Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Therese Scarpelli Cory

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 256
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions they raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Aquinas’s general cognition theory
Notes on terminology, texts, and translations
Part I Historical and textual origins
Chapter One The development of a medieval debate
The roots of the problem of self-knowledge
Two Augustinian maxims
Greek and Islamic Neoplatonic influences
Aristotle and his commentators
The mid-thirteenth-century debate
Aquinas vs. his predecessors
Chapter Two The trajectory of Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge, 1252–72
An immature first phase: Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences
An Albertist account: Sent I.3.4.5
A new distinction: Sent III.23.1.2, ad 3
The second phase: innovation and systematization in the late 1250s–1260s
The fourfold division: De veritate, q. 10, a. 8
Does the mind know itself by itself? Summa contra gentiles, bk. 3, ch. 46
The final mature phase: from the late 1260s onward
Knowing my soul by its act: Sententia libri De anima III, c. 3 and Summa theologiae ia, q. 87, a. 1
Returning to one’s essence: Super Librum de causis, prop. 15
The “big picture” view
Part II Phenomena and problems
Chapter Three Perceiving myself
Self-awareness: an everyday phenomenon
Indistinct cognition
Making sense of the content of self-awareness
Two final problems
Chapter Four Perceiving myself
“Like other things”: the intuition question
Directness
Immediacy
Self-awareness as self-intuition
Arguments for indirect self-awareness and the first-person problem
Evidence against indirect self-awareness in Aquinas: perceiving agents in their acts
Evidence of direct self-awareness in Aquinas
The immediacy of self-awareness
Implications of an intuitive self-awareness
Chapter Five The significance of self-presence
Presence and self-presence
Habits in Aquinas15
Habitual and yet not a habit
What conceptual work does habitual self-awareness do?
Chapter Six Implicit vs. explicit self-awareness and the duality of conscious thought
The phenomena
Where does implicit cognition fit?
Participated attention
Implicit cognition
Aquinas’s account of implicit self-awareness
Two phenomena of self-awareness?
The light account
The identity account
Two complementary accounts
Deciphering explicit self-awareness
Aquinas and the bare ‘ego’
Chapter Seven Discovering the soul’s nature
From prephilosophical self-awareness to a definition
The case of the missing definition
Judging the soul in the light of divine truth
Verificational judgment and the agent intellect
Verificational judgment of the soul’s nature
Another type of self-knowledge? Putallaz’s “reflexion in the strict sense”
Chapter Eight Self-knowledge and psychological personhood
Metaphysical vs. psychological personhood
The subject-viewpoint: the self and the other
The first person
Unity of consciousness across time
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index