Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. ![]() After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is intelligible not only when we think of it, but because we think of it. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too-along with Kant-had made the “turn to the subject” as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it as if St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. ![]() This study makes clear how one’s awareness of the theological views entailed by these psychologies enables one to assess more thoroughly psychological accounts of the identity and distinction of the divine persons.ĭid we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. This theological trajectory falsifies a judgment that every Augustinian psychology of the divine persons amounts to a pre-Nicene functional Trinitarianism. If we compare the theological views entailed by their psychologies we find a trajectory from Aquinas, through Henry, and ending with Scotus. For example, Aquinas (but neither Henry nor Scotus) thinks that the Father needs the Word to know the divine essence. Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus’s psychological accounts entail different theological opinions. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, in their own ways, follow the first route John Duns Scotus follows the second. ![]() There are two general routes that Augustine suggests in De Trinitate, XV, 14-16, 23-25, for a psychological account of the Father’s intellectual generation of the Word. 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. 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. 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. 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 abstractionist theory might look like.
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