ABSTRACT
At the centre of the vast field of enquiry that Latin medieval thinkers carried out on the subject of human cognition, the medievalist philosopher discovers one crucial question: the intellection of singular things. This question, which concerns the object of the intellective act, involves in a way all of the important themes about which theorists of cognition debated in the universities throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the extent of the intellect’s power of cognition, the cause of the act of intellection, the existence, nature and function of the intelligible species, abstraction, the articulation of sensory and intellectual faculties, and so on. Moreover, such a question reveals itself to be of a great interest to historians of medieval thought, in that the emergence in this period of the thesis that the intellect grasps not merely universals but also and primordially singulars 1 makes for an observation of the lively passage, so to speak, from a traditional Aristotelian paradigm to a resolutely modern scheme of thought. Indeed, to ask whether the intellect can cognize singulars only takes on its full meaning within a critique of an Aristotelian-inspired theoretical model, which apportions distinct cognitive roles between the intellect and the sensory faculties. Cognition of singular things befits the sensory faculties, which are intimately related to corporal organs. The intellect, for its part, which detains the power to abstract away from individualizing material conditions, is the faculty to which it properly falls to grasp universals. 2 In this perspective, the human intellect does not apprehend singular things inasmuch as they are singular, since it grasps them on the mode of abstract universality. Thomas Aquinas was one of the most brilliant promoters of this theoretical paradigm, and we will come back to it later on. According to him, the intellect cognizes universals directly and cognizes singulars only in an indirect fashion, that is, through the mediation of sensible representations (phantasms) that the imagination, one of the internal senses, produces from the data provided by the external senses. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, however, several thinkers, especially Franciscan theologians whom we will identify in due time, question this repartition of cognitive tasks between the senses and the intellect. They put forth the idea that the intellect can cognize singular things directly, without denying that it also has the capacity to cognize universals. 3
