ABSTRACT
Aquinas’s position on the “hard problem of consciousness” is impossible to map on to the range of options typically considered by contemporary philosophers of mind. One reason for this is that, strictly speaking, Aquinas had no position on the issue, because there was in his day no awareness that any hard problem existed. That is not because Aquinas and other medieval Scholastics were overlooking some problematic phenomenon. Rather, it is because the relevant phenomenon became problematic only once early modern philosophers abandoned certain key Aristotelian metaphysical assumptions. The hard problem of consciousness, and the mind-body problem in general, are artifacts of this abandonment. If Aquinas has an implicit solution to the hard problem, then, it is this: restore the metaphysical assumptions in question, and the problem goes away.
