner provides for the awareness of an individual of a natural kind. In
this way, Aquinas saves his epistemological realism and his ontological realism. This
is a direct, structured act of awareness analogous to Gestalt awareness. The analysis of
these texts suggests how Aquinas goes beyond the ‘magic’ of the situation proposed
by Reid and offers an explanation of how human nature can accommodate this episte-
mological work. Deely too refers to this conceptual similarity with Gestalt psychol-
ogy: ‘The argument here anticipates, more or less completely, the famous notion of
“Gestalt” that would be introduced into scientific psychology in the early decades of
the twentieth century. [. . .] The field of perception reveals objects in a way and accord-
ing to properties that cannot be derived from a mere summation of its purely sensory
components.’24 The famous ‘duck-rabbit’ illustration from Wittgenstein comes to
mind. This is not an act of judgement but rather a direct awareness of the particular
concretum. Following the Wittgensteinian analogy, the mental act of the vis cogitativa
using Phantasm-2 is an instance of ‘seeing as’. In her Aquinas, Stump, on the other
hand, ascribes ‘seeing as’ to a cognitive state requiring as a necessary condition the
working of the intellectus possibilis. Stump is correct in suggesting that this distinc-
tion common to analytic philosophy pertains to Aquinas’s account of knowing.
However, since she does not develop any substantial cognitive role for the vis cogita-
tiva in the process of intentional awareness, she is forced to reduce ‘seeing as’ to a

23
  Cyrille Michon, ‘Intentionality and Proto-thoughts’, in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories
of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 339.
24
 Deely, Four Ages of Understanding, 346.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

314  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

combination of the faculties of the phantasia and the intellectus possibilis.25 The position
developed here, however, is that because of the structured mental act of the vis cogita-
tiva, the attribution of ‘seeing as’ can be predicated of this faculty of inner sense on
the level of sense perception using the internal sensorium. The mental act of the vis
cogitativa elucidated in the manner undertaken in this analysis is sufficient to account
for instances of ‘seeing as’.
In the Commentary on the Soul, Aquinas writes: ‘The vis cogitativa is also called
particular reason, because it joins individual intentions in the way that the universal
reason joins universal concepts’ (no. 396). In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima,
Aquinas writes much the same way: ‘In human knowers, there is a cogitative power
that “collages” particular intentions; this is why it is called both particular reason and
passive intellect’ (a. 13). Since it is correct that at times Aquinas refers to the vis cogita-
tiva as the ‘ratio particularis’ (particular reason), obviously this might suggest that
there is some act of judgement associated with the workings of this internal sense
faculty. However, if any sense of judgement is connected with the vis cogitativa, it is at
best some form of an immediately apprehended intuitive judgement. This intuitive
judgement is reducible to the ‘Gestalt-like structure’ that is the focus of the present
analysis of the vis cogitativa. This in turn may be coextensive with Michon’s account
of the role proto-judgement might play in terms of an elucidation of the mental act of
awareness of the vis cogitativa.
In the matter of perceiving an individual directly, this analysis gives meaning to
Aquinas’s oft-repeated example of a child who in the beginning calls all men he sees
‘daddy’. It is only after a while that the child can distinguish his own father from his
uncle, his older brother, and the neighbourhood postman. This recognition is accom-
plished only through the structured awareness of the vis cogitativa. It must be kept in
mind, however, that Phantasm-2 is not an object of knowledge. It is a conditioning or
structuring of the act of awareness of the vis cogitativa so that a perceiver can get
beyond the limitation of the external sensorium. Accordingly, the force of the vis cogi-
tativa is to enable a human perceiver to transcend the limits of the external sensorium.
In an explanatory manner, Aquinas accounts for the possibility of human perceivers
transcending the limits of the proper and common sensibles. This possibility permits
perceivers to have an awareness of individual things as individuals of natural kinds and
not merely as bundles of sensible qualities. This internal cognitive structure in terms of
Actuality-II provides the philosophy of mind machinery that enables the vis cogitativa
to transcend classical empiricism as well as provides an explanatory content of how
this is possible. The vis cogitativa, as a built-in cognitive power, is always ‘on the go’, as it
were, seeking to be aware of individual substantive things—the hoc aliquids—in the
external world.

25
 Stump, Aquinas, 261.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  315

Phantasm-3
Phantasm-3 is nothing more than a stored Phantasm-2. Textual evidence indicates
that for Aquinas the function of this faculty of inner sense is to store the intentional
objects known by the vis cogitativa. The following passage supports the relation
between the vis cogitativa and the sense memory: ‘Moreover, for the apprehension of
intentions, which are not directly perceivable by the external sensorium, the vis aesti-
mativa [in human perceivers, the vis cogitativa] is needed. For the preservation of
these intentions, the vis memorativa is needed. This faculty is a storehouse [thesaurus]
for this kind of intention’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 78 a. 4).
If Phantasm-2 is the conditioned awareness of the vis cogitativa, then Phantasm-3
must be closely related to Phantasm-2. The sense memory is the faculty, which ‘dates’ or
characterizes temporarily a perception of an individual. Thus, a perceiver can remember
the 2014 family picnic during which cousin Stash fell into the lake. This is accom-
plished by means of Phantasm-3. The difference between Phantasm-2 and Phantasm-3
is that the latter has a temporal characteristic of ‘pastness’ in addition to the characteristic
of a conditioned awareness. In effect, the above claim proposes that human perceivers
have a special cognitive ability that stores their direct awarenesses of individuals. Thus,
one’s perceptual experience is not limited to past bundles of sensations but also
includes the remembered perceived content of individuals of a kind.
A distinction analogous to Phantasm-1 and idolum is appropriate to Phantasm-3.
When one has a direct awareness of an individual thing perceived in the past,
then  Phantasm-3 is functioning as a species expressa. This could be classified as a
Phantasm-3a. Furthermore, this would be a special type of idolum belonging to the
sense memory. Yet this additional act of awareness is not a necessary condition for
the existence of Phantasm-3. Phantasm-3, as is the case with Phantasm-1, can just ‘be
there’, as it were, functioning as a residue or remnant of a perceptual act of the vis cogi-
tativa. It is Phantasm-3 that plays an important role in the process of abstraction
through the intellectus agens.26

The Vis Cogitativa and Primary Substance

The vis cogitativa is the principal sense faculty in Aquinas’s theory of perception. It is
by the conditioned awareness of this faculty of inner sense that the individuals of the
world are perceived as primary substances. Insofar as Aquinas affirms the existence
of a world of individuals, he also provides the epistemological machinery by means of
which a human perceiver can be aware perceptually of those individuals. Furthermore,
because in Aquinas’s ontology a primary substance is always an individual of a natural
kind, which natural kind is determined by the substantial form, the vis cogitativa is

  This connection will be discussed at the conclusion of this chapter.

26
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

316  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

also the faculty whose conditioned awareness achieves perception of an individual as

one belonging to a natural kind. In essence, the vis cogitativa explains, after a modified
Gestalt fashion, the possibility of perception of primary substances. To reiterate a sugges-
tion from an earlier chapter, using Strawson’s term, this analysis of Aquinas approaches
‘descriptive metaphysics’. This faculty of inner sense saves both epistemological realism
and ontological realism for Aquinas.
This inquiry into the nature of phantasms is thus concluded. The logic of the concept
of phantasm is such that a phantasm is never equated with a sense datum, only par-
tially analysed as a sense image, and structurally never to be associated totally with the
external sensorium alone. More constructively, a phantasm is an epistemological cate-
gory connected with three distinct operations of inner sense. Obviously, the phantasm
is critically important for Aquinas’s theory of perception. It is by means of phantasms
that Aquinas, using a complicated and sophisticated intentionality of perception and
faculty psychology, has endeavoured to explain the possibility of a human perceiver’s
awareness of the world of individual primary substances. The phantasm is crucial in
providing a conceptual analysis of the vis cogitativa. Perhaps it is the vis cogitativa
that best argues against both the sense datum and the imago interpretations of the
phantasm. Both of these interpretations demand that there be an object for each act of
awareness. Yet the vis cogitativa does not itself have an object perceptible by means
of the external sensorium. Rather, it is the faculty that actively contributes a condi-
tioned awareness for interpreting the bundles of sensation perceived by the external
sensorium. The structured mental act of the vis cogitativa is an essential part of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. Without such a structure, it seems impossible to expli-
cate consistently Aquinas’s theory of perception regarding an awareness of individuals.
Phantasm-2 is the vehicle for this structured awareness through the vis cogitativa.
Of  course, the principal mainstay entity in Aquinas’s ontological realism is the
­primary substance.
What is driving Aquinas at this point is the following issue in the philosophy of
mind: what must be the case in order for a human perceiver to be aware of primary
substances? A primary substance—the individual of a natural kind—is the principal
metaphysical category in Aquinas’s scheme of things, his ontological realism. A pri-
mary substance is a combination of materia prima and forma substantialis, modified
by a set of accidental or incidental forms. Through a dialectic in his philosophy of
nature, Aquinas argues that this Aristotelian realism is the best metaphysical account
available for the things of the world. Each individual thing naturally occurring in the
world is an instance of a natural kind. The forma substantialis determines the set
of  necessary properties that ‘define’ the category of the natural kind. In Aquinas’s
ontology, materia prima is the principle of individuation.
Aquinas next asks: how can a human knower become aware of these primary
­substances? It is through the process of the external sensorium—the external senses
and the sensus communis—that a human perceiver is aware of the set of incidental or
accidental forms. It is through the rather complicated process of abstraction through
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  317

the work of the intellectus agens and the intellectus possibilis that a human knower is aware
of the essence rooted in the substantial form—the sortal properties—that determines
the natural kind. However, if the principal ontological category is the individual—the
primary substance—then it seems plausible that Aquinas would postulate some sort
of cognitive process so that a human knower might be aware of this fundamental
category. It is at this point that the vis cogitativa with its structured mental act of
awareness using an intentio non sensata comes into play. It is with the vis cogitativa
using Phantasm-2 that Aquinas melds his ontological realism with his epistemological
realism. Moreover, it is through an analysis of the vis cogitativa with Phantasm-2 that
he justifies the distinction between sensation and perception. It is, furthermore, by
means of the vis cogitativa with the contribution of Phantasm-2 that he not only offers
but also justifies a category difference between sensation and perception. The vis cogi-
tativa provides a placeholder in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind that prevents a vacuum
or lacuna from developing—i.e. how do we know the principal category in his ontological
realism, the primary substance?27
White perceptively points out the general lack of understanding of the cognitive as
opposed to the moral or practical reasoning account of awareness Klubertanz gener-
ally accepts in his extensive study of the vis cogitativa. This position articulated by
Klubertanz is opposed to the general thrust of the analysis undertaken in this book
and especially in this chapter. The vis cogitativa is that faculty of inner sense that iden-
tifies an individual of a natural kind; this phantasm-structured awareness is then
stored in the sense memory, from which the species intelligibilis is abstracted by the
intellectus agens. Hence the cognitive function of the vis cogitativa as articulated and
defended in this analysis indicates that this cognitive faculty of inner sense is far more
important than Klubertanz acknowledged; nonetheless, Klubertanz’s study is one of
the more extensive accounts of this faculty on inner sense published in the twentieth
century. This present study, therefore, attempts to remedy these important theoretical
shortcomings exhibited in the analysis put forward by Klubertanz and followed by
many philosophers commenting on Aquinas’s philosophy of inner sense.

Phantasm-3 and the Intellectus Agens

The analysis of Phantasm-2 and Phantasm-3 provides a hint towards understanding
the formation of an intelligible species via the intellectus agens as a means towards the
formation of a concept in the intellectus possibilis. There is only time and space here to
sketch this possible connection. Nonetheless, the intellectus agens does not form the

27
  In his analysis of the vis cogitativa, White writes the following about the Klubertanz muddles in dis-
cussing Aquinas on inner sense: ‘George Klubertanz actually denies that the cogitative power represents
the nature of the individual to the intellect. According to Klubertanz, the imagination rather than the
cogitative power is the source of the phantasm from which the intelligible species are abstracted; the cogi-
tative power merely focuses one’s attention on the phantasm in the imagination’: Leo A. White, ‘Why the
Cogitative Power?’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 72 (1998), 224, n. 2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

318  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

conceptus; this is the role of the intellectus possibilis informed by the species intelligibilis
abstracted by the intellectus agens from the phantasms stored in the sense memory.
In order to see this connection, we need to consider various texts from the Aquinas
corpus. Often in Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles, one finds statements like the
following: ‘phantasms [are] prepared by the vis cogitativa in order that they may
become actually intelligible and move the possible intellect’ (bk II, ch. 76); ‘The vis
cogitativa is [. . .] directed to the possible intellect [the intellectus possibilis] [. . .] only
through its act by which the phantasms are prepared, so that by the intellectus agens
they may be made actually intelligible; in this way, the possible intellect is perfected’
(bk II, ch. 73). Aquinas brings together all three inner sense faculties of the internal
sensorium: ‘It is through the vis cogitativa, together with the imagination and the
memory, that the phantasms are prepared to receive the addition of the intellectus agens,
whereby they are made actually intelligible’ (bk II, ch. 60). Throughout this discussion
in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas is concerned about the position defended by
Averroes asserting that the intellect for human beings is separated from and existen-
tially independent of all human knowing in the space–time realm. While this issue is
not a burning one in contemporary philosophy of mind, nonetheless it is in these dis-
cussions that Aquinas articulates several useful insights on the relation of phantasm to
the intellectus agens.
Brentano was an important commentator on both Avicenna and Aquinas. In dis-
cussing Avicenna and his position on the separated nature of the intellectus agens,
Brentano suggests an important role for the vis cogitativa. He calls the vis cogitativa,
much as Averroes described this internal sense faculty, the virtus cogitativa, which is
the ‘sensory thought faculty’. Brentano further argues that the vis cogitativa is needed
in order for what Avicenna calls the ‘material intellect’, which is the place in the human
knower where concepts are known, to receive forms from the ontologically separated
intellectus agens. He writes the following: ‘The activities of the imagination and of the
sensory thought-faculty [the virtus cogitativa] are needed to put it [i.e. the material
intellect] in a position to combine with the active intelligence and receive the intelligi-
ble forms that emanate from the latter.’28 What is important and significant textually in
this passage from Brentano is the role that the vis cogitativa plays in the formation of
concepts by the intellectus agens. If the vis cogitativa can recognize individuals of a
natural kind, then the active intellect will be far better at abstracting the appropriate
species intelligibilis rooted in the substantial form, which in turn produces the basis of
concepts in the intellectus possibilis in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.29
Haldane considers the importance of the species intelligibilis:

For Aquinas, the impressed species is a determination of the (possible) intellect in respect of
some form F which thereby constitutes the standing state: possession of the concept F, and this

28
  Franz Brentano, ‘Nous Poietikos: Survey of Earlier Interpretations’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amelie
Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 315.
29
  Kenny often refers to the intellectus possibilis as the ‘receptive intellect’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  319

acquired conceptual capacity is termed a habitus (i.e. an acquired disposition). The expressed
species, by contrast, is an exemplification of the concept evoked in a particular thought. What
is produced in the exercise of a concept is a conceptus. That is to say, the conceptus is a mental
event the character of which is determined by the expressed species which structures it and
which is a particular expression of the abstracted and retained impressed species.30

For Aquinas, the result of the abstractive process of the intellectus agens is a species
intelligibilis. This acts in a manner like the sensible species, which ‘informs intention-
ally’ the external sense faculty. The possible intellect is then ready to know the essence,
and when it does actually know the essence, the content of the abstracted form serves
as a conceptus, which is the means by which the human understanding knows the
essential, sortal properties in the individual in the external world. The conceptus is not
an object of thought, unless it is reflected upon much like a phantasm is reflected upon
by the vis imaginativa. Rather, the conceptus is the means by which a human knower
becomes aware of the structure of the external world. This structure, of course, is
determined by a substantial form ‘implanted’ or ‘emmattered’ in a piece of matter,
which determines the foundation of a natural kind in Aquinas’s Aristotelian ontology.
This is rooted fundamentally in the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism, one that
Aquinas accepts almost uncritically.
Why postulate the intellectus agens? In his Compendium of Theology, Aquinas dis-
cusses the need for this power of intellect; this extended passage is one of the better pub-
lished accounts in which Aquinas discusses the intellectus agens as a necessary cognitive
condition for the acquisition of human conceptual knowledge of the eternal world:
This discussion brings out the truth that knowledge of things in our intellect is not caused by
any participation or influence of forms that are intelligible in act and that subsist by themselves,
as was taught by the Platonists and certain other philosophers who followed them in this
doctrine. The Platonists, however, are incorrect. The intellect acquires knowledge from sensible
objects, through the intermediacy of the senses. However, since the forms of objects in the
sense faculties are particular, as we just said, they are intelligible not in act, but only in potency.
For the intellect understands nothing but universals. But what is in potency is not reduced to
act except by some agent. Hence, there must be some agent that causes the species existing in
the sense faculties to be intelligible in act. The intellectus possibilis cannot perform this service,
for it is in potency with respect to intelligible objects rather than active in rendering them
intelligible. Therefore, we must assume some other intellect, which will cause species that are
intelligible in potency to become intelligible in act, just as light causes colors that are poten-
tially visible to be actually visible. This faculty we call the intellectus agens, which we would not
have to postulate if the forms of things were intelligible in act, as the Platonists held.
(Compendium of Theology, pt I, ch. 83)

