This study presents Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating his theory within the mid-thirteenth-century deb... more abstractThis study presents Aquinas’s theory of human self-knowledge as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating his theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, it investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that he describes and the questions they raise: What is the content of self-awareness? Do I “intuit” myself or only cognize myself indirectly? How does the mind’s self-identity affect its ability to cognize itself? How does self-awareness relate to intellectual intentionality? Can the mind access its own nature? What are the implications for selfhood and subjectivity? To a degree surprising for a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas’s account of cognition and personhood. Cognition of extramental reality requires self-awareness, and vice versa: Subject and object are manifested in relation to each other. His theory thus provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity, and selfhood. Table of contents: Introduction Chapter I: The development of a medieval debate Chapter II: The trajectory of Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge, 1252–1272 Chapter III: Perceiving myself: The content of actual self-awareness Chapter IV: Perceiving myself: Is self-awareness an intuitive act? Chapter V: The significance of self-presence: Habitual self-awareness Chapter VI: Implicit self-awareness and the duality of conscious thought Chapter VII: Quidditative self-knowledge: Discovering the soul’s nature Chapter VIII: Self-knowledge and psychological personhood Bibliography"

Medieval Philosophy, Self and Identity, Cognition, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Consciousness, and 3 more

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstract... more abstractThe thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. Many contemporary interpreters of Aquinas—including Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, and Anthony Kenny—have failed to notice this alternative model, reading him instead as a proponent of some form of the standard account of abstractionism. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” While this language is typically read as metaphorical, I argue that Aquinas means it in a technical sense, so as to model intellectual abstraction on the activity of physical light as he understood it, from theories proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. Aquinas’s adherence to the Active Principle Model for abstraction requires us to rethink his account of how we come to know essences—a process that turns out to be much more tentative and incremental than previously thought.

Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Empiricism, Cognition, Thomas Aquinas, and 8 more

Journal Name: Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 4 (2015) 607–646

This article examines two medieval thinkers—Averroes and Aquinas—on the kind of causation exercised by the agent intellect in “abstracting” or producing intelligibles from images in the imagination. It argues that ab... more abstractThis article examines two medieval thinkers—Averroes and Aquinas—on the kind of causation exercised by the agent intellect in “abstracting” or producing intelligibles from images in the imagination. It argues that abstraction in these thinkers should be interpreted in causal terms, as an act whereby images in the imagination, through the power of the agent intellect, educe their intelligible likeness in a receptive intellect. This Averroan-Thomistic causal approach to abstraction offers an intriguing alternative to the usual approach to abstraction as an epistemological content-sorting. The article also demonstrates the extensive common ground uniting these thinkers’ cognition theories, despite Aquinas’s well-known rejection of Averroes’s theory of separate Intellects.

Intellectual History, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, and 19 more

More Info: Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 82 (2015): 1-60. This article is the continuation of the line of research developed in "Rethinking Abstractionism: Aquinas's Intellectual Light and Some Arabic Sources," forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy 2015.

Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the ap... more abstractMedieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts.

Medieval Philosophy, Consciousness, Self-Knowledge, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas

More Info: Vivarium 50 (2012): 554-81. Post-print version, uploaded to this personal page with permission by Brill.

This paper seeks to elucidate Aquinas’s “turn to phantasms” by investigating what he means by “turning”. It argues that the key to the underlying conceptual framework of “intellectual turning” is found in two Islam... more abstractThis paper seeks to elucidate Aquinas’s “turn to phantasms” by investigating what he means by “turning”. It argues that the key to the underlying conceptual framework of “intellectual turning” is found in two Islamic sources that were immensely influential on thirteenth - century Latin philosophical psychology, and that present specific technical concepts of “turning” as a kind of dependence: the anonymous Liber de causis, and the Persian philosopher Avicenna’s Liber de anima. This paper, then, aims at recovering this underlying historical paradigm, by examining how these two key sources conceive of “turning” and how Aquinas incorporates their insights into his account of the “turn to phantasms”.

Medieval Philosophy, Embodied Cognition, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Islamic Philosophy, Aquinas, and 7 more

More Info: Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía 45 (2013): 129-162 (pdf with misspelled name corrected).

Medieval Philosophy, Cognition, Medieval Theology, Christology, and Bonaventure

More Info: Franciscan Studies 65 (2007): 63-86 (posted with permission).

More Info: Comparative Philosophy 3.2 (2012): 19-28 APA Author-Meets-Critics Panel on Mohammed Azadpur, Reason Unbound: On Spiritual Practice in Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2011)

Publisher: comparativephilosophy.org

Publication Name: Comparative Philosophy

Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Aristotle, Islamic Philosophy, Metaphysics of Mind, and 4 more

More Info: April 2014 to August 2015 at the Universität Würzburg (Germany). Research for this project is supported by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the William M. Calder III Fellowship from the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

This chapter surveys 13th and 14th-century medieval debates on consciousness and self-consciousness. DRAFT ONLY - DO NOT CITE.

