Essay on Thomas Aquinas

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Pages: 4

Philosophy 1000 paper 2 | Aquinas | How does Aquinas think we acquire knowledge? | | Makenzie Thornock | 11/2/2012 |


1.) Thomas Aquinas believes that humans are born with a clean slate in a state of potency and acquire knowledge through sense experiences by abstraction of the phantasms. His view on how man acquires knowledge rejects Plato’s theory that humans are born with innate species. Along with Plato’s theory of humans understanding corporeal things through innate species, Aquinas also rejects Plato’s theory that in being born with innate species, humans spend their lives recollecting their knowledge. 2.) Aquinas makes two objections to this theory. His first objection is that man could not forget what he
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Aquinas explains that for the human intellect to do this it “is to abstract the form from the individual matter which is represented by the phantasms” (124). 6.) Aquinas implies that man must always use abstraction to understand anything, material or immaterial. Aquinas explains that man can only understand immaterial things through sensible images of imaginative examples. Such an example of abstracting from the phantasms would be a person explaining God as a molder of clay and humans as well as the material world as the clay whose fate belongs in the hands of the molder. 7.) Abstraction is used to get the form out of the matter in which it can be certain properties of things such as color, shapes, etc. These properties can be essential or accidental. Aquinas claims that abstracting from the phantasms can occur in two different ways. The first way consists of composition and division in which humans use to identify that something can exist in separate ways. An example of this type of abstraction is a human knowing that there are different shades of white but that it does not change whiteness itself. Both objects are white, just different shades. The second way that abstraction can occur is by way of simple and absolute. By way of simple and absolute means that man understands that two