Back to Aquinas Arguments

Anthropology

Intellect and knowledge

Human knowledge begins in sense experience, while the intellect abstracts universal intelligible forms from particulars.

Guiding question

How does the human mind know universal truths through sensible things?

Why it matters

Aquinas's account of abstraction connects embodiment, perception, imagination, and intellectual judgment.

The argumentative movement

  1. 1Human knowing begins with sensible particulars received through bodily powers.
  2. 2Phantasms provide the material from which the intellect abstracts universal forms.
  3. 3The intellect judges and reasons about universals without being reducible to a bodily organ.