In a later part of the Compendium, Aquinas continues this discussion:

The intellectus possibilis is in potency with regard to intelligible objects in the sense that it
does not contain within its nature any determinate form of sensible things [i.e. there are no

30
  John Haldane, ‘Brentano’s Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989), 1–32 (emphasis added).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

320  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

Cartesian innate ideas]. In the same way, the pupil of the eye is in potency with regard to all
colours. To the extent, then, that phantasms abstracted from sensible things are likenesses
of definite s­ensible things, they are related to the intellectus possibilis as act to potency.
Nonetheless, the phantasms are in potency with regard to something that the intellectual
soul possesses in act namely, being as abstracted from material conditions. And in this
respect, the intellectual soul is related to the phantasms as act to potency. No contradiction
is involved if a thing is in act and potency with regard to the same object according to dif-
ferent points of view. The same intellectual soul, therefore, can be in potency with regard
to  all intelligible objects and nonetheless, without any contradiction, can be related to
them  in  act, if both an intellectus possibilis and an intellectus agens are acknowledged in
the soul. (ch. 88)

Aquinas continues:
The role of the intellectus agens will be seen more clearly from the way the intellect renders
objects actually intelligible. The intellectus agens does not render objects actually intelligible
in  the sense that the latter flow from it into the intellectus possibilis. If this were the case,
we human knowers would have no need of phantasms and sense in order to understand. On
the contrary, the intellectus agens renders things actually intelligible by abstracting them from
phantasms. In a similar fashion, light, in a certain sense, renders colours actual, not as though
it contained the colours within itself, but so far as it confers visibility on them. In the same way,
we are to judge that there is a single intellectual soul that lacks the natures of sensible things but
can receive them in an intelligible manner, and that renders phantasms actually intelligible by
abstracting intelligible species from them. The power whereby the soul is able to receive intel-
ligible species is called the intellectus possibilis, and the power whereby it abstracts intelligible
species from phantasms is called the intellectus agens. The latter is a sort of intelligible light
communicated to the intellectual soul, in imitation of what takes place among the higher intel-
lectual substances. (ch. 88)

The three powers of the internal sensorium working together prepare the data from
sensation and perception for the abstractive work of the intellectus agens. This prepara-
tion is so very important for the intellectual life of human beings that Averroes once
suggested that the vis cogitativa should be called a kind of ‘intellect’. The vis cogitativa
is sometimes referred to as the ‘particular reason’.31
Aquinas often writes about the close working relationship between the intellective
powers and the internal sensorium. In the Summa Theologiae, he writes that the intel-
lect has need of certain ‘lower powers’ for its mental acts to function well: ‘The lower
powers of which the intellect has need in its operation. For those in whom the imagi-
native power, the vis cogitativa, and the memorative power are of better disposition,
are better disposed to understand’ (Summa Theologiae, I q. 85 a 7). Often in Book II
of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas writes about this relation of dependency of
intellect on internal sensorium:

31
  Michon remarks that Thomas has three names that he uses in several texts: ‘the vis cogitativa, also
called ratio particularis and intellectus passivus’: ‘Intentionality and Proto-thoughts’, 337.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  321

The soul [i.e. the intelligence] in order to understand, requires the powers, which prepare the
phantasms so that they may be made actually intelligible [i.e. the vis cogitativa and the memory.]
These faculties and their acts are found in certain organs of the body, and operate through
these organs.
Given this, Aristotle wrote that ‘the soul does not understand without phantasms,’ and that
‘it understands nothing without the passive intellect’, which he also calls the vis cogitativa.
(Summa Contra Gentiles, bk II, chs 80, 81)

The substantial form or the set of sortal properties is only potentially in the phan-
tasm. The intellectus agens is a necessary condition for rendering the awareness of
this substantial form from potency to act. The identity relation holds, nonetheless,
but it is exemplified in two ways: potency and act. This is another case where the
­categories of potency and act are central to Aquinas’s mode of undertaking a rigorous
philosophical analysis.

Intellectus Agens as an Efficient Cause

The abstractive function of the intellectus agens has always been a difficult bit of
philosophy-of-mind theory to elucidate adequately. In the famous metaphor of the
‘army in retreat’ found in Chapter 19 of Book II of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle
suggests that out of sense comes memory, and out of memory then comes experience.
‘Sense’ here possibly refers to an awareness of an individual, ‘memory’ to the stored
awareness of many such individuals, and ‘experience’ to the formation of the species
intelligibilis by the intellectus agens. In his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics,
Aquinas uses the same example. He elaborates by writing that the ‘nature of mind’ is
such that it ‘can also cause this in virtue of the intellectus agens, which makes things
intelligible in act by abstraction of universals from singulars’ (bk II, lect. 20).
Just as Phantasm-2 is a conditioning of the mental act of awareness enabling the
perceiver to be aware of the incidental object of sense, the sense memory stores these
structured mental acts of awareness. On this suggestion, then, possibly the intellectus
agens is possibly a higher-level structure, which works through the stored structures of
the sense memory. In this way, the intellectus agens is able to focus attention on the
individual as a member of a natural kind and not as a bundle of sensations. The intellec-
tus agens, it would appear, is the enabling structure permitting the individual knower
to abstract the essence or sortal properties from the set of individuals forming the class
determined by the natural kind. The vis cogitativa has prepared the ground for the
process of abstraction. The vis cogitativa renders the bundle of sensations perceivable
as an individual of a natural kind; in a similar manner, the intellectus agens renders
the essential properties structuring the natural kind in the individual primary sub-
stance intelligible for the intellectus possibilis. Every potency requires an entity in act in
order for the particular potency to be rendered into an actual state. The vis cogitativa
and the intellectus agens serve as entities always in act ‘searching’ for potentialities
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

322  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

(Phantasms-1 and Phantasms-2) to become a qualitatively different state of actuality—­a

perception of an individual of a natural kind or a concept of the essence ready to be
known by the intellectus possibilis.
To put the matter somewhat differently, it might be fruitful to look upon the
functioning of the intellectus agens in a manner analogous to the conditioned awareness
of the vis cogitativa. The intellectus agens utilizes a structured awareness in interpreting
collections of individuals in what constitutes them as belonging to a natural kind or
having essential natures. As the vis cogitativa in utilizing Phantasm-2 contributes
towards an awareness of an individual, so too the intellectus agens contributes towards
an awareness of the essential, sortal properties, which constitute a nature or essence.
These essential natures are abstracted as intelligible species; in Aquinas’s philosophical
language, this happens by a scanning of the phantasms through the intellectus agens
and then by this intentional result or form being implanted in the intellectus possibilis,
which is the cognitive faculty where these essential natures are known. The implication
of this narrative is that the essential properties are known by a conditioned awareness—
the scanning—of Phantasms-3, in that Phantasms-3 are the residues of perceived indi-
viduals, which are Phantasms-2. The notion of ‘making a nature’ is the most fruitful
way to interpret the abstractive function of the intellectus agens; Geach discussed this
dimension rooted in Aquinas’s texts:
We can now say something that goes for all concepts without exception: Having a concept
never means being able to recognize some feature we have found in direct experience; the mind
makes concepts, and this concept-formation and the subsequent use of the concepts formed
never is a mere recognition or finding but this does not in the least prevent us from applying
concepts in our sense-experience and knowing sometimes that we apply them rightly. In all
cases it is a matter of fitting a concept to my experience, not of picking out the feature I am
interested in from among other features given simultaneously.32

Geach refers to the intellectus agens as ‘the mind’s concept-forming power.’33 One must
be careful in considering his analysis of the intellectus agens. This intellectual power
renders the conditions appropriate by means of an intelligible species—a species
impressa—so that the intellectus possibilis can possess a concept to be understood,
which would be the species expressa. As South keeps reminding readers of Aquinas on
mind, the intellectus agens does not ‘know’ a concept. On the contrary it renders a
concept possible through its formation of a species intelligibilis by means of its abstrac-
tive ability. Aquinas writes about this function in the following passages: ‘Similarly, we
understand the light of the intellectus agens, in so far as it is the reason for the intelligible
species, making them actually intelligible’ (De Veritate II, q. 10 a. 8), and ‘the intellectus
possibilis [. . .] is brought to completion [i.e. it actually understands] only through the

32
  Peter Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 40. An appendix to Mental Acts
continues this illustrative analysis of Aquinas’s position on the intellectus agens; ‘Historical Note on Aquinas
and Abstractionism’, 130–31.
33
  Ibid., 130.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  323

acquired intelligible species, which are abstracted from the senses’ (q. 10 a. 8). In his
De Veritate, Aquinas writes: ‘The active intellect is described as that whose function
it is to make all things, and the possible intellect as that whose function it is to be made
all things’ (De Veritate I, q. 2).34
In De Veritate, Aquinas explicitly refers to the intellectus agens as ‘making’ the con-
cepts for the intellectus possibilis; this is how a human knower, to borrow from Kenny,
‘acquires complicated concepts from experience’:
Physical light is seen through itself only in so far as it is the reason for the visibility of visible
things and a kind of form making them actually visible. Now, we see the light, which exists in
the sun only through its likeness, which exists in our sight. For as the specific nature of stone is
not in the eye, but its likeness, so the form of light, which is in the sun cannot be the same form
that is in the eye. Similarly, we understand the light of the intellectus agens, in so far as it is the
reason for the intelligible species, making them actually intelligible. (De Veritate II, q. 10 a. 8)35

Martin’s suggestions are in line with the general thrust of the interpretation of the
structure and function of the intellectus agens put forward in the final sections of this
chapter. The intellectus agens, in the manner of an efficient cause, actually makes the
species intelligiblis, which is a necessary condition for the formation of a concept that in
turn is known by the intellectus possibilis. This is a far cry from the sense of abstraction
often found in scholastic accounts of the intellectus agens in Thomas, where what this
faculty does is ‘pick out’ essential features in the phantasms. This is the interpretation
of the intellectus agens that concerned Geach in Mental Acts. To ‘pick out’ renders
incomprehensible Aquinas’s discussion of the intellectus agens as an efficient cause.
The function of the intellectus agens is to provide a ‘structured’ awareness of the
Phantasms-3 stored in the vis memorativa. Hence, what Aquinas’s philosophy of mind
consists of is a level of structured mental acts. The structured mental act of the vis

34
  Commenting on the role of the intellectus agens in Aquinas, Kenny wrote: ‘The specifically human
ability to acquire complicated concepts from experience, and to grasp geometrical thoughts presented in
diagrams, will perhaps be what Aquinas has in mind when he speaks of the agent intellect. […] Rats can
see, and discriminate between circles and triangles; but no amount of gazing at a diagram will make a rat a
student of geometry’: ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’, in Anthony Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection
of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 279.
35
  Martin provides one of the better accounts of the role the intellectus agens plays in the process of
abstraction. He places emphasis on the causal role of the intellectus agens: ‘But there is another, quite
different, analogy that Aquinas uses at least as often. This is to compare the active intellect to a light
that shines on the sense-image and reveals what is intelligible in it. The analogy is to this extent clear:
there is no apprehension of colour where there is no light, and there is no apprehension of the object
of thought without this contribution of the active intellect. The intellect, after all, is active in this
aspect: it actually modifies the nature of what it is brought to bear on, in a stronger way than the
nutcracker modifies the nature of the nut. There is more to it than that, even: Aquinas says that the
analogy breaks down in that light is normally thought of as merely revealing the colours of a thing
that were already there. There is no parallel for this with the active intellect: it is more like a light that
creates the colours which it makes visible. Thus the object of thought is something that is made by the
intellect: not something hanging around in the world or the imaging faculty waiting to be picked up’:
Christopher Martin, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Introductory Readings (London: Routledge,
1988), 118–19.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

324  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

cogitativa is aware of an individual as a member of a natural kind. This structured

awareness is accomplished through the means of Phantasm-2. The remnant or residue
of these acts of awareness is stored in the vis memorativa as Phantasms-3. These are
remnants of structured awarenesses. The intellectus agens then is a higher-level struc-
ture that ‘makes’ or ‘interprets’ the essential properties common to the natural kind
found potentially in the collection of a kind of individuals stored as Phantasms-3. As
the vis cogitativa is always ‘working’, as it were, finding individuals of natural kinds, so
too is the intellectus agens always ‘working’ trying to put a set of essential or sortal
properties into the natural kind found potentially in the individual primary substances
represented as individuals by Phantasms-3. What the intellectus agens makes is then
placed in the intellectus possibilis, as a conceptus with esse intentionale. This concept
is the means by which human knowers understand the nature of the external world.
This is the final part of the epistemological realism in Thomas that is aligned with his
ontological realism. The ontological realism is determined by natural kinds that are in
turn determined by sets of synthetic necessary sortal properties. This is the structure
of the forma substantialis that determines the foundation for the essential properties.
The intellectus agens, as an efficient cause, makes a concept, which in principle is
that by means of which a knower is able to know the fundamental ontological cate-
gories that determined the structure of the external world. Of course, this ontological
structure is rooted in individual primary substances, which are individual instances of
natural kinds.
In De Veritate, Aquinas suggests that the intellectus agens is intrinsically active
and always ready to make a species intelligibilis from the phantasms in the internal
sensorium:
In every act by which human knowers understand, the action of the intellectus agens and that
of the intellectus possibilis concur. Moreover, the intellectus agens does not receive anything
from the outside. Only the intellectus possibilis does so. Hence, with reference to the require-
ments for human thought and human thinking, there is nothing on the part of the intellectus
agens to keep human knowers from always understanding. However, the same does not hold
for the intellectus possibilis, because it is brought to completion—i.e. it actually understands—
only through the acquired intelligible species, which are abstracted from the senses. (De
Veritate II, q. 10 a. 8)

On this interpretation, Geach’s account on abstractionism in Mental Acts is illustrative.

The ‘content’ material for the interpretive function of the intellectus agens is Phantasm-3.
Phantasms-1 provide the material content from which the conditioned awareness
of the vis cogitativa was produced. Likewise, Phantasms-3 provide the content from
which the structured awareness of the intellectus agens is produced. The role
assigned in this analysis to Phantasm-3 in concept formation by means of the spe-
cies intelligibilis is expressed in the Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle explicitly
affirms the important function of memory in the process of the ‘making of the
universal’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  325

The notion of the intellectus agens is, of course, in dire need of a thorough conceptual
analysis for analytic historians of philosophy. However, the suggestion at the end of
this study of phantasms is the following: structured mental acts ‘perceiving’ on the
level of the vis cogitativa, ‘storing’ on the level of the vis memorativa, and ‘abstract-
ing’ on the level of the intellectus agens all enable the human knower to be aware of
the richly diversified ontology of individuals grouped in natural kinds that make up
the world Thomas Aquinas assumed to be the case. This is how Thomas offers a
cognitive explanation of how all of this is possible in his theory of an Aristotelian phi-
losophy of mind. The above sketch of levels of structured mental acts might prove
fruitful towards providing a thorough elucidation of such an unwieldy concept as
the intellectus agens.

