The Object of the Intellect and Self-Knowledge in Thomas Aquinas

This essay focuses on two technical and difficult notions in the thought of Thomas Aquinas: the object of the intellect and self-knowledge. I argue that the object of the intellect determines the character and content of self-knowledge. Prosecuting this case requires disambiguating our everyday use of object from Thomas’s technical sense of obiectum and unpacking Thomas’s ambiguous use of one term, “object of the intellect,” for multiple notions. For Thomas, self-knowledge occurs in virtue of the cognition of being (ens), and I show how the multiple senses of “object of the intellect” relate to and determine self-knowledge as related to the cognition of being. Recognizing the determining influence of the object of the intellect on self-knowledge also provides an account of why human self-knowledge is a complicated, episodically actualized, and variegated affair.