ABSTRACT
Aristotle largely took over Plato's analysis of the different degrees of knowledge and grafted it onto his own account of the act of knowledge centred on the process of abstraction. The act of abstraction is made possible, on the one hand, by the complex structure of the human nervous system and, on the other hand, by participation in increasingly complex forms of social organization. The issues at stake in the assessment of the relation between the Aristotelian-Thomistic way of distinguishing the degrees of abstraction and the Hegelian-Marxist distinction between Verstand and Vernunft are no less serious. Aristotle seems quite clear on the difference between the objects of physics and mathematics, and is thus able to define with reasonable clarity just what sort of abstraction is involved in each. While the Dominican doctrine of natural knowledge stresses abstraction, even such progressive thinkers as Maritain revert to the Augustinian theory of illumination to explain revelation.