Concluding Observations: Eight Summary Propositions

In coming to a terminal point in this extensive analysis of Aquinas’s account of sensation
and perception, one will recall that the important contribution of this analysis is the
explication of the role of the vis cogitativa in matters of perception. It will be useful at this
point to summarize the principal points rendered in this analysis about perception in
Aquinas. The following is a summary list of the philosophical propositions affirmed
in this analysis of the inner sense of the vis cogitativa in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind:
(a) The vis cogitativa is the faculty which perceives the individuals of the world. In
Aquinas’s ontology, these would be the primary substances, each of which is a
hoc aliquid.
(b) This perception is of an individual of a natural kind.
(c) This awareness transcends the boundaries of the external senses. The external
senses are limited, given the structure of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, to an
awareness of proper and common sensibles.
(d) The awareness of the vis cogitativa is an ‘active contribution’ to the perceiving
process—a structured mental act—to be aware of individuals as individuals
and not as bundles of sensations; this is Phantasm-2.
(e) It follows from (a)–(d) above that Aquinas developed a philosophy of mind on
the perceptual level sufficient to provide for an awareness of individuals.
(f) This account of the awareness of an individual is in addition to the usual
account of the reflexive awareness of the intellect so common to explications of
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 86 t. 1, ‘Whether
the Intellect Knows Particulars’.
(g) The vis memorativa as a ‘thesaurus’ stores as Phantasms-3 the perceived indi-
viduals known by the vis cogitativa.
(h) It follows that Aquinas offers an account for the awareness of individuals as
individual hoc aliquids on the level of sense perception.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

326  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

Concluding Propositions: The Mental Act

of the Vis Cogitativa
Given the propositions articulated above, the following list of conclusions can be
enumerated:
The vis cogitativa, in opposition to Frede’s claim, is not an embarrassment.
The awareness of the mental act of the vis cogitativa is a structured, Gestalt-like
awareness.
The awareness is not a judgement or proto-judgement.
This mental act distinguishes sensation from perception in Aquinas’s philosophy of
mind.
This act of awareness of the individual of a natural kind, in a modified Gestalt fashion,
is neither magic nor an instance of divine illumination.
The act of the vis cogitativa is more than a reduction to the structure of the vis
aestimativa, which many philosophers, in both the scholastic and the analytic
traditions, have suggested.36
This analysis of the vis cogitativa proposes an account of a structured mental act of
perception, which better explains the account of ‘abstraction’ by means of the intellec-
tus agens. Both the perceptual and the conceptual realms, therefore, have higher-level
structured mental acts, which when conjoined enable Aquinas to offer an account of
human knowledge of the primary substances of the external world. This is an example
of what in the late twentieth century became known as ‘cognitive psychology’.
With his discussion of the vis cogitativa and its mental act, Aquinas accepts in princi-
ple Wisdom’s noteworthy distinction between ‘sense statements’ and ‘thing statements’,
and is concerned about the same set of issues. Through his analysis of the vis cogitativa,
Aquinas undercuts the sense data theories of early twentieth-century epistemology
found in the writings of Russell, Moore, Price, and Ayer, and also the representational
empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Aquinas accomplishes this by suggesting,
in effect, that our experience is of things rather than of sense data. In addition, by using
a metaphilosophical methodology entailing a cognitive faculty psychology, Aquinas
provides the philosophy-of-mind machinery necessary to explain the possibility of an
act of awareness of an object beyond the immediate data of the proper and the com-
mon sensibles. There is a similarity to Strawson, who once claimed that ‘particulars’
serve as the basic elements of a human perceiver’s conceptual scheme. Accordingly,
Aquinas, like Strawson, Chisholm, Putnam, McDowell, and Ross, suggests that it is an
elementary philosophical mistake to assert that human perceivers are primarily and
fundamentally aware of bundles of sense data. To the contrary, human perceivers have
a direct awareness of ‘thing consciousness’ or ‘individual consciousness’. Furthermore,
this ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentional awareness’ are rudimentary for human perceivers.

36
  See e.g. Klubertanz, Kneale, Mahoney, and Kemp, Medieval Psychology.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)  327

The intentionality of mind is geared towards perceiving and understanding a world

of primary substances. It is this goal that leads Aquinas to develop the structured
positions that he articulates in his sophisticated philosophy of mind.

A Final Observation
This brings closure to the analysis—an explicatio textus—of the somewhat muddled
region of inner sense—phantasia—found in the many philosophy of mind texts
authored by Thomas Aquinas. This is a bit of philosophy of mind rooted in Aristotle’s
De Anima, but an account developed much further. If this account is sufficiently
perspicuous, it will possibly assist contemporary philosophers of mind address what
Haldane suggested as ‘one of the tasks for the next century’. The texts from the Summa
Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, the Commentary on the Soul, and the
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, among others used in this extended study, offer
justification for the explanatory analysis put forward and developed in this mono-
graph. Hence, the incidental object of sense is an intentio non sensata known through
the intentional activity of the vis cogitativa. Given this analysis, the vis cogitativa, in an
explanatory mode, is not an embarrassment to Aquinas. On the contrary, this faculty
provides the possibility for the awareness of an individual of a natural kind on the level
of perception. This in turn renders the entire abstraction process, which is part of the
intellect, more coherent. This analysis has argued that, for Aquinas, the vis cogitativa is
a necessary component between sense perception of individual sensible qualities and
conceptual thought of sortal properties by means of abstraction; this is, of course, the
position that Frede called an embarrassment. To reiterate an earlier observation, with-
out the vis cogitativa, Aquinas’s philosophy of mind would be both much muddled and
indeed an embarrassment.
This concludes the inquiry into the role of perception theory articulated in the
­philosophy of mind of Thomas Aquinas. Themes common to traditional discussions
in intentionality theories embellish and assist our understanding of Thomas on mental
acts in both the external and the internal sensoria, together with the functioning of the
intellectus agens and the intellectus possibilis.

appendix
The Inner Sense Theory and Contemporary
Scientific Explanation
In considering medieval and Renaissance cognitive theory, historians of philosophy might
reflect on the analysis of inner sense put forward by the historian of psychology Simon Kemp.
Kemp offers several significant suggestions in his evaluation of the medieval theory of inner
sense, which will be indicated briefly in what follows. First of all, this cognitive theory found in
the medieval texts is, Kemp suggests, an ‘information-­processing model’. Secondly, the theory
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/19/2016, SPi

328  The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense (2)

is consistent with ‘discrete stage-processing models’, which, Kemp notes, have been important in
contemporary cognitive psychology. These models argue that cognitive information is transformed
in discrete stages. Thirdly, contemporary psychologists distinguish between ‘episodic memory’
and ‘semantic memory’.37 For Aquinas, the former would be located in the inner sense faculties
and the latter in the mind; this ‘semantic memory’ appears to be similar structurally to Geach’s
analysis of the concept in Aquinas as an acquired cognitive ability.38
Kemp suggests that when considering the value of medieval theories of inner sense, one
needs to consider the metascientific theory articulated by recent philosophers of science.39 The
necessary conditions for an adequate scientific theory include explanatory depth, unifying power,
consistency and coherence, and application. The theory of inner sense as developed in medieval
cognitive theory, Kemp argues, did attempt to explain perception theory. Moreover, it was a
unified position covering the developing stages of phantasm formation; furthermore, the
overall cognitive theory appeared to be consistent internally. Lastly, Kemp writes that the
theory helped account for certain mental aberrations—nightmares, delusions, etc.—that were
explained through the malfunctioning of the vis cogitativa or the phantasia.
Historians of philosophy might reflect on Kemp’s admonition to his fellow p ­ sychologists—
and also, it would appear, to contemporary philosophers of mind—who too readily dismiss
medieval and Renaissance cognitive theories as nothing more than novel episodes of triviality:
‘However, we would claim that the theory of the inner senses was an elaborate and innovative
exposition that, even in retrospect, can be regarded as a considerable scientific achievement.’40
The same might be argued in defence of the philosophy-of-mind positions on inner sense
articulated by Thomas Aquinas. Haldane too offers the general advice to his fellow philosophy-
of-mind colleagues that Aristotelian-based cognitive theory may assist in resolving several of
the theoretical muddles common to contemporary philosophy-of-mind studies.

37
  Simon Kemp, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, American Journal of Psychology 106(4)
(1993), 568–9.
38
 Geach, Mental Acts, 11–17.
39
  Kemp refers to the work of Larry Laudan in ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, 572.
40
  Ibid., 572–3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography

Principal Aquinas Texts

Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas
Aquinas, trans. K. Foster, OP, and S. Humphries, OP (New Haven, Conn., 1951).
A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Robert Pasnau (New Haven, Conn., 1999).
Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, rev. edn (Notre Dame, Ind.: 1994).
Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Chicago, 1963).
Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Chicago, 1961).
Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, trans. Fabian R. Larcher, OP (Albany, NY,
1970).
‘Commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 15: 17–19’, in Timothy McDermott
(ed.), Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford, 1993), 192–3.
Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, trans. A. P. D’Entrèves and J. G. Dawson
(Oxford, 1954).
Compendium of Theology (various trans.) (London, 1920).
De Ente et Essentia, trans. Joseph Bobik as Aquinas on Being and Essence (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1965).
De Memoria et Reminiscentia, trans. Robert Pasnau: http://www.JosephKenny.joyeurs.com/
CDtexts/DeMemoriaReminsc.htm.
On the Power of God (London, 1932).
On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists, trans. Beatrice H. Zedler (Milwaukee, Wis.,
1968).
Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima, in B.-C. Bazán (ed.), Sancti Thomae de Aquino doctoris
angelici (Rome, 1996).
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, ed. Raimondo Spiazzi (Rome, 1964).
Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus, trans. J. P. Reid as On the Virtues in General (Providence,
RI: Providence College Press, 1951).
S. Thomae Aquinatis Quaestiones Quodlibetales, ed. Raimondo Spiazzi (Rome, 1965).
Sentencia Libri De Anima, ed. R.-A. Gauthier (Paris: Vrin, 1984).
Summa Contra Gentiles (various trans.) (Notre Dame, Ind., 1975).
Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London, 1920).
Summa Theologiae: Supplement, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York,
1946).
Truth (De Veritate), trans. James V. McGlynn (Chicago, 1953).

Other References

Albertus Magnus, Libri Tres de Anima and Summa de Homine, in George Peter Klubertanz, SJ,
The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa According to St. Thomas
Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Modern Schoolman, 1952).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

330  Select Bibliography

Anscombe, G. E. M., and Peter T. Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961).
Aristotle, Categoriae, trans. E. M. Edghill, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle
(New York: Random House, 1941), 3–37.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, rev. text with introduction and commentary by William D. Ross
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
Armstrong, D. M., Bodily Sensations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
Ayer, Alfred Jules, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London, 1940).
Baumrin, Judith M., ‘Aristotle’s Empirical Nativism’, American Psychologist 30(4) (1975), 486–94.
Beilby, James K., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against
Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Bergmann, Gustav, ‘Inclusion, Exemplification and Inference in G. E. Moore’, in E. D. Klemke
(ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of G. E. Moore (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 81–94.
Bergmann, Gustav, Meaning and Existence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960).
Bergmann, Gustav, ‘Ontological Alternatives’, in Logic and Reality (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964), 124–57.
Bergmann, Gustav, The Philosophy of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).
Berkeley, George, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1874).
Boland, Vivian, OP, ‘Kenny on Aquinas on Being’, New Blackfriars 84(991) (2003), 389.
Bourke, Vernon, ‘Thomas Aquinas, St.’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
vol. 13 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 106.
Boyle, Leonard E., ‘The Dominican Order and Theological Study’, Providence: Studies in
Western Civilization 2(3) (1994), 241–56.
Boyle, Leonard E., The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas, vol. 5 (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982).
Bréhier, Émile, The Seventeenth Century, trans. Wade Baskin (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966).
Brentano, Franz, ‘Nous Poietikos: Survey of Earlier Interpretations’, in Martha Nussbaum and
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 313–42.
Brentano, Franz, Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt/Realism and the Background to
Phenomenology, ed. Roderick M. Chisholm, trans. D. B. Terrell (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).
Broad, C. D., Scientific Thought (London: Kegan Paul, 1927).
Brower, Jeffrey E., Review of Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages, Speculum
75(1) (2000), 206–7.
Burnyeat, M. F., ‘Aquinas on “Spiritual Change” in Perception’, in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and
Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 129–53.
Burnyeat, M. F., ‘Is an Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind Still Credible? (A Draft)’, in Martha
Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 15–26.
Burrell, David, ‘Review Note on John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas’,
Amazon Review Service (2001).
Cantens, Bernardo, ‘Cognitive Faculties and Evolutionary Naturalism’, in Intelligence and the
Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006),
201–8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography  331

Chisholm, Roderick, ‘Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional’, in Edward

N.  Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (eds), Phenomenology and Existentialism (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 1–23.
Chisholm, Roderick, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982).
Chisholm, Roderick, ‘Intentionality and the Theory of Signs’, Philosophical Studies 3
(1952).
Chisholm, Roderick, On Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Chisholm, Roderick, ‘On the Observability of the Self ’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research (1969), 7–21.
Chisholm, Roderick, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University
Press, 1973).
Chisholm, Roderick, Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press,
1960).
Chisholm, Roderick, and Wilfrid S. Sellars, ‘Intentionality and the Mental: A Correspondence,’
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (1957), 521–39.
Cohen, Sheldon M., ‘St. Thomas Aquinas on the Immaterial Reception of Sensible Forms’,
Philosophical Review (1982), 193–209.
Copleston, Frederick C., SJ, Aquinas (London: Penguin, 1955).
Copleston, Frederick C., SJ, History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy, vol. 2 (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1962).
Cottingham, John, and Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method and Morality: Essays in Honour of
Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Davies, Brian, OP (ed.), Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
Davies, Brian, OP, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Dauphinais, Michael, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (eds), Aquinas the Augustinian
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
Deely, John N., ‘Animal Intelligence and Concept Formation’, The Thomist 35(1) (1971),
43–93.
Deely, John N., Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
Deely, John N., Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation (Scranton, Penn.:
University of Scranton Press, 2007).
Deely, John N., New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994).
Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and
Replies, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Descartes, René, The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, trans. John Veitch
(Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).
Dewan, Lawrence, ‘On Milbank and Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas’, Nova et Vetera 1(1) (2003),
199–212.
Di Blasi, Fulvio, Virtue’s End: God in the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas (South
Bend, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2008).
Durbin, Paul, Summa Theologiae, vol. 12, Latin text and English translation of ‘Human
Intelligence’ (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 170–72.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

332  Select Bibliography

Eschmann, I. T., OP, ‘A Catalogue of St. Thomas’s Works’, in E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy
of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), 381–430.
Everson, Stephen, Aristotle on Perception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
Fodor, Jerry A., Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Frede, Dorothea, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, in Dominik Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval
Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 155–83.
Galilei, Galileo, ‘1623: The Assayer’, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. with introduction
and notes by Stillman Drake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).
Geach, Peter T., ‘Form and Existence’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1954), 251–72.
Geach, Peter T., Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
Gibson, James, ‘The Perceiving of Hidden Surfaces’, in Robert G. Turnbull and Peter Machamer
(eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 422–34.
Gilby, Thomas, St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1951).
Gilson, E., The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Herder, 1939).
Gredt, Josephus, Elementa Philosophiae Aristelico-Thomisticae (Barcelona: Herder, 1961).
Guttenplan, Samuel D. (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994).
Haldane, John, ‘Analytical Thomism’, The Monist 80(4) (1997), 485–6.
Haldane, John, ‘Aquinas on Sense-Perception’, Philosophical Review 92(2) (1983), 233–9.
Haldane, John, ‘Aquinas and the Active Intellect’, Philosophy 67(260) (1992), 199–210.
Haldane, John, ‘Brentano’s Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989), 1–32.
Haldane, John, Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical (London: Routledge,
2004).
Haldane, John, Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics, ed. David S. Oderberg
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
Haldane, John, ‘Forms of Thought’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M.
Chisholm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149–71.
Haldane, John, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan
(ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 333–8.
Haldane, John, ‘(I Am) Thinking’, Ratio 16(2) (2003), 124–39.
Haldane, John, ‘In Memoriam: G. E. M. Anscombe (1919-2001)’, Review of Metaphysics 53(4)
(2000), 1019.
Haldane, John, ‘Insight, Inference, and Intellection’, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 73 (1999), 31–45.
Haldane, John, ‘Intentionality and One-Sided Relations’, Ratio 9(2) (1996), 95–114.
Haldane, John, ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’, in John Cottingham and
Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 119–39.
Haldane, John, ‘The Metaphysics of Intellect(ion)’, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 39–55.
Haldane, John, Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography  333

