Nature et enjeux de la relation entre la sensibilité et l’intellect chez Thomas d’Aquin
The Peripatetic epistemology of Aquinas supposes an ontological distinction between sensitivity and the intellect within the soul. The sensitive soul is mobile and corruptible while the intellect is immobile and incorruptible. In regard to this, it seems evident that the grasp of intellectual data, the species intelligibiles, shouldn’t be affected by the body’s corruption. However, it isn’t the case : the sensible memory losses affect the intellective memory’s activity. Since the intellect is immutable, the fact that it forgets points to a structural dependency of the intellect to its body, which would be the origin of omission. This research tries to excavate the nature and the logic of this structural dependency. More precisely, it tries to answer the following question : does the soul always need to turn towards phantasms when it thinks the intelligible species and, if so, how does it do it? The first and second literature show distinctly Thomas’ belief that the soul must always turn toward phantasms to think. Nevertheless, how it happens is a whole different issue. As shown by Piché (2019), the conversio ad phantasmata, also called “reflexio”, is described in two different ways all along the Thomasian corpus : either the return toward phantasms happens by accident when the intellect grasps the universal, either the conversio is an autoreflexive process achieved by the intellect toward its own intellectual act of thinking. Although the commentators (Gilson, Kretzmann, Lonergan and Pasnau) haven’t categorized Thomas’ explanations in terms of a dichotomy as Piché did, they all seem to agree with the first explanation provided by Aquinas.  We will build our text according to the following plan : after a brief introduction, we will expose the salient features of Thomas Aquinas’ epistemology to reveal the structural links in between the intellect and the sensible soul. Then, we will show that the intellect always turns toward phantasms while it’s active. Thereafter, we will confront the possible explanations relative to the way this turn occurs. Finally, we’ll expose the modality aporia, as I call it, which ensues necessarily from the relationship in between the sensible soul and intellect.
Intellect Philosophy Epistemology Thomas Aquinas Intellect Phantasms