* Previous issues of The Thomist can be accessed electronically through Project Muse. 

Volume 88, Number 4 (October 2024) 




Articles


Abstract: Drawing on contemporary research in philosophy and psychology, this is the first study to provide a systematic treatment of attention in the writings of Aquinas. How cognitive agents direct their attention, whether freely or as necessitated by objects, was for him an important topic of investigation. In doing so, he developed a rich vocabulary around the theme of attention. Aquinas understands attention to be a feature of finite cognitive agents—animals, humans, and angels—whose mental activity proceeds piecemeal. For such agents, and in contrast to God, cognition is necessarily selective. Aquinas variously speaks of attention as a capacity, an activity, and an outcome. Qua capacity, attention is a finite resource that gets used up in the process of being deployed. Qua activity, attention is mental prioritizing—foregrounding some items while backgrounding others. Qua outcome, attention is the result of this prioritization, the precise angle under which an item is taken up to be known. Each of these three aspects are examined in successive sections of the article. In general, for Aquinas, attention is the priority structuring that ensures the unity of an individual’s cognitive life as it unfolds in time. Aquinas’s main source for this reflection was St. Augustine. Hence, in its first part, this paper examines how Augustine thematized the topic of attention.


Keywords: Aquinas, attention, Augustine, cognition, philosophy, psychology, salience

Abstract: In this paper I consider how St. Thomas dealt with φύσις as natura in his comments on the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics as translated by Moerbeke, drawing support from the commentaries on Physics II.1, Metaphysics V.4, and Nicomachean Ethics V.7, as well as from the Digest, whose language had become fashionable across the universities by the time the translations were written. Saint Thomas’s understanding of these pages of the Politics may have affected his argument in the Summa, especially STh I-II, q. 94, where he shows caution in addressing the Roman law treatment of natura, and STh II-II, q. 57. Attention to St. Thomas’s language in the commentaries and the Summa may bring additional clarity to his understanding of natura and its cognates in both settings.


Keywords: Φύσις, nature, generation, natura, generatio, Moerbeke, Roman law, Digest


Abstract: In Question 31 of the Summa theologiae, Prima secundae, Aquinas puts forward a distinction between bodily pleasure and joy, then argues for the superiority of the latter over the former. Given this, the reader expects an analysis of joy to follow, yet Aquinas does not devote a single question to its examination in his treatment of the passions. Indeed, scholars have long puzzled over Aquinas’s choice to instead focus the majority of his treatment on bodily pleasure. I contend that a close examination of questions 31–39 reveals the fittingness of Aquinas’s treatment of joy in his section on the passions. I argue that his careful usage of joy can be seen as an intentional didactic strategy that points the reader beyond the passions and towards the fruits of the Holy Spirit that spring from infused virtue. By causing the reader to hope for an examination of true joy in questions 31–39 of the Prima secundae, and subsequently delaying any examination of joy until question 28 of the Secunda secundae, Aquinas points to the subordination, though not the denigration, of the bodily passions and acquired virtues to the supernatural end of man.


Keywords: Aquinas, virtue, pleasure, joy, charity, gifts




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