Haldane, John, ‘Mind–World Identity and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in John Haldane and
Crispin Wright (eds), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 15–37.
Haldane, John, ‘On Coming Home to (Metaphysical) Realism’, Philosophy 71(276) (1996), 287–96.
Haldane, John, ‘Putnam on Intentionality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52(3)
(1992), 671–82.
Haldane, John, ‘Rational and Other Animals’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41
(1996), 17–28.
Haldane, John, ‘Realism with a Metaphysical Skull’, in James Conant and Urszula Zeglen (eds),
Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2002), 97–104.
Haldane, John, ‘Reid, Scholasticism and Current Philosophy of Mind’, in M. Dalgarno and
E. Matthews (eds), The Philosophy of Thomas Reid (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 285–304.
Haldane, John, ‘A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind’, Ratio 11(3) (1998), 253–77. Repr.
in David S. Oderberg (ed.), Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).
Haldane, John, ‘The State and Fate of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’, American
Philosophical Quarterly 37(3) (2000), 301–11.
Haldane, John (ed.), ‘Thomism and the Future of Catholic Philosophy’, special issue, New
Blackfriars 80(938) (1999), 158–69.
Haldane, John, ‘A Thomist Metaphysics’, in Richard M. Gale (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to
Metaphysics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).
Haldane, John, ‘Thomistic Ethics in America’, Logos 3(4) (2000), 150–68.
Haldane, John, ‘Truth and Hope’, Journal of Philosophy 99(3) (2002), 157–62.
Haldane, John, ‘What Future Has Catholic Philosophy?’, American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 71 (1997), 79–90.
Haldane, John, and Crispin Wright (eds), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
Hamlyn, D. W., Aristotle’s De Anima: Books II and III, with Passages from Book I (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986).
Hamlyn, D. W., Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
Hobbes, Thomas, ed. Edwin Curley, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition
of 1668 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).
Hochberg, Herbert, ‘The Radical Hylomorphism of Bergmann’s Aristotelian Metaphysics and
the Ontology of Relations’, Modern Schoolman 78(4) (2001), 257–88.
Honderich, Ted, ‘Introduction’, in Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat (eds), Philosophy As It
Was (New York: Penguin, 1984).
Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition, ed. Tom L.
Beauchamp, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Husserl, E., ‘Ideen III’, in Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Phenomenology and Existentialism (New
York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Jacobs, Jonathan, ‘Habits, Cognition, and Realism’, in John Haldane (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics,
and Value in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2002), 109–24.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

334  Select Bibliography

Jenkins, John I., ‘Aquinas on the Veracity of the Intellect’, Journal of Philosophy 88(11) (1991),
623–32.
Jenkins, John I., Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
Johansen, T. K., Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
John of St Thomas (also known as John Poinsot), Philosophia Naturalis, ed. Beatus Reiser (John
N. Deely) III (Turin, 1933).
Jordan, Mark D., ‘Theology and Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleanor Stump (eds),
The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
232–51.
Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929).
Kemp, Simon, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1996).
Kemp, Simon, ‘The Inner Senses: A Medieval Theory of Cognitive Functioning in the Ventricles
of the Brain’, in Wolfgang G. Bringmann, Helmut E. Luck, Rudolf Miller, and Charles E. Early
(eds), A Pictorial History of Psychology (Chicago: Quintessence, 1997).
Kemp, Simon, Medieval Psychology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990).
Kemp, Simon (with Garth J. O. Fletcher), ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, American
Journal of Psychology 106(4) (1993), 559–76.
Kenny, Anthony, Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Kenny, Anthony (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor, 1969).
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Aquinas: ‘Intentionality’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Philosophy Through Its Past
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 78–96.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Aquinas and the Appearances of Bread’, review of John Milbank and Catherine
Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 2001), 14.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Aquinas Medalist’s Address’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind:
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 23–7.
Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Kenny, Anthony ‘Cognitive Scientism’, in Kenny (ed.), From Empedocles to Wittgenstein:
Historical Essays in Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 149–62.
Kenny, Anthony, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968).
Kenny, Anthony, Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Kenny, Anthony, ‘The Four Types of Quality’, appendix 3, Summa Theologiae, vol. 22:
Dispositions for Human Acts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 115–16.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Intellect and Imagination in Aquinas’, in Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection
of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 273–93.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Intentionality: Aquinas and Wittgenstein’, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); repr. in Brian Davies, OP (ed.), Thomas Aquinas:
Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 243–56.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Introduction’, Summa Theologiae, vol. 22, ‘Dispositions for Human Acts’
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
Kenny, Anthony, The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography  335

Kenny, Anthony, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

Kenny, Anthony, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Kenny, Anthony, The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994).
Kenny, Anthony, Philosophy in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Kenny, Anthony, The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Stump’s Aquinas’, Philosophical Quarterly 54(216) (2004), 457–62.
Kenny, Anthony, ‘Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa
Theologiae, 1a 75–89’, Times Literary Supplement 5214 (2003).
Kenny, Anthony, What I Believe (London: Continuum, 2006).
Kenny, Anthony, Wittgenstein, rev. edn (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006).
Kerr, Fergus, OP, ‘Aquinas and Analytic Philosophy: Natural Allies?’, Modern Theology 20(1)
(2004), 123–39.
Kerr, Fergus, OP, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Kerr, Fergus, OP, ‘A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents’, International
Journal of Systematic Theology 8(2) (2006), 128–48.
Kerr, Fergus, OP, ‘Origins of Analytical Philosophy’, New Blackfriars 84(991) (2003).
Kerr, Fergus, OP, ‘Thomistica III’, New Blackfriars 85(1000) (2004), 628–41.
Kerr, Fergus, OP, ‘The Varieties of Interpreting Aquinas’, in Fergus Kerr, OP (ed.), Contemplating
Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2003).
Kim, Jaegwon, ‘Chisholm on Intentionality: De Se, De Re and De Dicto’, in Louis Hahn (ed.),
The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 361–83.
Klubertanz, George Peter, SJ, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa
According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis, Mo.: Modern Schoolman, 1952).
Klemke, E. D., The Epistemology of G. E. Moore (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1969).
Kneale, William, ‘Analysis of Perceiving’, in F. N. Sibley (ed.), Perception: A Philosophical
Symposium (London: Methuen, 1971), 64–80.
Knowles, David, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon Press, 1962).
Kretzmann, Norman, ‘The Philosophy of Mind’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump
(eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 128–59.
Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later
Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism,
1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Kretzmann, Norman, and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Leahey, Thomas Hardy, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought
(Harlow: Longman, 1987).
Lee, Edward N., ‘The Sense of an Object: Epicurus on Seeing and Hearing’, in P. K. Machamer
and R. G. Turnbull (eds), Studies in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and
Science (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 27–59.
Lee, Patrick, ‘Human Beings Are Animals’, in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law and Moral
Inquiry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 135–51.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

336  Select Bibliography

Lindberg, David C. (ed.), John Pecham and the Science of Optics (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1970).
Lisska, Anthony J., ‘A Note: Aquinas’s Use of Phantasia’, The Thomist 40(2) (1976), 294–302.
Lisska, Anthony J., Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
Lisska, Anthony J., ‘Axioms of Intentionality in Aquinas’ Theory of Knowledge’, International
Philosophical Quarterly 16(4) (1976), 305–22.
Lisska, Anthony J., ‘Deely and Geach on Abstractionism in Thomistic Epistemology’, The
Thomist 37(3) (1973), 548–68.
Lisska, Anthony J., ‘Deely, Aquinas, and Poinsot: How the Intentionality of Inner Sense
Transcends the Limits of Empiricism’, Semiotica 178 (2010), 135–67.
Lisska, Anthony J., Review, ‘Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation’,
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84(1) (2010), 168–72.
Lisska, Anthony J., Review of Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De
Anima, The Medieval Review (Apr. 2000).
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Lundin, R. W., Theories and Systems of Psychology (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1972).
MacDonald, Scott, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, in N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 160–95.
MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1991).
MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
(London: Duckworth, 1999).
Mahoney, Edward P., ‘Sense, Intellect, and Imagination in Albert, Thomas, and Siger’, in
Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later
Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 602–22.
Maritain, Jacques, The Dream of Descartes, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944).
Maritain, Jacques, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (London: Sheed & Ward, 1928;
repr. 1950).
Martin, Christopher, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Introductory Readings (London:
Routledge, 1988).
McCool, Gerald A., ‘Is Thomas’ Way of Philosophising Still Viable Today?’, Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association 64 (1990), 1–13.
McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
McInerny, Ralph, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006).
Michon, Cyrille, ‘Intentionality and Proto-thoughts’, in Dominik Perler (ed.), Ancient and
Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 325–42.
Milbank, John, and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001).
Modrak, Deborah K. W., Aristotle: The Power of Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987).
Moore, G. E., ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, in J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British
Philosophy, 2nd ser. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), 32–59.
Moore, G. E., Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953).
Nelson, Everett J., ‘The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Induction’, Proceedings and Addresses
of the American Philosophical Association 40 (1967), 19–33.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography  337

Nugent, Francis, ‘Immanent Action in St. Thomas and Aristotle’, New Scholasticism 37(2)
(1963), 164–87.
Nussbaum, Martha C., The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘The Text of Aristotle’s De Anima’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amélie
Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1–6.
Nussbaum, Martha C., and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
O’Callaghan, John P., Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005).
O’Connor, Daniel J., Aquinas and Natural Law (London: Macmillan, 1967).
Oderberg, David S. (ed.), Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).
O’Meara, Thomas F., Thomas Aquinas, Theologian (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1997).
Owens, Joseph, Cognition: An Epistemological Inquiry (Houston, Tex.: Center for Thomistic
Studies, 1992).
Owens, Joseph, ‘The Primacy of the External in Thomistic Noetics’, Église et théologie 5 (1974),
155–69.
Pasnau, Robert, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
Pasnau, Robert, Review of Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages by Simon Kemp, Isis 88
(1997), 703–4.
Pasnau, Robert, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae,
1a 75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Pasnau, Robert, Thomas Aquinas: The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).
Paterson, Craig and Matthew Pugh (eds), Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Peghaire, Julien, ‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’, Modern
Schoolman 20 (1942–3), 123–40, 210–29.
Peifer, John, The Mystery of Knowledge (formerly: The Concept in Thomism) (Albany, NY: Magi
Books, 1964).
Perler, Dominik (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
Peterson, John, Realism and Logical Atomism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976).
Philippe, M. D., ‘Phantasia in the Philosophy of Aristotle’, The Thomist 35(1) (1971), 1–42.
Phillips, R. P., Modern Thomistic Philosophy: An Explanation for Students (London: Burns,
Oates & Washbourne, 1934).
Pickstock, Catherine, ‘Imitating God: The Truth of Things According to Thomas Aquinas’, New
Blackfriars 81 (2000), 308–26.
Pilsner, Joseph, The Specification of Human Actions in St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (eds), Faith
and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press,
1983), 1–93.
Plantinga, Alvin, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

338  Select Bibliography

Pouivet, R., Après Wittgenstein, saint Thomas (Paris: PUF, 1997); English translation, After
Wittgenstein, St Thomas, by Michael Sherwin, OP (Notre Dame, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2006).
Pozzo, Riccardo, ‘Review of Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition’, Review of Metaphysics 57(2)
(2003), 424–5.
Preller, Victor, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).
Putnam, Hilary, ‘Aristotle’s Mind and the Contemporary Mind’, in Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou,
Jagdish Hattiangadi, and David M. Johnson (eds), Aristotle and Contemporary Science, vol. 1
(New York: Lang, 2000), 7–28.
Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992).
Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History, vol. 3: Realism and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981).
Putnam, Hilary, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009).
Putnam, Hilary, ‘Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human
Mind’, Journal of Philosophy 91(9) (1994), 445–517.
Quine, Willard Van Orman, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1980).
Quine, Willard Van Orman, ‘On What There Is’, in From A Logical Point of View, rev. edn
(New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 1–19.
Raith, Charles, Aquinas and Calvin on Romans: God’s Justification and Our Participation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Reid, Thomas, ‘An Inquiry into the Human Mind’, in Louis Schneider (ed.), The Scottish
Moralists on Human Nature and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
Reid, Thomas, Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1983).
Reid, Thomas, The Philosophical Orations of Thomas Reid Delivered at Graduation Ceremonies
in King’s College, Aberdeen, 1753, 1756, 1759, 1762, ed. D. D. Todd (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1989).
Rescher, Nicholas, Common-Sense: A New Look at an Old Philosophical Tradition (Milwaukee,
Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2005).
Rikhof, H. W. M., ‘Thomas at Utrecht’, in Fergus Kerr, OP (ed.), Contemplating Aquinas: On the
Varieties of Interpretation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003),
105–36.
Ross, James, ‘Aquinas on Belief and Knowledge’, in William A. Frank and Girard J. Etzkorn (eds),
Essays Honoring Allan B. Wolter (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1985), 245–69.
Russell, Bertrand, The Analysis of Mind (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921).
Russell, Bertrand, ‘On Denoting’, Mind (1905), 479–93; repr. in Logic and Knowledge, ed.
R. C. Marsh (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956).
Russell, Bertrand, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1903).
Ryan, John K., ‘Aquinas and Hume on the Laws of Association’, New Scholasticism 12(4) (1938),
366–77.
Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London, 2009).
Ryle, Gilbert, ‘John Locke on the Human Understanding’, in J. L. Stocks and Gilbert Ryle (eds),
Tercentenary Addresses on John Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); repr. in
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

Select Bibliography  339

C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong (eds), Locke and Berkeley (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1968), 14–39.
Ryle, Gilbert, ‘Sensation’, in H. D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy III (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1956), 427–43.
Ryle, Gilbert, ‘Teaching and Training’, in R. S. Peters (ed.), The Concept of Education (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1967), 105–19.
Sellars, Wilfrid, ‘Being and Being Known’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 34 (1960), 28–49.
Sellars, Wilfrid, In The Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Kevin Sharp and
Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Sellars, Wilfrid, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Humanities Press, 1963).
Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, Sexti Empirici opera 3 (1842).
Sheehan, Peter, ‘Aquinas on Intentionality’, in Anthony Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 307–21.
Shields, Christopher, ‘Some Recent Approaches to Aristotle’s De Anima’, in D. W. Hamlyn
(ed.),  De Anima: Books II and III with Passages from Book 1 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
Simons, Peter, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in Franz Brentano, Psychology from the
Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister
(London: Routledge, 1995).
Smit, Houston, ‘Aquinas’s Abstractionism’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10(1) (2001),
85–118.
Sorabji, Richard, ‘Intentionality and Physiological Processes: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense-
Perception’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De
Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 195–226.
South, James B., ‘Suárez and the Problem of External Sensation’, Medieval Philosophy and
Theology 10(2) (2001), 217–40.
Stock, Michael, Psychologia (Dover, Mass.: St Stephen’s College, 1960).
Strawson, P. F., Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959).
Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003).
Suttor, Timothy (trans. and commentary), Summa Theologiae, vol. 11 (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
Taylor, A. E., Aquinas: Sexcentenary Lecture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1924).
Taylor, A. E., ‘Preface to the Seventh Edition’, Elements of Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1924).
Taylor, Richard, ‘Abstraction in al-Farabi’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 151–68.
Taylor, Richard C., Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba: Long Commentary on the De Anima of
Aristotle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
Taylor, Richard, and Max Herrera, ‘Aquinas’s Naturalized Epistemology’, in Social Justice: Its
Theory and Practice: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 79
(2005), 85–102.
Teichman, Jenny, Philosophy and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Tellkamp, Jörg Alejandro, ‘Aquinas on Intentions in the Medium and in the Mind’, in Intelligence
and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association
80 (2006), 275–89.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/14/2016, SPi

340  Select Bibliography

Tellkamp, Jörg Alejandro, Sinne, Gegenstände und Sensibilia: zur Wahrnehmungslehre des
Thomas von Aquin (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
Thomas, Ivo, OP, ‘Introduction’, in K. Foster and S. Humphries (eds and trans.), Commentary
on Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), 13–37.
Torrell, Jean-Pierre, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert
Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
Torrell, Jean-Pierre, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2: Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003).
Tranoy, Kurt, ‘Thomas Auinas’, in D. J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy
(New York: Free Press, 1964), 98–123.
Tugwell, Simon, ‘Introduction’, in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1988), 1–129.
Turnbull, Robert G., ‘The Role of the “Special Sensibles” in the Perception Theories of Plato and
Aristotle’, in Robert G. Turnbull and Peter Machamer (eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1978), 3–26.
Veatch, Henry B., For an Ontology of Morals (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971).
Walz, Angelus, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Biographical Study, trans. Sebastian Bullough, OP
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951).
Weinberg, J. R., A Short History of Medieval Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1964).
Weisheipl, James A., Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1974). Rev. edn with corrections (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1983).
Weitz, Morris, ‘The Grounds of Sense: The Philosophy of Everett J. Nelson’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 33(4) (1973), 455–71.
Wells, N. J. ‘Descartes’ Idea and its Sources’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67(4)
(1993), 513–35.
White, A. Leo, ‘Instinct and Custom’, The Thomist 66(4) (2002), 577–605.
White, A. Leo, ‘Perception, Language, and Concept Formation in St. Thomas’, Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 (2010), 197–212.
White, A. Leo, ‘Why the Cogitative Power?’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 72 (1998), 213–27.
Williams, A. N., ‘Is Aquinas a Foundationalist?’, New Blackfriars 91(1031) (2010), 20–45.
Wilson, M. D., ‘History of Philosophy in Philosophy Today, and the Case of the Sensible
Qualities’, Philosophical Review 101(1) (1992), 191–243.
Wippel, John F., The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated
Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophische Untersuchunge (Philosophical Investigations), trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Wolfson, Harry Austryn, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’,
Harvard Theological Review 28(2) (1935), 69–133.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1984).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

