A purpose of this thesis to explain the process of the cognition of the material objects in St. Thomas Aquinas' epistemology.
Thomas considers cognition as a power of the soul. but he doesn't say only the soul as the subject of cognition. According...
A purpose of this thesis to explain the process of the cognition of the material objects in St. Thomas Aquinas' epistemology.
Thomas considers cognition as a power of the soul. but he doesn't say only the soul as the subject of cognition. According to Thomas, a human being is a substance which is a complex of soul and body, and soul is a form of body. Therefore, the subject of cognition is a human being who is a complex of soul and body. the soul of a human being is only perfected when it is combined with the body, the subject of the cognition is perfected by a complex of soul and body. in Thomas Aquinas' epistemology, sense takes the initiative role and influences the later part of the cognition process which is the intelligible cognition.
According to Thomas Aquinas, the cognitive object of the senses is material things and the cognitive object of the intellect is the quiddity in a thing.
Thomas proceeds to sensual experience in cognition. that is, the cognition of human being starts from sense-perception. He divides sensory powers into two categories: outer senses and inner senses. the outer senses are properly so called, and he accepts the traditional list of five: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. A human being perceives a particular sense-object through the outer senses. According Thomas, a sense is a passive power whose function is to undergo change through the action of an external sense-object. That is, the sense organ is formed by the form of sense-object.
In addition to the outer senses, Thomas believed that there were other cognitive powers which human beings shared with dumb. these did he call interior senses. The phantasms are formed through inner senses.
Cognition is an phenomenon. Therefore it is a transformation from the sphere of the sense to the one of the intellect. In this process the passive intellect and the agent intellect come into the role and presuppose the abstraction of the agent intellect.
The function of the agent intellect is to make phantasms received from the sense, by abstraction, into actually thinkable objects. That is, the phantasms formed through sense-perceptions in the sense organs are only possibly intelligible, so that there must be something which makes this possibly intelligible one actually intelligible. This does Thomas call the agent intellect. Human intellect understands form of things, because the agent intellect abstracts intelligible forms(abstracted nature) from phantasms, which it then impresses on the passive intellect. That is, the impressed species is formed on the passive intellect. The passive intellect formed impressed species for itself. Finally, the idea is formed in the human intellect.