Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
John Locke, in his Essay, poses the following problem:
It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore, is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things. But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves?
1 Cf. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, IV, 3; in ed. Yolton, J.W., London/New York, 1961: Dent/Dutton, Vol. II, p. 167. Locke's italics.Google Scholar
The crucial answer is, of course, that concerning “simple” ideas (para. #4). It is based on a doctrine of natural, regular causality, stemming from “the wisdom and will of our Maker.” But concerning the very existence of the things which cause our ideas, cf. IV, II, 14; ed. cit., Vol. II, pp. 143–4.
2 Cf. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. 5 Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers in the Image Books edition, Garden City, N.Y., 1964: vol. I, pp. 124–26.Google Scholar
3 Summa theologiae (henceforth “ST” )I, q.15, aa.1–3.
4 Ibid., a. 1. All translations are my own.
5 Indeed, this is so much the case that from the brief reply to objection #2 one could easily be led to think that an idea, to be an idea, must have both characteristics. However the whole third article serves to eliminate this view.
6 St. Thomas does not regard God as having an idea of Himself. One might think (cf. a. 1, ad2) that the reason is that God does not produce Himself. However there is also the reason that the “idea” is supposed to be outside the thing of which it is the idea (a. 1, cited above on p. 393).
7 Ibid., a.3.
8 Ibid., body of the article and also ad2.
9 Outside the discussion of God's knowledge, however, St. Thomas does not use the term “idea” noticeably. Thus, e.g., in his In Libros Peri Hermeneias Expositio, L. I, lect. II, #12 [2]-16 [6], he uses “conceptio” almost exclusively.
10 STI, q.15, a.2. Below, we see in detail what is meant by the form or specific likeness “which puts the mind in operation”, or which constitutes the mind as mind in operation. This is the species intelligibilis.
11 Ibid., obj.2 and ad2.
12 For more elaboration of this distinction in St. Thomas' doctrine, cf. my paper “Leslie Dewart, St. Thomas, and Knowledge”, Downside Review, vol. 91 (1973), pp. 51–64, esp. pp. 55–57 a nd 60–64.
13 Here the alternative is not that it lacks all knowledge, but that it knows the Platonic Ideas. This St. Thomas denies.
14 For our purposes in this paper these terms are interchangeable. Cf. STI, q.79, a. 1, ad1.
15 Cf. ibid., q.84, prologue.
16 Cf. ibid., q.75, a.2.
17 Since it is imperative that this item be clearly distinguished from ideas or concepts or notions, the Latin term will be used.
18 Cf. ibid., q.55, prologue; a. 1, ad1; a.3, ad2.
19 Cf. In I De anima, lect. IV (in the edition of A.M. Pirotta, O.P., Turin, 1959: Marietti, #43, p. 14).
20 Cf. STI, q.4, a.3.
21 St. Thomas regards Plato as making a similar error in a contrary direction. While the ancient physicists started with the materiality of the things known and moved to a material presence of the known in the knower, Plato started from the immateriality (universality, necessity) of our mode of knowing, and moved this out into the thing known. Both the physicists and Plato think knowing demands not merely unity of form, but that the form have the same mode of being in knower and known. Cf. ibid., q.84, a.1.
22 Cf. STI, q.84, a.2; also q. 14, a. 1.
23 It should not be thought that St. Thomas' interest here in the intellect's knowledge of all things is incidental. For him, any intellect has somehow as object all things: cf. q.54, a.2.
24 STI, q.84, a.2, obj.3 and ad3.
25 I.e. not merely according to some genus it has in common with other types of thing. In the article under consideration St. Thomas points out that one knows a thing inasmuch as one grasps it in its actual being, not merely grasping one of its material or potential principles. Later on (q.85, a.3, body of the article and ad4), he argues that knowledge of the mere genus of a thing is imperfect and potential knowledge, knowledge taken from the material side of things.
26 Ibid., q.85, a.2
27 Cf. ibid., q.84, prologue and ptssim; q.85, a.2, at the very end of the body of the article.
28 My contention here is in most respects the same as that of Lord Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”, in Mysticism and Logic, London, 1963: Unwin Books, p. 161.
Notice, also, that the mirror is quite a suitable image for understanding St. Thomas' doctrine of concepts or ideas. The mirror is itself known, and in it one considers something else (mirrors in normal use are themselves noticed).
29 571, q.85, a.2, obj.3 andatfj. To catch the sense of the objection, one must bear in mind that the issue is: does the species intelligibilis have the precise role of “thing understood.”
30 Speaking of this text of Thomas, St., Maritain, J., Les Degrees du savoir, 5ee éd., Paris, 1946: Desclée de Brouwer, p. 815, refers us to the commentary of Cajetan, wherein, according to Maritain, it is said that the concept is “something known” not as a quod but as a quo. This is not in fact the vocabulary of Cajetan.Google Scholar
Nevertheless, the interpretation of the role of ideas for St. Thomas, which we present in this paper, is that neither of Maritain nor of Cajetan.
31 While we noted this doctrine of immateriality, above at p. 397, we have not been able to give it the attention which it deserves, within the limits of this paper.