Index

aboutness╇ 33–6, 40, 51–2, 62, 79, 83, 93, 175 account of perception╇ 5
Aboutness-1╇ 33, 35 account of sensation╇ 180, 213
Aboutness-2╇34 account of sensation and perception╇ 1
abstraction╇ 15, 25, 27, 47, 86, 247, 271n.88, 276, and empiricism╇ 64
278, 312–13, 321, 323, 326–7 and teleology╇ 9
cognitive╇53n.51 and the concept of ‘imago’╇ 289
intellectual╇5 Aristotelian commentaries╇ 25
mental act of╇ 115, 252 Aristotelian ontology╇ 319
of concepts╇ 274 Aristotelian realist metaphysics╇ 145
power of╇ 264 as a direct realist╇ 140
process of╇ 1, 3, 87, 114, 250, 267, 272, 284, Cognitive Theory of Inner Sense╇216
295, 315–16 Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics╇ 41, 43–4,
abstractionism╇324 80, 89, 108–9, 164
act/object distinction╇ 35, 52–3, 93 Commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the
actio hominis/actio humana╇ 58n.60, 110 Corinthians╇ 26n.69, 39n.27
active intellect╇ 161, 237, 318, 323, see Commentary on the De Anima╇ 5n.13, 12,
also abstraction 13n.14, 25, 29n.77, 30, 31n.87, 55, 87n.55,
actuality╇ 42–3, 49, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 106, 108, 90, 149n.3, 161n.21, 163, 210, 219n.1, 233,
113, 116, 121–2, 134, 142, 155, 157, 322 260n.60, 287n.40
Actuality-1╇ 99–101, 103–4, 108, 110–11, Commentary on the Metaphysics╇ 22, 68, 72,
113–15, 118, 160, 168, 171, 181–3, 296, 302 151, 163, 165, 178, 240–1, 249–50, 256n.49,
Actuality-2╇ 100n.6, 101–2, 105, 108–11, 262, 267, 268, 307
182, 314 Commentary on the Posterior Analytics╇ 5, 90,
adequatio╇ 86, 141, 192 246–7, 266–7, 321
adequatio rei et intellectus╇86–7 Commentary on the Sentences of Peter
aisthesis╇ 4, 51n.46 Lombard╇ 24, 62, 160, 175, 245–6
Albert the Great╇ 67n.6 Commentary on the Soul╇ 3, 5, 16–17, 26,
Albertus Magnus╇ 13, 29, 133, 207, 223, 226, 230, 28–31, 40, 42–4, 49–2, 62, 63n.76, 66–7, 74,
235, see also Albert the Great 78, 83, 87, 89, 91, 94, 96–7, 103–6, 108–11,
alteration╇ 45, 48, 62, 74, 91–2, 96, 107–11, 140, 113, 116, 120, 123–4, 130, 132–8, 143–4,
146, 158, 180, 183, see also change 148–50, 152–3, 155–9, 161, 163, 168, 170,
Analytical Thomism╇ 2, 8, 12n.8, 15, 20–1 175, 179, 183–4, 186, 188, 197–8, 202, 205,
anamnesis╇ 35, 85 207–8, 212, 217, 219, 224–5, 229, 233, 241,
angels╇ 39–40, 64n.1, 95, 104, 241n.18, 244, 249, 255, 259–60, 262, 266, 275, 277–8,
251n.41, 252 281, 283–4, 287, 295, 299, 303–4, 306, 314,
angelic knowledge╇ 39–40, 103n.9, 241n.18 327, see also Commentary on the De Anima
angelic mind╇ 252 Compendium of Theology╇ 66, 138–40, 179,
angelic thought╇ 251n.41 184, 319
animals╇ 3, 10, 12n.10, 41, 68, 72, 82, 97n.4, 100, conformative theory╇ 192
103, 105n.12, 113–14, 131, 136, 138, 151, De Ente et Essentia╇ 33, 46, 57, 67n.6, 116,
153–4, 157, 170, 180, 188, 195–9, 212, 117n.20, 256n.49
216–18, 222, 226, 239–43, 245, 247, De Imagine╇291
248n.34, 249–52, 258, 265–7, 283, 290, 299 De Memoria et Reminiscentia╇ 139, 266, 311n.21
Anscombe, Elizabeth╇ 20n.35, 34n.10, 35n.16, De Principio Individuationis╇ 259–61, 271
36n.20, 40n.31, 192 De Spiritualibus Creaturis╇ 31, 95
anti-realism╇ 150, 156, 264, see also realism denies vacuum╇ 155
aporia╇ 23, 76n.34, 94, 158, 191, 200, 233, distinct from Aristotle╇ 12
308n.10 epistemological naturalism╇ 309
Aquinas, Thomas epistemology╇ 8, 144, 270, 287
account of inner sense╇ 7 externalism╇ 188, 213
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

342â•… index

Aquinas, Thomas (cont.) theory of perceptual intentionality╇ 273

foundationalism╇188 theory of sensation╇ 185, 195
intentional existence of forms╇ 1, 33 theory of sensation and perception╇ 302
metaphilosophical procedure╇ 145 treatment of sensation and perception╇ 186–9
metaphilosophy╇144 versus Avicenna╇ 199
metaphysics╇ 145, 250 Arabian philosophers╇ 85, 162, 277n.10, 214,
On the Power of God╇ 109, 137 223, 226, 228, 234, 270, 282, 298
On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Aristotelian
Averroists╇ 54, 99, 104, 137, 139, 184 account of change╇ 91
ontological realism╇ 316 categories╇ 107–8, 146, 180
ontology╇ 11, 164, 312 cognitive theory╇ 328
ontology of substantial form╇ 145 commentaries╇ 2, 13, 16, 25, 28–30, 78, 150,
philosophical system╇ 144 163, 188, 219, 233
philosophical thought╇ 148n.42 concept of a tabula rasa╇104
philosophical work╇ 2 corpus╇13
philosophy of mind╇ 3–4, 8–9, 11, 145, definition of motion╇ 96, 106
169–70, 213, 227–8, 261–2, 270, 312 epistemology╇ 61, 200
psychology╇145 formal causality╇ 156, 164
Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima╇ 6, 16, 25, hylomorphism╇ 42, 54, 63, 107, 319
30–1, 70, 162, 170, 314 incidental object of sense╇ 217
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate╇ 6, 16, insights on inner sense╇ 215
68–9, 72, 74, 78, 86, 112, 132, 141, 167, intentionality theory╇ 52, 61, 173
169–71, 180, 212, 219, 221n.6, 231, 239, logical forms╇ 87
241, 246, 262, 282, 293, 322–4, 327 metaphysics╇ 34, 61, 121, 145
Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus╇122–3, notion of change╇ 106
311–12 notion of potentiality╇ 118
Quaestiones Quodlibetales╇124 ontology╇ 47, 121, 141, 232, 319
rejection of atomism╇ 155, 165, 214 perception theory╇ 17, 113, 211
rejection of representationalism╇ 167 phantasia╇214
sensation and perception╇ 8–9 philosophers╇ 13, 211
sensation theory╇ 166 philosophy╇22
Sentencia Libri De Anima╇ 1, 3, 25, 29–30, philosophy of mind╇ 9, 34, 53, 55, 96, 105, 112,
221n.6, 224, see also Commentary on the Soul 115, 141, 312, 325
Sentencia Libri De Sensu et Sensato╇25–6 primary substance╇ 127
Summa Contra Gentiles╇ 6n.15, 12, 16, 24–5, prohibitions╇29
28, 41, 115, 139, 163, 180, 197–8, 211, psychology╇ 65n.3, 225
213n.37, 219–21, 228, 242n.23, 243, 247, realism╇ 22, 80, 128, 145, 316
249, 262, 265–6, 273–4, 281, 283–4, 300, reception of forms╇ 36
318, 320–1, 327 schema for causality╇ 106
Summa Theologiae╇ 1, 3, 5–6, 12, 15–16, science╇ 94, 148
23–30, 34, 39–40, 48–9, 50, 52, 58n.60, 62, soul╇50
74–5, 78, 89, 98, 100, 102–3, 109n.15, 110, soul–body issues╇ 23
114, 125–6, 129–30, 133, 135–6, 140–1, studies╇7
146, 148, 149, 152, 158–63, 167, 170, 173–5, syllogism╇87
176n.15, 180, 182, 183n.27, 186, 188, 191, terminology╇ 41, 46
195–200, 202n.14, 203–4, 209, 212, 216–17, texts╇ 29, 30n.86
219–25, 227–8, 232–4, 239, 241–3, 248, theories of intentionality╇ 17
249n.37, 252, 262–3, 265, 274–5, 278, 281, theory of opposites╇ 106
283–4, 287, 289–90, 291, 293–4, 296, 301, theory of sensation and perception╇ 31
303, 305, 315, 320, 325, 327 theory of sense and mind╇ 52
texts╇ 5, 283 tradition╇ 55, 270
theological world view╇ 190 treatises╇30
theory of human nature╇ 210–11 Aristotle╇ 4–5, 7, 12–14, 16–17, 22–3, 25, 28, 30,
theory of intentionality╇ 2, 4, 166 32, 36–8, 43n.38, 46, 51–2, 59, 61, 63, 65n.3,
theory of knowledge╇ 144, 266 66, 68n.10, 72, 77–9, 83, 86, 91, 92n.1, 94–5,
theory of mind╇ 2, 6, 12, 144–5 97–9, 101, 103, 105–8, 110, 112–21, 122,
theory of perception╇ 2, 7, 9, 172, 273, 311 124–6, 131–3, 135, 137–8, 140–1, 145n.38,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 343

146, 148, 150–2, 154–5, 157–8, 161n.21, Bonaventure╇85

162–3, 169n.2, 172, 173n.8, 178, 183–4, Bosanquet, Bernard╇ 153n.9
187, 189n.34, 195, 201n.13, 202, 205–8, Boyle, Leonard E.╇ 28
212, 215, 223–6, 229, 232–4, 240, 246–7, Bradley, Francis H.╇ 153n.9
255, 264, 266–7, 276, 283, 289n.44, 303, Bréhier, Émile╇ 235
305–7, 312, 321, 324 Brentano, Franz╇ 11, 19, 33–6, 47, 52n.50,
Categories╇46 53–4, 59–60, 64, 79, 83, 90, 116, 150n.5,
De Anima╇ 1, 3, 9, 11–12, 13n.12, 25, 29–30, 156, 234, 318
36, 87, 92, 99, 118, 122n.2, 151, 159, 161–3, British empiricism/empiricists╇ 55, 117, 121,
214–15, 222n.9, 225, 233–4, 268, 270, 272, 123n.5, 124, 128, 154n.10, 195, 197, 200,
303, 327 204n.17, 210, 213–14, 218, 227, 231, 254,
Ethics╇ 30, 163, 240 261, 269, 280, 305, 307–8
Metaphysics╇ 35, 52–3, 69, 106–7, 114, 121–2 Broad, C. D.╇ 18
On the Soul╇ 3, 50, 91, 98, 132, 270, see also De Burnyeat, Myles F.╇ 17, 34n.11, 35n.12, 173,
Anima 175n.13, 176–7
Physics╇ 69, 91, 96, 158 Burrell, David╇ 20
Posterior Analytics╇ 4, 11, 145n.38, 264, 266,
268, 321, 324 Cajetan, Thomas╇ 34n.9, 260–1, 271
Armstrong, D. M.╇ 92n.2, 152 Cantens, Bernardo╇ 71, 190
Ashley, Benedict╇ 19n.33 Cartesian╇ 17, 47, 144–5, 172, 189, 234–5,
atomism╇ 76, 96, 155–6, 159, 164–5, 173–4, 177, 272, 290
179–80, 289, 311 dualism╇ 39–40, 52, 81, 177, 192, 251–2
psychological╇ 144, 204n.17, 205, 214, epistemology╇ 36, 192, 295
308n.9, 311 foundationalism╇192
atomists╇ 75, 89, 105n.12, 140, 155–6, 164–5, 289 immaterial ego╇ 37
Augustine╇ 10, 21, 35n.12, 72–3, 86–7, 138, 289–90 immaterial mind╇ 39
Austin, J. L.╇ 55, 88, 94 indirect realism╇ 288
Avempace╇161 innate ideas╇ 65, 320
Averroes╇ 13n.12, 33n.4, 86, 137, 161, 207n.23, material theory╇ 173
214, 222–3, 233, 242, 245, 259–61, 271, mental awareness╇ 238
277n.10, 318, 320 methodology╇ 14, 71, 190–1
Avicenna╇ 33n.4, 62–3, 139, 175, 199–200, ontology╇147
214–17, 222–6, 230, 233–5, 242, 248, 271, paradigm╇37
277n.10, 282n.20, 318 philosophy of mind╇ 55, 81, 107, 119, 228
awareness representationalism╇ 70, 73n.29
intentional╇ 56, 66, 112, 121, 166, 169, 195, substance immateriality╇ 40
251, 253, 256–7, 313, 326 Caston, Victor╇ 17, 34n.11
non-veridical╇ 56, 81, 128–30, 232 change╇ 39, 44–5, 48, 50, 91–2, 94, 106, 108,
of individuals╇ 198, 241, 243, 254, 257, 261–3, 110–11, 113, 121, 137, 139–40, 163, 167–8,
272, 306, 314, 316, 325 177–8, 182, 184, 188, 243, 253n.45
perceptual╇ 180, 189, 204n.17, 271 accidental╇ 44, 106–7
visual╇ 149–50, 155 atomic╇173
Ayer, Alfred J.╇ 23, 76n.34, 89, 194, 257, 278n.14, causal╇77–8
280, 327 cognitive╇106
immaterial╇ 62, 175
Bacon, Roger╇ 218 incidental╇ 44–6, 106–7
Baker, Mark╇ 237n.3 intentional╇ 48, 106, 173, 179
Bartholomew of Capua╇ 29 material╇ 105, 186
Baumrin, Judith M.╇ 65n.3, 169n.2 natural╇ 48, 62
Beilby, James K.╇ 71n.22, 190n.41 of place╇ 45
Bergmann, Gustav╇ 18, 33, 35n.12, 41, 47n.44, physical╇ 58n.60, 105–7, 110–12, 173, 179, 209
52n.50, 63, 80 physiological╇ 109, 179
Berkeley, George╇ 8, 11, 65, 76–7, 88, 117, qualitative╇ 44–5, 107
123n.5, 142–3, 153n.9, 158, 172n.5, 194, quantitative╇ 44, 107, 180
203n.15, 210, 245n.25, 254–5, 257, 262, spiritual╇ 179, 209
269, 301, 305–6, 308, 326 substantial╇ 44–5, 106–7
Boland, Vivian╇ 15 see also alteration
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

