Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge

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. Features: -- Uncovers a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge in one of the most influential medieval thinkers; -- Investigates the mid-thirteenth-century debate on self-knowledge more generally; -- Shows how Aquinas's theory of self-knowledge is integrated with other aspects of his cognition theory. Therese Scarpelli Cory is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Publisher's note 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 Aquinas 15 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 Therese Scarpelli Cory. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 221-235) And Index.