ABSTRACT
In the later Middle Ages, the question of self-knowledge emerged as one of the most vexing in Aristotelian natural philosophy. Aristotle himself says so little about it. Yet it is an evident and obvious fact that the human intellect, in addition to understanding the deliverances of the ve external senses, is able to form a concept of itself.edi$culty is in saying just how this occurs.omasAquinas, for example, imagines a ladder-like progression in which we cognize ‘acts through objects, powers through acts, and the essence of the soul through its powers.’1 But later commentators on De anima found that the metaphors of Aristotelian faculty psychology did not always translate very well into arguments, or at least not into patterns of reasoning su$ciently rigorous to answer the newer questions they wanted to raise. My aim here is to catalogue a series of late medieval e orts to redeem the Aristotelian paradigm on the question of self-knowledge, and to suggest that the relative success of these e orts explainswhy themodern conception of the self had to emerge from other, inherently more problematical, sources. In short, unlike the Aristotelian account of motion, it appears that these philosophers were able to extend the resources of Aristotelian psychology to cover self-knowledge, and so also to extend the life of the theory.