344â•… index

Chenu, Marie-Dominique╇ 21–2, 235 dating╇ 25n.67, 29–31, 163, 170

Chisholm, Roderick╇ 11n.7, 35, 38, 40, 47n.43, Dauphinais, Michael╇ 21n.48
53–4, 58, 60–3, 67, 97, 121, 138, 143, David, Barry╇ 21n.48
256n.48, 269–70, 276n.5, 308, 326 Davidson, Donald╇ 55, 79, 313
Clark, Mary╇ 19n.33 Davies, Brian╇ 16, 20, 276n.9
Clarke, Norris╇ 20n.34 Deely, John N.╇ 35n.15, 185n.29, 225n.18,
cogitative power╇ 170, 188, 211n.33, 222, 237, 230–1, 235, 240n.17, 292n.46, 298,
243, 246–7, 248n.34, 313–14, 317n.27, 308n.10, 309–310, 313
see also vis cogitativa De Haan, Daniel╇ 237n.3
Cohen, Sheldon M.╇ 52, 263n.68 De Koninck, Charles╇ 16n.25
colour╇ 39–40, 48, 54, 59, 89, 95, 111, 113, 117, Democritus╇ 89, 155–6, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 289
120, 122–5, 129–32, 134–41, 143–4, 146, Descartes, René╇ 8, 15, 18, 44n.39, 53n.52, 54,
150–5, 157–65, 167–9, 171, 177–83, 185, 73, 76–7, 82, 86, 89, 93, 103, 118, 142n.33,
187–8, 195–6, 208, 229, 244, 245n.25, 253, 144–8, 171, 176n.16, 179n.21, 189, 191,
269, 278, 290, 300, 304–5, 311–12, 319–20, 200–1, 224n.16, 229, 231–2, 234–5,
323n.35, see also light, sight/vision 251n.41, 288n.42, 291, 297–8
common sense╇ 28n.75, 55, 58n.58, 68, 76n.34, Dewan, Lawrence╇ 21, 87n.54
85, 88, 94, 124, 133, 136, 148, 172, 201–2, diaphanum╇ 154n.11, 159–61, 167–8, 177, see also
207, 211, 215–17, 220, 221, 223, 229–30, medium
234, 264, 275, 279, 285, 297, 309–10, see also Diares╇ 124, 132, 136, 144, 188, 245, 306, 311
sensus communis direct realism, see realism
concept disposition╇ 26, 42, 44–5, 47, 50–1, 53, 70, 78,
exercise╇ 27, 96, 107, 111–12, 274 95–103, 105–6, 108–10, 112–13, 116, 118,
formation╇ 1, 3–4, 15, 25, 27, 40, 47, 66, 85, 96, 120, 124n.6, 134, 139–40, 142–3, 154, 169,
101n.8, 103, 107, 111–14, 116, 119, 124n.6, 171, 177, 179, 181–3, 186–7, 199, 208, 220,
126–7, 168, 181, 185n.30, 200, 237, 257, 247, 251, 284, 295–6, 302, 320
266, 273–4, 294, 322, 324 acquired╇ 42n.35, 99–104, 109, 113–14,
conceptus╇ 97, 99, 101, 103, 110, 114, 126, 263n.68, 118–19, 295, 319
274, 295, 318–19, 324, see also concept causal╇ 134, 137
concreta/concretum╇ 32, 45, 58, 64–5, 116–17, cognitive╇ 82, 84, 104, 115, 144, 302, 310
127–8, 132, 198, 243, 253–4, 257, 304n.6, conceptual╇ 96, 103, 114, 118
305, 313 Disposition-1╇ 98–101, 106, 108, 110, 181–2
concrete whole╇ 197, 204–6, 208, 212–13, 227–9, Disposition-2╇ 99–100, 106, 108, 118, 168,
239, 253, 255–7, 265, 267–8, 282, see also 171, 182, 296, 302
wholes epistemological╇ 35, 42, 91, 98, 101, 120
conformity╇ 73, 79, 86, 192 importance of╇ 102
conjunctive relation╇ 203, 209, 229 intentional╇ 42, 97, 230
consciousness╇ 59, 82, 89, 164, 177, 180, 185, ontological╇97
209, 224, 281, 326 perceptual╇ 92, 112, 114–15
arrow of╇ 129n.17, 158, 264 dispositional properties╇ 11, 37–8, 40, 42, 44–7,
impressions in╇ 74 49–51, 75, 98, 101, 114, 116, 118, 154, 164,
individual╇ 256, 326 250, 295, 320
inner╇125 dualism╇ 89, 252
intentional╇172 Cartesian╇ 39–40, 52, 81, 177, 192, 251–2
modes of╇ 74 epistemological╇80
quality╇ 257, 280 Duns Scotus╇ 85, 110, 230–1, 256, 263, 312
root of╇ 171, 209, 213
seat of╇ 209 early modern philosophers/philosophy╇ 8,
thing╇ 74, 89, 143, 256–7, 280, 326 44n.39, 68, 76–7, 85, 89, 96, 111, 144, 146,
Continental 148, 158, 188, 225, 228–32, 234–6, 259, 288,
phenomenology╇60 297–8
philosophy╇20 efficient cause╇ 56, 77–8, 80, 115, 124n.6, 154,
rationalists╇200 156, 173, 176, 182, 184, 267, 321, 323–4
Thomism╇21 Empedocles╇ 51–2, 91, 93, 95
contraries╇ 43, 99, 105–8, 110–12 principle╇ 40, 51, 91–2, 94, 96
Copleston, F. C.╇ 23, 43n.38, 287 theory of perception╇ 51, 92
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 345

empiricism╇ 11, 14–15, 32, 55, 59, 64–6, 68, 104, experience╇ 4, 97, 114, 120–1, 143, 145, 196, 199,
117, 121, 123n.5, 124–5, 128, 154n.10, 192, 201, 206, 213, 227, 246, 249–50, 253, 255–6,
195, 197, 200, 204n.17, 210, 213–14, 218, 265–8, 282, 306, 310, 321–3
227, 231, 238, 244, 254–5, 257–8, 261, 263, common-sense world of╇ 85
269–70, 280, 305–8, 314, 325 conscious╇ 125, 177, 191
environment╇ 10, 68–70, 72, 81n.46, 131, 144, human╇ 10, 54
190, 193, 252, 309 immaterial╇263n.68
epiphenomenalism╇278 mental╇60
Eschmann, I. T.╇ 29–30, 261n.66 perceptual╇ 242, 315
esse intentionale╇ 19, 33–40, 45, 47–50, 53–4, sense╇ 65, 134, 136, 198, 208, 242, 244, 276n.6,
56n.56, 58, 62–3, 65, 78–80, 82–4, 112, 302, 308, 322
140–1, 150n.5, 168–9, 173–4, 176, 179–80, sensory╇ 233, 287–8, 295
182, 187, 208, 228, 271, 292, 304, 324 subjective╇ 56, 71
esse naturale╇ 34–5, 37–40, 45, 47–9, 53–4, 58, visual╇56
78–80, 82–3, 110, 140–1, 182, 187, 208, 228 explicatio textus╇ 5, 7, 16, 18, 25, 68, 72, 87, 232,
essence╇ 33, 40, 43n.38, 44, 51, 53, 57, 63, 65, 67, 262, 266, 268–9, 276, 308–9, 327
83, 85, 87, 101, 114, 116, 120, 127, 133, 135, extension╇ 50, 58, 83, 89, 146–8, 245n.25
137n.24, 168, 187, 246, 250, 252–3, 260, externalism╇ 23n.55, 36–7, 42, 52, 55, 62, 66,
262, 274, 294–6, 317, 319, 321–2 74–5, 82–3, 88–90, 124, 125n.9, 128, 145,
esse reale╇ 79n.39, 84, 182 150, 174, 176, 180, 186, 188, 193, 213,
Euclid╇28 230, 252–3, 257, 262, 274–7, 282, 286,
Everson, Stephen╇ 133n.22, 207 292, 298, 300
existence╇ 39, 43n.38, 45–7, 53, 64, 65n.4, 69, external senses╇ 3, 16, 25–6, 32, 58, 63, 72, 74,
88–9, 99, 113, 119, 141, 164, 169, 186–7, 84, 109, 113, 125–7, 132–3, 136–7, 139,
195, 201, 203, 262, 292 149, 151, 157–8, 167, 169–70, 174–5,
act of╇ 20 181–2, 188, 191, 195–8, 200, 202–7,
actual╇92 209–15, 221–5, 227–9, 234–5, 239, 244–5,
angelic╇40 254, 255n.47, 258, 260–2, 264–5, 267, 271,
enmattered╇38 280–2, 284–6, 288, 293, 297, 305, 306,
extra-mental╇145 316, 325
formal╇47
human earthly╇ 274 Fodor, Jerry A.╇ 73n.29
intentional╇ 1, 33, 38–9, 47n.43, 53, 63, 80, formal
140, 175, 284, 293, 300, 304 ability╇115
mental╇47n.43 aspect╇ 122–3, 160, 311–12
natural╇ 39, 53 cause╇ 56, 76–8, 80–1, 83–5, 124n.6, 145, 154,
of a phantasm╇ 214, 220, 288, 296, 304, 315 156, 164, 173, 176, 182, 184, 261n.67, 295
of a vacuum╇ 155, 164 condition╇160
of a world of individuals╇ 262 equivalence╇38
of cognitive structures╇ 258 existence╇47
of colour╇ 167 identity╇ 37, 56, 79, 81–3, 92
of five faculties╇ 223 knowledge╇181n.22
of innate structures╇ 103 object╇ 122, 311
of sensations╇ 269 proportion╇138
of the phantasia╇223 reality╇ 53n.52, 179n.21, 189
of the triadic relation╇ 167 structure╇ 37, 38, 50, 80, 115
of the vis cogitativa╇217 truth╇87
spiritual╇39 forma substantialis╇ 262, 316, 324
see also esse intentionale, inexistence Foster–Humphries translation╇ 5, 6n.15, 25, 30
existent╇ 41–2, 44–7, 49, 57–8, 97 Foster, K.╇ 5, 25, 30
extended quantified╇ 89 foundationalism╇ 9–10, 13, 73, 79, 90, 145, 186,
intentional╇39 188, 191, 192, 195, 232
mental╇117 Franks, Joan╇ 28n.75
ontological╇44 Frede, Dorothea╇ 4, 34n.11, 216n.49, 227,
physical╇48 229–30, 231n.35, 239, 240n.16, 242n.22,
spiritual╇39 263n.68, 268–70, 303n.4, 326–7
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

346â•… index

Galen╇214–15 Hume, David╇ 8, 11, 65, 68, 89, 117, 123n.5,

Galilei, Galileo╇ 164 141n.29, 142n.33, 144, 153n.9, 200, 210,
Gauthier, R.-A.╇ 5, 22, 25, 29, 30–1, 163 245n.25, 254–5, 257, 259, 269–70, 288, 301,
Geach, Peter T.╇ 1, 3, 5, 20n.35, 34–5, 36n.20, 40, 303, 305–6, 308–9, 311, 326
45n.40, 60, 79n.39, 97n.4, 101n.8, 118–19, Humphries, S.╇ 5, 25
192, 274n.1, 295–6, 322–4, 328 Husserl, Edmund╇ 11, 54, 60, 152n.7
genus╇ 33, 42n.35, 51, 97, 182, 209, 247 hylomorphism╇ 42, 53–4, 63, 79, 84, 107, 319
Gibson, James╇ 10, 64, 67–9, 71–2, 131, 144, 174,
190, 252, 264, 309 idea╇ 9, 14, 18, 41, 47n.42, 54, 60, 65, 73, 75–7,
Gilby, Thomas╇ 176n.15, 202n.14 87, 93, 103–4, 113, 118, 144, 147, 156,
Gilson, Etienne╇ 10n.6, 14, 16n.25, 19n.33, 20–3, 179n.21, 190–1, 202, 210, 232, 235, 241,
43n.38, 147n.41, 235, 264, 285–6, 297 243–4, 257, 267n.74, 269, 275, 280, 290,
God╇ 27, 39n.29, 40–1, 43n.36, 64, 71–2, 87, 102, 298, 308n.9, 309–10, 320
190, 289, 293 idealism╇ 13–14, 36, 41n.33, 42, 53, 60, 65n.4, 88,
affects change in the world╇ 109 154n.10, 192, 253, 275
and separated substances╇ 39 idolum╇ 289–90, 296, 301, 303–4, 307, 315
as an Actus Purus╇ 41, 43, 57n.57 illuminatio divina╇85–6
created sense faculties╇ 190 illusion╇ 56, 76–7, 81, 279n.15, 280
first act of existence╇ 20 image╇ 74, 76n.34, 87–8, 173, 182–3, 185n.29,
Gredt, Josephus╇ 287 187, 189, 191–2, 200, 208, 210–14, 216–17,
222–4, 228, 230–3, 235, 248n.34, 263n.68,
habit╇ 42n.35, 50, 97–9, 104–5, 110–11, 114, 118, 265, 273, 276–7, 279–82, 285–93, 296–7,
122–3, 247, 311–12 302–3, 304, 316, 323n.35
habituation╇ 253n.45, 118 account, 285–6, 288
habitus╇ 99–101, 103, 118, 319 imaginatio╇ 197, 215–17, 219n.2, 221, 224,
haecceitas╇ 256, 263, 312 226–7, 245, 296, see also vis imaginativa
Haldane, John╇ 1–3, 6, 8–12, 17–20, 24, 30–1, imagination╇ 3, 8, 12, 24, 51n.46, 59, 66, 74–5,
33–8, 49, 52, 56, 58, 61, 67, 70, 73, 78–81, 85, 105n.12, 125, 138–9, 149, 180, 191, 194,
83, 89, 107, 112, 116n.19, 119, 125, 128, 197–200, 209n.25, 210–13, 215–17, 219,
142, 145–6, 150n.5, 156, 184, 189, 192, 195, 221–36, 238–9, 248, 263n.68, 265, 268, 273,
237, 257n.50, 263n.68, 269, 309n.11, 318, 276, 278, 280–5, 287–8, 296–7, 299–303,
319n.30, 327–8 306, 317n.27, 318
Hamlyn, D. W.╇ 23–4, 155–6, 164, 177, 179, imago╇ 285, 289–92, 295–6, 301, 303–4, 316,
209–11, 229, 231n.35, 234, 280, 281n.19, 298 see also idolum
hearing╇ 59, 93, 113, 120, 124, 130, 135, 139, 151, immaterial╇ 1, 37, 39–40, 47–8, 51, 53–4, 57, 62,
157–8, 164, 178, 179, 182, 183n.27, 188, 203, 78, 95, 142, 151–2, 161, 175–9, 208, 263, 294
206, 207n.21, 220, 229, 240, see also sound immutation╇ 62, 175, 179, see also immutatio
Heft, Harry╇ 10n.5 reception of forms╇ 36, 47–8, 52, 54, 92, 138,
Herrera, Max╇ 33n.4, 86, 133n.22 174, 228
Hobbes, Thomas╇ 89, 229, 231, 234–5, 297–8 immutatio╇ 48, 74, 176
Hochberg, Herbert╇ 18, 63 immutation╇ 48, 62, 137, 146, 174n.10, 175–6,
Hoenen, Pierre╇ 14 178, 196, 200, 204, 209, 232, 239, 275, 296
Honderich, Ted╇ 9 immaterial╇174
human intentional╇ 74, 176–7, 179–83, 208
action╇102 natural╇ 152, 158, 167, 176, 183n.27
agent╇255 non-material╇208
beings╇ 101, 103, 240, 249 physical╇ 173, 177
conceptual knowledge╇ 319 physiological╇ 176, 181–2, 208
condition╇39n.29 psychological╇176
earthly existence╇ 274 in rerum natura╇ 38, 47, 69, 104n.10, 260
estimation╇217 incidental object of sense╇ 123–5, 127–33, 136,
intellect╇66 143, 146, 166, 170, 188, 217, 219, 237,
knower╇ 249–50, 265, 316 243–4, 245n.25, 248, 255, 261–2, 268–70,
knowledge╇271 305–7, 321, 327
organism╇297 indirect realism, see realism
perceiver╇ 198, 203, 267, 315 individual╇ 4, 11, 84, 153n.9, 198, 237, 243, 262,
person╇ 26, 91, 125, 143, 157, 204, 240, 253 267, 314
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 347

individuation╇ 63, 110, 193, 256, 259–61, 263, 263n.68, 264, 267, 270, 274, 276, 278,
271, 312, 316 294–5, 312–14, 317–24, 327
inexistence╇ 36, 47n.43, 90, see also existence intensity╇184
innate cognitive structure╇ 103, 241, 312 of a perfection╇ 109
inner sense╇ 1, 3–5, 7, 12–14, 18, 35n.15, 63, of light╇ 168, 171, 300
115, 143, 194–6, 200–1, 207n.21, 213–18, of the knower╇ 111
220–8, 232–4, 236–9, 242, 244–5, 248, intentio╇ 48–9, 62–3, 174–6, 239, 271
249n.37, 251–6, 258–9, 263–4, 268, 270, intentio formae sensibilis╇ 62, 174
272–5, 281–2, 286, 288, 298–9, 304, 306, intentio insensata╇ 260, 271, see also intentiones
308, 310n.18, 312–18, 325, 327–8, see non sensatae
also internal sense intention╇ 40, 48, 62, 74–5, 175–6, 191, 222, 250,
inner theatre of the mind╇ 55, 83, 192, 275n.4 265, 310, 315
instinct╇ 216–17, 238–41, 250, 279 first╇ 33, 116–17, 126–7
natural╇ 143, 222, 241, 243, 249–50 second╇ 33n.2, 116–17, 126–7
intellect╇ 15, 26, 37–8, 39, 48, 50, 51n.46, intentional╇ 39, 48, 52, 84, 138, 161, 173, 176–8,
54, 66, 69, 79, 83, 86, 96, 98–9, 104, 250, 258, 288
107, 114–15, 116n.19, 117, 126, 135, act╇ 35, 42, 44, 58, 110, 112
137, 139, 143, 152, 167, 180, 181n.23, activity╇ 112, 176, 213, 262, 327
184, 187, 202, 242, 244–5, 248–50, alteration╇140
259–60, 262, 276, 313, 317n.27, 319–20, analysis╇85
323, 325, 327 awareness╇ 56, 66, 112, 121, 166, 169, 195,
active╇ 161, 237, 318, 323n.34, see also 251, 253, 256–7, 313, 326
intellectus agens becoming╇ 95, 111, 182
agent╇ 1, 97, 162, 247, 323n.34, see also being╇ 33, 39, 49, 63, 140, 175, 178
intellectus agens capacity╇ 70, 77
passive╇ 271, 314, 321 categories╇ 33, 307
intellectual╇ 22, 106, 114–15, 193, 244 change╇ 48, 106, 173
abstraction╇5 characteristics╇127
activity╇ 191, 271 consciousness╇172
apprehension╇ 66, 246 disposition╇ 42, 97, 230
awareness╇ 271, 294 edifice╇84
cognition╇112 entity╇ 210, 277, 291, 292
concept╇ 99, 252, 296n.53 exercise╇235
confusion╇14 existence╇ 39, 53, 63, 80, 140, 175, 220, 284,
disposition╇ 101, 295–6 293, 300, 304
faculties╇ 70, 117, 243 existent╇39
knowers╇104 faculty╇ 215, 228
knowledge╇ 25, 27, 37, 41, 50, 56, 63, 66–7, 79, features╇105n.12
83, 103, 113–14, 116–17, 127, 136, 139n.26, forms╇ 1, 33, 47, 49, 53n.52, 84, 302, 322
180–1, 188, 271, 274, 294–5, 313 foundation╇61
power╇ 26, 246, 322 function╇ 265, 303
realms╇181 image╇302
reason╇243 immutation╇ 74, 173, 177–83, 208
reservations╇20 inexistence╇ 36, 47n.43, 90
soul╇320 likeness╇171
species╇ 294–5, 296n.53 manner╇ 62, 95, 140, 174
sympathy╇7 mental acts╇ 67n.6
understanding╇ 67, 248, 312 mode╇176
intellectus agens╇ 1, 3–4, 12, 15, 27, 32, 47, 50, modification╇292
53n.51, 57, 65–6, 70, 84–7, 101, 103, object╇ 32, 117, 217, 230, 254, 281, 294, 303–4, 315
114–17, 162, 200, 237, 242, 246–7, 250, process╇ 174, 254, 288n.41
252–3, 257–8, 263n.68, 264, 267, 271n.88, properties╇36
272, 274, 276, 278, 284, 295–6, 312, 315, residue╇301
317–27 sentences╇60
intellectus possibilis╇ 3, 12, 15, 27, 32–3, 50, 57–8, species╇124n.6
65–6, 83–4, 87, 101, 104, 114–15, 117, states╇ 35, 173n.8, 174, 177
142n.35, 181, 242–3, 253, 255, 262, structure╇ 138, 264
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