Medieval Philosophy, Reflexivity, Self Consciousness, Consciousness, Thomas Aquinas, and 5 more

Considerable work has been done on Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of metaphysical themes from the anonymous Arabic Neoplatonist work, the Liber de causis. But the Liber’s influence in his theory of cognition has not ... more abstractConsiderable work has been done on Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of metaphysical themes from the anonymous Arabic Neoplatonist work, the Liber de causis. But the Liber’s influence in his theory of cognition has not received the same attention. As a step toward filling this gap, I propose to examine how Aquinas interprets and applies the concept of the “complete return to one’s essence” (reditio completa ad essentiam suam) from the Liber’s prop. 15 , in his treatment of cognitive reflexivity and its relation to incorporeality. Although Aquinas’s references to the “complete return” have not gone unnoticed, discussion of them is often driven by unexamined assumptions concerning its relation to his theory of self-knowledge. A systematic and historically-informed study can help shed light, not only on his developing interpretation and use of the text, but also on broader concerns about reflexivity and consciousness that motivate certain developments, and on his strategies for handling a philosophically interesting doctrine that he increasingly recognizes as rooted in a different view of the soul.

Medieval Philosophy, Reflexivity, Islamic Philosophy, Self-Knowledge, Thomas Aquinas, and 5 more

More Info: DRAFT: DO NOT CITE. For the volume "Appropriation, Interpretation and Criticism: Christian Approaches Towards Arabic and Hebrew Philosophy," ed. Alexander Fidora and Nicola Polloni.

It is commonly assumed that for Thomas Aquinas, intentionality (the characteristic of mental states such that they are “about” an object) has to do merely with mental representation (the characteristic of a mental sta... more abstractIt is commonly assumed that for Thomas Aquinas, intentionality (the characteristic of mental states such that they are “about” an object) has to do merely with mental representation (the characteristic of a mental state such that it is “like” an object). I contend, however, that this account ignores the role of attention, in the everyday sense of actively focusing on or taking interest in something. In order to uncover Aquinas's view of how attention factors into intentionality, this chapter focuses on Aquinas treatment of the problem of mind-reading in "De Malo" 16.8. There, under the heading of “whether the demons cognize our thoughts," he raises a version of what I will call the “mind-reading question”: namely, if Person A could directly observe the inner workings of Person B’s mind, would A be able to see what B is thinking about, i.e., read B’s mind? His answer reveals the role of attention in determining the intentional direction of a thought. This text also offers an interesting approach to navigating contemporary questions about “reading minds” through neuroimaging, and shows that he distinguishes between cognition as a certain metaphysical reality in a cognitive power that is observable "from the outside", vs. as a psychological phenomenon with a subjective perspective that can only be experienced "from the inside."

Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Mental Representation, Aquinas, Demonology, and 6 more

More Info: DRAFT - DO NOT CITE. For the Cambridge Critical Guide to Aquinas, De malo, ed. M. Dougherty.

In thirteenth-century Latin discussions of self-knowledge, one of the foremost concerns was the phenomenon of self-familiarity. In his De Trinitate Augustine had unforgettably described how the mind can never encounte... more abstractIn thirteenth-century Latin discussions of self-knowledge, one of the foremost concerns was the phenomenon of self-familiarity. In his De Trinitate Augustine had unforgettably described how the mind can never encounter itself as foreign or new, but only as something that had always been familiar. In Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ thought experiment (Liber de anima I.1 and V.7), a number of early thirteenth-century thinkers found an explanation for this phenomenon: The soul is by nature self-thinking, even though it is generally distracted from itself by involvement with sensation. Although Aquinas initially adopts this Avicennian position at the beginning of his career (In Sent. I), he soon rejects it, arguing instead in Sent. III and De ver. that the intellect perceives itself only in its acts of cognizing other things. While these two views are strikingly different (Avicenna posits an unconscious realm of natural self-thinking, whereas Aquinas posits only a natural habitual self-knowledge, locating self-awareness in the structure of intentional acts), Aquinas’s mature position turns out to have some interesting debts to Avicenna. This paper sketches Avicenna’s position on self-knowledge as expressed in the texts available to the Latin medievals. I then trace the Avicennian elements in Aquinas’s developing theory of self-knowledge in his Commentary on the Sentences. Given the prominence of the ‘Flying Man’ in his predecessors’ treatments of self-knowledge and Aquinas’s own strenuous objections to the theory of self-knowledge illustrated therein, however, it is odd that he never refers to it. I conclude by considering possible explanations for this striking absence.

Medieval Philosophy, Medieval Theology, Self-Knowledge, Thomas Aquinas, Arabic Philosophy, and 2 more

More Info: DRAFT - please do not cite, but I'd be glad of comments.

Although Aquinas is often believed to approach the human person from a purely metaphysical perspective, I argue that he actually has a keen awareness of the phenomena associated with subjectivity. I propose that in h... more abstractAlthough Aquinas is often believed to approach the human person from a purely metaphysical perspective, I argue that he actually has a keen awareness of the phenomena associated with subjectivity. I propose that in his theory of reflexivity as a metaphysical property of incorporeal beings and the necessary condition for self-awareness and free judgment, we can find his efforts to accommodate the experience of the human being as self or subject. The paper begins by examining what it means to be reflexive for Aquinas, and why he thinks something is completely reflexive if and only if it is incorporeal (the Reflexivity Premise). It then studies how reflexivity affects the “self-possessed” character of our experience, in implicit self-awareness and the freedom of our judgments about what is to be done.

Philosophy of Mind, Medieval Philosophy, Reflexivity, Self-Knowledge, Free Will, and 1 more

More Info: DRAFT; please do not cite--but I'd be glad of comments.

More Info: PhD Dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 2009; Reworked and published as a monograph from Cambridge Univ Press, 2014 (see link under "books" above)