ABSTRACT
We come, then, finally to the question how, within this theoretical framework, to account for knowledge of the individual self. The question of self-knowledge can be put in more than one way. We may ask: how does a human individual know himself? Or we may ask: how does the human intellect know itself? Aquinas prefers, in question eighty-seven, the second formulation. This is perhaps surprising in view of his correct insistence elsewhere that it is a human being who thinks and understands, just as it is a human being (and not, say, an eye) which sees. Equally surprisingly, the first question which he puts to himself, in connection with the intellect’s self-knowledge, is whether the intellect knows itself by its essence. We may well wonder whether talk of the essence of an individual intellect does not, in the end, involve Aquinas in believing in something very like a Scotist haecceitas.