348â•… index

intentionality╇ 1–4, 7–8, 11, 12n.8, 16–17, 19, 24, 19–22, 24–5, 33, 36n.20, 43n.36, 58n.59,
32–3, 35–41, 47, 49–56, 58–64, 70, 77–84, 65n.4, 71, 79n.39, 81, 83, 85n.51, 87n.54,
90, 92–5, 98, 101, 105n.12, 110, 112, 137, 97, 100–1, 109n.15, 111n.16, 115, 118–19,
139, 141, 150, 156, 166, 172–5, 177, 179–80, 125, 131, 141–2, 149, 192, 194, 200–1,
186–8, 208–9, 228, 234, 242, 253, 273, 276, 210n.28, 211n.33, 212–13, 226, 228,
285–6, 292, 316, 327 229n.29, 235n.48, 237n.1, 238–9, 258n.56,
Principle A╇ 41 271, 271n.89, 276–7, 280–1, 285–6, 290,
Principle B╇ 43 298, 318n.29, 323
Principle C╇ 44 Kerr, Fergus╇ 6, 15–16, 20, 21n.42, 43n.36,
Principle D╇ 46 59n.61, 71, 128, 150, 177n.19, 186n.31, 191,
Principle D-1╇ 47, 50, 53–6, 58 192, 201, 235, 251n.41, 276n.5
Principle E╇ 57 Kim, Jaegwon╇ 60–1
Principle F╇ 57–8 Klemke, E. D.╇ 279n.15
principles of╇ 32, 34, 39n.29, 40, 59, 64, 91, Klubertanz, George P.╇ 215, 217n.55, 223n.10,
97, 256 224n.17, 226n.22, 237, 238n.4, 242, 245–6,
intentiones non sensatae╇ 65, 198, 217, 239, 241, 258, 259–61, 317, 326n.36
243, 248, 257–8, 262–3, 268, 317, 327 Kneale, William╇ 68, 258n.54, 259, 326n.36
internal sense╇ 1, 3–4, 12–14, 25–6, 32, 50, knowing╇ 9–10, 18, 33–4, 37–8, 42–3, 45, 48, 50,
58n.58, 63, 66, 68n.10, 84, 125, 127, 139, 53–4, 58–9, 68n.10, 69–70, 72, 74–5, 78–80,
149, 185, 194–203, 208–17, 219–28, 230, 82–4, 87, 92–3, 95–100, 103n.9, 105–7,
232–3, 235, 237, 239, 242–3, 248, 254, 259, 109–12, 115, 118, 120, 124n.6, 139, 145,
260n.64, 263, 265, 270–1, 273, 281–3, 151, 176, 180, 181nn.23–4, 189, 191, 199,
286–8, 297–8, 302, 308–9, 314, 318, 205, 228, 232, 240, 241n.18, 248, 250–1,
see also inner sense 263, 266–7, 284, 296, 303, 309, 312–13, 318,
internalism╇ 36–7, 74–5, 82–3, 88–90, 145n.38, 322
150n.4, 186, 189, 191, 232, 253, 264, 275, 288 knowledge╇ 10, 15, 17, 26, 30, 34–6, 40, 47n.43,
isomorphism╇ 55, 69, 75, 79–80, 82–4, 89, 92, 48, 51–6, 58, 61, 64–9, 73, 75, 77–9, 82–5,
116, 141, 144, 165, 169, 186, 257, 262 88, 92, 96–100, 103–4, 106–11, 113, 116,
118, 121–2, 128, 141, 145, 150, 161, 162n.22,
Jacobs, Jonathan╇ 34n.11, 116n.19, 117 173–4, 179, 189, 199n.6, 243, 247, 263, 266,
Jenkins, John╇ 24, 180, 186, 190, 193 289n.44, 290, 294, 296, 310, 319, 326
Johansen, T. K.╇ 152n.7, 172n.6 angelic╇ 39n.29, 40, 241n.18
John of St Thomas (John Poinsot)╇ 34n.9, 181, animal╇97n.4
225, 230, 292, 294–5, 303, 308n.10, 309, categories╇67
310n.18 common-sense╇ 94, 201
on distinctions in Aquinas╇ 224 complex╇ 271, 313
John Paul II, Pope╇ 201n.10 conceptual╇ 66, 109, 319
Jordan, Mark╇ 2, 21–2 divine╇39n.29
judgement╇ 28n.75, 75, 86–7, 119, 130, 131n.18, formal╇181n.23
164, 169–70, 178, 190, 192, 197, 204–5, 240, inductive╇145
247, 271, 313–14, 326 innate╇104n.10
proto-╇ 127n.12, 269, 314, 326 intellectual╇ 25, 27, 37, 41, 50, 56, 63, 66–7, 79,
justification╇ 10, 17, 26, 36, 63, 70–2, 79, 90, 131, 83, 103, 113–14, 116–17, 127, 136, 139n.26,
145–6, 257n.50, 160, 168, 171, 189, 190, 180–1, 188, 271, 274, 294–5, 313
195, 199, 204, 221n.5, 262, 309–10, 327 intelligible╇245
nature of╇ 17
Kantian╇306 non-intellectual╇313
approaches╇253 object of╇ 55, 57, 64, 72, 74, 76, 84, 88, 117,
insights╇ 19, 171 121, 181, 205, 229–30, 275, 292, 297–8, 301,
terms╇128 304, 307, 314
theory╇41 potency╇ 51, 97, 120
un-Kantian╇ 253, 262, 268 potential╇105
Kant, Immanuel╇ 8, 13–15, 308 practical╇ 245, 258, 259n.56
Kemp, Simon╇ 13n.12, 23, 66n.5, 69, 210–11, problems of╇ 34
214–18, 225n.21, 228, 233n.37, 238, 248, propositional╇103
258n.56, 281n.19, 282, 285–6, 327–8 rational╇ 67, 116
Kenny, Anthony╇ 1–3, 5–7, 9, 11, 14, 17n.27, scientific╇ 67, 94, 116
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 349

sense╇ 25, 37, 41, 49–50, 62–3, 66–7, 70, 79, Malebranche, Nicolas╇ 76, 93
83, 89, 101, 109, 113–14, 116–17, 120, Marechal, Joseph╇ 14, 19
123–4, 126, 129, 138n.25, 139, 141, 170–1, Maritain, Jacques╇ 19n.33, 34n.9, 103n.9,
173, 175–6, 181, 185–6, 195, 198, 204n.17, 251n.41
221, 240, 242, 269, 295, 306, 311n.22 Martin, Christopher╇ 17n.27, 19, 20n.35, 141,
states╇ 37, 98, 109 238, 287, 323
theory of╇ 17, 32, 34–5, 61, 144–5, 190, 266, materialism╇ 36, 56, 89, 92n.2, 94, 96, 105n.12,
277, 294 107, 172–3, 176–7
universal╇246 eliminative╇174
Knowles, David╇ 24 reductive╇ 52, 138, 177, 179
Kretzmann, Norman╇ 6, 20, 238 see also non-materialism
Kripke, Saul╇ 11, 84 materia prima╇ 44, 57, 256, 316
materia secunda╇57
Leahey, Thomas H.╇ 217, 225, 258n.56, 259n.57 materia signata╇ 46, 63, 256, 312
Lee, Edward N.╇ 35n.13 matter╇ 34, 38, 41–6, 47n.42, 48–51, 54, 57–8, 61,
Leonine edition╇ 5, 22, 25, 29 63, 69, 78–80, 82, 84, 95, 97, 105, 107, 116,
Leo XIII, Pope╇ 19 135–40, 147, 159, 162, 168, 186–7, 234, 244,
Levering, Matthew╇ 21n.48 256n.49, 259–60, 263, 274, 278, 297, 319
Lewis, Clarence I.╇ 257 Maurer, Armand╇ 24
Lewis, David╇ 64 McCool, Gerald A.╇ 14
light╇ 89, 151–2, 154n.11, 155, 158–64, 168, McDowell, John╇ 34n.11, 38n.25, 42n.34,
171, 185, 300, 319–20, 323, see also colour, 47n.42, 56, 73n.29, 79–81, 83, 128, 156n.13,
sight/vision 251, 288n.42, 326
like knows like╇ 40, 51–2, 92, 95 McInerny, Ralph╇ 2n.6, 5, 19n.33, 21–2, 25n.63,
likeness╇ 4, 34, 43–4, 78, 86–7, 95, 106, 111, 125, 67n.8
129, 141, 157, 159, 163, 171, 179, 181, 187, medium╇ 39, 62–3, 130, 135, 149, 155, 157–8,
208, 228–9, 235, 274, 276n.6, 278, 287, 160–3, 166–72, 174–6, 178–80, 183, 195,
289–91, 293–6, 303, 305, 307, 320, 323 208, 210, 213, 228–9, 231, 297, 300–1
Likeness-1╇ 294–6, 301–2, 305, 307 coloured╇178–9
Likeness-2╇ 294–6, 300, 302, 307 diaphanous╇155
Likeness-3╇294–5 external╇240
Likeness-3a╇295 extraneous╇158
Likeness-3b╇295–6 physical╇161
Lindberg, David C.╇ 27n.70 sensation╇284
Lisska, Anthony J.╇ 2n.7, 35n.15, 310n.18 transparent╇ 155, 159–63, 168, 183
Lockean see also diaphanum
concept of inner sense╇ 238 Meinong, Alexius╇ 35, 60, 64, 200
interpretation╇65 memory╇ 5, 8, 66, 68, 73, 118, 139, 211, 216, 220,
ontology╇147 222–3, 226–7, 239–40, 249, 265–7, 273,
philosophy of mind╇ 55 281, 288, 318, 321, 324, 328, see also sense
scepticism╇189 memory, vis memorativa
Locke, John╇ 8, 11, 65, 73, 75–7, 89, 104, 147–8, mental╇ 35, 37, 39, 55, 79, 265
167, 171, 191, 194, 200–1, 210, 229–32, 255, aberrations╇328
257, 298, 326 abstraction╇115
logic╇ 1, 4–5, 11, 16, 76–7, 87, 91, 98, 173, 191, act╇ 8, 11–13, 17, 27, 32–4, 37, 40–1, 51, 53,
274, 276–7, 286, 289, 291, 296, 299, 316 58, 64–5, 67, 77–8, 80, 83, 88–9, 93, 95, 105,
Lonergan, Bernard╇ 14 107, 113, 115–17, 119–21, 123n.3, 124n.6,
Lubac, Henri de╇ 21–2 125n.9, 126–30, 144, 149, 168–9, 180, 189,
Lucretius╇ 89, 164 191, 194n.2, 195, 197–8, 204, 208–13,
Lycan, William╇ 60 220–1, 227–8, 234, 238, 241–2, 249–52,
254, 256–7, 262–4, 270–1, 274–5, 279,
MacDonald, Scott╇ 20n.35, 90, 144, 189–91, 281–4, 288–9, 293, 295n.51, 300–1, 303–4,
238n.10, 264, 266–7 306–7, 309–14, 316–17, 320–1, 323, 325–7
MacIntyre, Alasdair╇ 13, 15, 23, 151n.6, 251 activity╇ 62, 126, 185, 199, 202–3, 248, 265
magnitude╇ 135–7, 146–8, 152, 168, 178, 187–8 agents╇34
Mahoney, Edward P.╇ 10n.5, 211n.33, 229, 258, awareness╇ 1, 53, 77, 95, 113, 127, 134, 139,
326n.36 196, 238, 250, 253–4, 267, 301, 304, 321
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

350â•… index

mental (cont.) Oesterle, John A.╇ 16n.25

capacity╇119 O’Meara, Thomas F.╇ 14
causal object╇ 189 ontological realism, see realism
construct╇ 44, 46, 57, 117 Owens, Joseph╇ 16n.25, 18, 19n.33, 25n.63, 253
dispositions╇104
entity╇ 75, 209, 212, 275, 280, 282 particularist╇ 121, 256n.48
event╇319 Pasnau, Robert╇ 5–6, 13, 15–16, 17n.27, 19,
existences╇145 20n.35, 21–2, 24–5, 29–31, 43, 52n.47,
existents╇117 70–1, 85–7, 108, 124n.6, 125, 131, 133n.22,
experience╇60 149, 176–7, 189, 192, 207, 210–11, 219n.1,
faculties╇ 26, 95, 304 232–4, 251, 269, 281n.19, 286–7
image╇ 210, 276, 280–1, 286–8, see also imago Paterson, Craig╇ 20n.37
inexistence╇ 47n.43, 90 Pecham, John╇ 27
machinery╇268 Pegis, Anton╇ 16n.25, 19n.33
objects╇ 128, 265 Peifer, John╇ 238, 287
phenomena╇ 35, 47n.43, 54n.52, 57, 59, perception, see sensation and perception
60n.64, 90 Perler, Dominik╇ 23
process╇284 Peter of Spain╇ 67n.6, 117n.20
proxies╇88 Peterson, John╇ 20n.35, 264
reality╇276 phantasia╇ 3, 12, 51n.46, 66, 139, 194, 197, 210,
relation╇116 214, 219–22, 224–9, 232–6, 248, 255,
skills╇104 277–81, 283–5, 287, 297–9, 301, 303n.4,
states╇ 11, 35–6, 73n.29, 74, 88, 109, 275 314, 327–8
terms╇70 phantasm╇ 4–5, 66, 84–5, 101n.8, 125–7, 150,
Mercier, Désiré-Joseph╇ 201n.13 181–2, 185, 200, 209–14, 216, 220–1,
metaphilosophy╇ 11, 17–18, 33, 41, 44n.39, 61, 224–5, 227–32, 234–5, 238, 247, 250,
121, 144–6, 172n.4, 188, 191, 192, 195, 253–4, 257n.51, 264, 269, 273–328
201n.11, 242, 251–2, 256–7, 264, 309, 326 Phantasm-1╇ 299–302, 304, 307
methodism╇121 Phantasm-1a╇303–4
Michon, Cyrille╇ 34n.11, 127n.12, 128, 216n.49, Phantasm-1b╇303
258n.56, 259, 269, 313–14, 320n.31 Phantasm-2╇ 299–301, 304–7
Milbank, John╇ 20, 21n.40, 22, 87n.54 Phantasm-3╇299
Miller, Rudolf╇ 17 Position-A╇ 285–6, 288–9, 291, 304
mind–world identity╇ 38 Position-B╇ 286, 288, 293, 302, 304
Mirandola, Pico della╇ 13 phenomenology╇ 53, 60, 62
Modrak, Deborah K. W.╇ 268 Philippe, M.-D.╇ 287
Moore, G. E.╇ 8, 23, 35, 52n.50, 58n.58, 60, Phillips, R. P.╇ 201n.13, 203n.16, 204, 240n.15
64, 67, 115n.18, 121, 123n.5, 127n.12, philosophy
129n.17, 158, 172n.4, 194, 201, 264, historians of╇ 3, 7, 10, 18n.32, 23–4, 26, 59–60,
278–9, 288n.42, 326 77, 85, 147n.41, 211, 213, 217, 220, 222n.9,
motion╇ 68, 91, 96, 105n.12, 106–7, 109, 130, 231n.35, 245n.25, 257, 259–60, 281n.19,
146–8, 158, 178, 195–6, 234, 240, 297 282, 325, 327–8
history of╇ 7–9, 18, 64, 75, 91, 142n.33, 214,
Nelson, Everett J.╇ 45, 80, 145 242, 263
Neo-Thomism╇ 9, 12n.8, 14, 19–21, 260, 286 medieval╇ 2, 7, 19, 64, 69, 83, 90, 138, 184,
non-materialism╇ 39, 47, 161, 176, see also 191, 214, 220, 223, 231n.35, 232, 242n.21,
materialism 257, 279
Nugent, Francis╇ 111n.16 physicalism╇ 52, 58, 81, 92n.2, 95–6, 105–8, 140,
Nussbaum, Martha C.╇ 3, 17, 23, 34n.11, 36, 174, 176, 228, 263n.68
51n.46, 81, 92n.1, 105n.12, 173n.8 Pickstock, Catherine╇ 20, 22, 87n.54, 264
Pilsner, Joseph╇ 122, 160–1, 248–9, 311n.22
objective relativism╇ 85, 89, 160, 168–9, 180, Pirotta edition╇ 5, 25n.64
185–6, 300 Plantinga, Alvin╇ 64, 71, 90, 145, 190–1
O’Callaghan, John P.╇ 17n.27, 23, 124n.6 Plato╇ 10–11, 35, 44n.39, 47n.42, 51n.46, 64, 67,
Occam’s razor, see William of Occam 85, 115, 116n.19, 117, 129n.17, 152n.7, 158,
O’Connor, D. J.╇ 24n.58, 28 184, 185n.28, 195, 246, 257, 312
odour, see smell/odour Poinsot, see John of St Thomas
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 351

