Aquinas on mind
Aquinas' mature works, though theological in intent, contain much material which is philosophical in the sense that it is not in any way dependent on beliefs which are specifically Christian. His philosophical psychology, or philosophy of mind, was not taken seriously by secular thinkers, with one or two exceptions, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries because of the dominance of ideas deriving from Descartes. In the present century many philosophers have come to regard the Cartesian system as quite exploded, and it can now be seen that Aquinas' philosophy of mind has a great contemporary interest. This book makes accessible those parts of Aquinas' system which are of enduring value. The kernel of the work is a close reading of the sections of Summa Theologiae which are devoted to human intellect and will and to the relationship between soul and body. It presupposes no knowledge of Latin or of medieval history, and relates Aquinas' system to a tradition of philosophy of mind inaugurated in the Anglo-American community by Wittgenstein and Ryle. Anthony Kenny is unusually qualified to bring together the medieval and modern philosophical insights, since he was trained in scholastic philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome and has taught analytic philosophy in Oxford for many years.
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- Of course, Anthony Kenny countered Russell’s assertion by humorously noting, “ It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life” (Aquinas on Mind, 11).
Russell also misunderstands much of Thomas’s project in this quotation. To my knowledge, Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy (at least not according to the modern understanding of it); most of his work is theology that happens to have philosophical implications. But as Thomas notes in the opening articles of the Summa Theologica, theology as a scientia takes divine revelation as its first principles and makes rational deductions on the basis of that deposit of revelation. Importantly, however, it pursues its ends using particularly theological methods and criteria, some of which overlap with philosophical methods and criteria, while others do not.
But the starting point of theology is Anselm’s “Credo ut intelligam,” not Descartes’s Cogito. To imagine that theology is just some poorly-conducted version of philosophy is fundamentally a category error.
- > Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy
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"The Summa Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work"
Anthony Kenny (Aquinas on Mind, 13)
