Abstract

This dissertation examines Thomas Aquinas's understanding of how the four internal senses work together in our experience. Its goal is to show how these senses help prepare one for intellectual cognition. This work is especially concerned with how higher levels of perceptual activity originate from lower levels. The conclusion offers a brief treatment of the similarities between Aquinas's theory of sense judgment and Edmund Husserl's description of perception as a synthesis; it also points out the ways in which Husserlian phenomenology offers a more adequate portrayal of perception. ;The first chapter examines the common sense. It considers how Aquinas can maintain that the common sense and the external senses perceive the same sensible qualities without compromising the unity of consciousness. It argues, furthermore, that the common sense cannot perceive the individual as such; that is, it cannot discern that different sensible qualities belong to the same individual. This chapter also studies the imperfectly reflexive awareness found in the common sense. ;The second chapter examines the imagination and memory. It argues that the terms phantasia and imaginatio are sometimes used by Aquinas to signify the internal sense going by the same name, while at other times these terms signify the concerted operations of the imagination, the cogitative power and memory. This chapter also criticizes Aquinas's notion that, in remembering, we take a phantasm present in the imagination as an image of something that we have previously perceived. ;The third and fourth chapters concern the cogitative power, which is able to perceive per accidens sensibles . Chapter three examines the role of the cogitative power in evoking human actions and passions. It also examines how the estimative power of non-rational animals performs instinctive judgments. ;The fourth chapter examines the role of the cogitative power in preparing in preparing one for intellectual cognition. It argues that this power is indispensable to the preparation of the phantasm for abstraction. It also describes how "experience," which pertains to the cogitative power, foreshadows intellectual cognition