postmodernism╇ 20–2, 55, 87n.54, 264 external╇86

Pouviet, Roger╇ 192 formal╇ 54n.52, 179n.21, 189
Price, H. H.╇ 23, 278 objective╇ 53n.52, 179n.21, 189
primary substance╇ 11, 32, 37n.21, 38, 41, 43–6, structure╇ 70, 82
51, 54, 57, 69, 72, 82, 84, 94, 115–17, 121–3, reductionism╇ 14, 245n.25
127–8, 132, 139–41, 144, 154n.10, 175–6, scientific╇70
180, 203, 217, 232, 234, 243–5, 248–50, theological╇2
252–5, 257, 259–62, 267, 272, 282, 295–6, reflection╇ 9, 13, 17, 58, 61, 203, 208, 273
307, 310–13, 315–17, 321, 324–7 Reginald of Piperno╇ 29
prudence╇ 240–1, 259 Reid, Thomas╇ 58n.58, 64, 67–8, 117, 121, 127,
psychology╇ 2–4, 6–7, 10–11, 13n.12, 23, 36, 144, 201, 259, 306, 308–10, 313
60n.64, 65n.3, 66n.5, 68–71, 75, 79, 88–9, reliabilism╇ 37, 145, 176, 180, 186, 190–1, 252,
92n.2, 97n.4, 125, 131, 144–5, 176n.15, 194, 300, 310n.17
199, 204n.17, 205–6, 214–15, 217, 224–5, representationalism╇ 34n.9, 52, 55–6, 64, 70,
228, 238n.5, 242, 251n.41, 252, 256, 275, 73–83, 88–90, 93, 124n.6, 125n.9, 132,
298, 308n.9, 311, 313, 316, 326–8 140–1, 150, 167, 183, 189, 191, 210–11, 213,
Pugh, Matthew╇ 20n.37 217, 230–2, 253, 262, 273–5, 276n.5,
Putnam, Hilary╇ 11, 17, 34n.11, 38, 55–6, 61, 279–80, 282, 285, 288–9, 291–2, 297–8,
73n.29, 78–81, 83–4, 125, 128, 150n.5, 156, 304, 307, 310
173n.8, 192, 242n.19, 275n.4, 288n.42, 326 representative realism, see realism
Rescher, Nicholas╇ 207n.21
Quine, Willard Van Orman╇ 64n.1, 70, 73 Rikhof, Herwi M.╇ 21
Rorty, Amelie╇ 36
Radical Orthodoxy╇ 20–1 rose-coloured glasses objection╇ 171
Ramirez, Erick╇ 16n.25 Ross, James╇ 10n.5, 28, 72n.25, 190, 288n.42, 326
Rasmussen, Douglas╇ 20n.35 Russell, Bertrand╇ 8, 23, 35, 52n.50, 55, 60, 64,
rationalism╇ 14, 59, 65, 200, 235n.52, 251n.41 89, 115n.18, 119, 129n.17, 153n.9, 154n.10,
realism╇ 10n.6, 14, 37, 41, 45, 52, 55, 61, 66–7, 163, 194, 203, 278n.14, 311, 326
71, 75, 81, 88, 93, 125, 140, 145, 150, 156, Ryle, Gilbert╇ 11, 39, 45n.40, 55, 88, 94, 118, 166,
179, 186, 239, 253, 259, 262–4, 275, 280 191, 232, 237, 256, 273, 238n.13, 275n.4
Aristotelian╇ 22, 80, 128, 145, 316
common-sense╇ 94, 201 Sartre, Jean-Paul╇ 104n.11
direct╇ 6n.18, 32, 56, 64, 69, 73–5, 79–80, 83, Second Vatican Council╇ 21
85, 88–9, 93, 140, 167, 185, 189, 213, 274, Sellars, Wilfrid S.╇ 40n.30, 51n.46, 55, 62–3, 80,
276, 279, 282, 286, 288, 292 139n.26, 278
empirical╇253 sensation and perception╇ 1, 3, 7–9, 12, 14–19, 25–8,
epistemological╇ 2, 11–13, 37, 41, 55, 61, 63, 31, 33, 40, 55, 69n.13, 65n.3, 74–7, 81, 87,
74–5, 81–3, 89, 125, 141, 158, 164, 168, 191, 89–96, 113, 117, 120, 126–7, 129, 133, 142, 144,
211, 213, 230, 232, 239, 250, 254, 259, 272, 149–51, 154n.11, 155–6, 158, 160, 163, 165–6,
274–6, 280, 291–2, 298, 313, 316–17, 324 168, 172–3, 179–80, 185–6, 188, 192, 196,
exaggerated╇85 209–10, 218, 223, 225n.18, 237, 239, 242–5,
extreme╇47 254–5, 259, 262–3, 270, 278, 280, 285, 290, 292,
indirect╇ 75, 85, 89, 278, 288, 292, 297 294, 298–9, 302, 306, 309–10, 317, 320, 325
metaphysical╇ 14, 19, 37n.22, 128 sensations╇ 203, 262, 275
moderate╇47 apparatus╇168–9
naive╇ 167, 193, 231, 300n.2 bundle of╇ 213, 306
natural╇ 56, 128, 193 non-veridical╇129
ontological╇ 11, 13, 37, 41–2, 53, 63, 65, 81–2, Sensation-I╇127
86, 121, 125, 141, 156, 191, 213, 230, 239, 250, Sensation-Ia╇127
252, 254, 257, 263, 270, 274, 313, 316–17, 325 Sensation-Ib╇127
representative╇ 73, 76–8, 82, 85, 88–90, 93, theory╇83
183, 275, 288–9, 292, 298, see also visual╇137
representationalism sense
see also anti-realism data╇ 23, 75–6, 84, 88, 123n.5, 125–6, 127n.12,
reality╇ 22, 35, 37, 40, 54, 73, 77, 81, 130n.18, 194, 206, 214, 238, 255–6, 261, 273, 275n.3,
141, 189, 276 276n.6, 277–80, 284, 295, 297–8, 302, 309,
categories╇61 316, 326
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

352â•… index

sense (cont.) South, James B.╇ 10n.6, 25n.63, 185n.29,

memory╇ 4–5, 12, 85, 115, 125, 149, 181, 198, 211n.32, 221n.7, 231, 235, 296, 298, 322
200, 214–16, 219, 220–1, 227, 229, 250, space–time
264–8, 281, 284, 299, 315, 317–18, 321, context╇58
see also vis memorativa realist ontology╇ 41
sensibles╇ 109, 126, 196, 202 realm╇ 65, 84, 254, 318
common╇ 32, 117, 123–37, 146–8, 166, 170, species expressa╇ 181, 235, 294–6, 301, 303, 307,
178, 188, 195–6, 204, 206–8, 209, 213, 215, 315, 322
230, 243, 248, 254–6, 261, 265–70, 282–3, species impressa╇ 181–2, 185, 188, 292, 294,
286, 294, 302, 305, 307–8, 310, 314, 325–6 295n.50, 302, 304, 322
proper╇ 117, 122–6, 130–7, 143, 146–7, 164, species insensatae╇258
167, 169–70, 172, 182–3, 185–6, 188, 192, species intelligibilis╇ 5, 12, 15, 27, 65–6, 87, 114–17,
196–7, 203–4, 207, 269, 305, 312 267, 273–4, 295, 312, 317–19, 321–2, 324
special╇ 113, 123–5, 135, 166 species sensibilis╇115
unifying function╇ 197 St Dominic╇ 22
sensorium Strawson, P. F.╇ 68, 199, 242, 256, 316, 323, 326
external╇ 57, 66, 85, 104, 113, 125–7, 137, 149, Stump, Eleonore╇ 6, 16, 17n.26, 19–20, 37, 39,
151–2, 157, 172, 181, 183, 196–8, 205–6, 71–2, 107, 145, 177, 180, 186, 189–91, 194,
209n.25, 212–14, 220, 227–9, 242, 254, 256, 200, 220–2, 224, 226, 232–4, 238, 248,
263, 275, 279–84, 289, 291, 293–5, 300–8, 249n.38, 255, 258n.52, 276, 293, 310, 313
314–16, 318 Suárez, Francisco╇ 185n.29, 230–1, 235, 297–8
functions╇182 Suttor, Timothy╇ 136n.23, 174, 227n.27, 289n.43
internal╇ 16, 57, 66, 85, 125–7, 132, 144,
149, 172, 182, 194n.2, 197, 199–200, taste╇ 117–18, 124, 130, 143, 151, 157–8, 164,
209n.25, 212–13, 219–21, 227–30, 236–8, 170, 178, 183n.27, 187, 195, 197, 202–4,
242, 248, 254, 257, 265, 273, 281n.18, 220, 269
282–3, 284, 286–8, 299–300, 306, 308, Taylor, A. E.╇ 12n.8, 28
314, 320, 324, 327 Taylor, Richard╇ 13n.12, 33n.4, 86, 133n.22
sensus communis╇ 4, 12n.10, 57–8, 68n.10, 93, teleology╇ 9, 10, 71–2, 120–1, 144, 189, 191
125, 133, 149, 152, 171, 179, 185, 194, Tellkamp, Jörg A.╇ 63, 175, 270–1
197–9, 201–18, 220–30, 225n.18, 231n.35, tending towards╇ 35, 40, 51–3, 60, 62, 79, 93, 175
232, 234–6, 239, 254, 265, 267–8, 281–7, tertium quid╇ 73, 124n.6, 125n.9, 141, 212, 232,
293, 296–8, 300–2, 305, 316 275, 278, 280, 288, 292, 295n.51, 297–8, 307
Sextus Empiricus╇ 164 thesaurus╇ 197, 216, 227, 239, 265, 267, 301–3,
Sheehan, Peter╇ 24, 285–6 308, 315, 325
Shields, Christopher╇ 17, 20n.35, 34n.11, 232–4 Thomas, Ivo╇ 30
sight/vision╇ 48, 54, 56, 59, 77, 89, 92, 95, 112, Torrell, Jean-Pierre╇ 8, 24–6, 162n.22, 261n.66
120, 122–5, 129–30, 134–5, 137–44, touch╇ 48, 50, 124, 137, 140, 151–2, 157, 158,
149–52, 154–5, 157–63, 164, 167, 171–2, 164, 178–9, 183n.27, 188, 204, 207n.21, 220
176–83, 184, 187–8, 197, 202–9, 211n.33, Tranoy, Kurt╇ 24, 244n.25
229, 241, 244–5, 258n.54, 278, 279n.15, transcendental
294–5, 300, 305, 311–14, 320, 323, idealism╇ 13, 253
see also colour, light method╇14
similitudo╇ 4, 78, 141, 171, 185, 278n.13, 286, objects of awareness╇ 85
290–6, 305–7 Platonism╇85
Simons, Peter╇ 60n.65 realm╇47
Sirridge, Mary╇ 6n.17 Thomism╇ 13–14, 20–1, 264n.71
Smart, J. J. C.╇ 92 turn╇ 37, 41
smell/odour╇ 138, 151, 157–8, 164, 172, 178, triadic relation╇ 166–9, 171, 184, 186, 213,
183n.27, 220, 245n.25, 269 295n.51, 300–2, 305–6
Smit, Houston╇ 70, 86, 133n.22 Tugwell, Simon╇ 8n.1, 22–3, 29–30, 261n.66, 163
Socrates╇ 132, 136, 188, 245–6, 306 Tully, James╇ 240
Sorabji, Richard╇ 17, 34n.11, 52, 78n.35, 107, Turnbull, Robert G.╇ 133n.22, 184–5, 195, 207
172–3, 177–9, 258n.56
sound╇ 59, 113, 117, 120, 124, 130–1, 134–5, universal propositions╇ 45n.41, 101
138–40, 146, 157–8, 160, 164, 178, 181–4, universals╇ 33, 63, 65n.4, 67, 115n.18, 116–17,
187–8, 195, 239, 241, 279, see also hearing 126–7, 247, 259, 312, 319, 321
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/23/2016, SPi

indexâ•… 353

University of Paris╇ 29–30, 85 Wallace, William A.╇ 19n.33, 148n.42

Utrecht╇21 Walz, Angelus╇ 29–30
Weinberg, J. R.╇ 24, 210–11, 220–2, 224, 226,
vacuum╇ 155, 164, 308, 317 229, 231n.35, 281n.19, 297–8
Veatch, Henry B.╇ 18, 37, 41 Weisheipl, James A.╇ 24, 28, 30, 261n.66
vehicle╇ 58n.59, 126, 142–3, 168, 228, 242, 282, White, A. Leo╇ 237n.3, 246–8, 259, 270, 311, 317
306, 316 wholes╇262
ventricle system╇ 214–16 complete╇ 210, 286
vis aestimativa╇ 3, 198 complex╇197–8
vis cogitativa╇ 1, 3–5, 7, 12–14, 32, 63, 65, unified╇ 197, 254–5, 293, 305
85, 114, 117–18, 123n.3, 125, 127–8, see also concrete whole
132, 136, 143–4, 149, 170, 188, 194n.2, William of Moerbeke╇ 29–30, 122n.2, 163
197–200, 211–21, 225n.18, 226–7, 229, William of Occam╇ 23n.55, 124n.6, 231
232–4, 237–9, 241–50, 252–73, 281–2, Occam’s razor╇ 200, 217n.50, 224, 226
284, 296, 299–300, 304–8, 310–18, 320–2, William of Shyreswood╇ 67n.6
324–8 Williams, A. N.╇ 189
vis imaginativa╇ 3, 12, 125, 139n.27, 149, 181–2, Wilson, Margaret╇ 236n.55
198, 216, 220–1, 225–6, 232, 248, 263, 274, Wippel, John F.╇ 19n.33, 22, 263n.69
281n.18, 292, 296–9, 301–2, 303n.5, 304, Wisdom, John╇ 263, 307, 308n.7, 326
308, 312, 319 Wittgenstein, Ludwig╇ 11, 38n.25, 55, 177n.19,
vis memorativa╇ 3–4, 12, 125, 139, 149, 198, 191, 232, 256, 313
216, 220, 227, 248, 265, 267, 296, 299, Wolfson, Harry A.╇ 13, 216n.49, 223–4, 225n.19,
302, 315, 323–5 226–8, 302
vision, see sight/vision Wolterstorff, Nicholas╇ 90, 145