A Note: Aquinas’s Use of Phantasia

A NOTE: AQUINAS'S USE OF PHANTASIA IN HIS WELL received A Short History of Medieval Philosophry , Professor Julius Weinberg wrote as follows concerning the faculties of sensation in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: The sensitive (powers) include the functions of the five exterior senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) as well as the functions of the interior senses of the common sense, the phantasy, the imagination, the estimative (or cogitative) capacity, and memory.1 In defending this account about the number of sense faculties found in Aquinas's epistemology, Weinberg refers the reader to Book Four, Chapter 58, of the Summa Contra Gentiles.2 Given this passage, Weinberg leads his readers to believe that, in Aquinas's epistemology, there are five faculties of the 1 Julius Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval, Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 201. •I suspect that Weinberg's reference here is either a misprint or a mistake. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Chapter 58 of Book IV is a discussion entitled " On the Number of the Sacraments of the New Law," which contains no reference at all to the faculties of the internal senses let alone affirming that the phantasia is a distinct faculty of internal sense. It is Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles which contains much discussion of epistemological issues together with explicit reference to the faculties of the internal senses. Yet Chapter 58 of Book II cannot justify Weinberg's analysis either. It is a discussion entitled "That in Human Beings there are not Three Souls: Nutritive, Sensitive, and Intellective." Although there is some discussion of epistemological questions in this chapter, nevertheless there is no explicit reference to any faculties of internal sense. Furthermore, in my reading of the Summa Contra Gentiles, I have never found a reference to the phantasia as a distinct faculty of the internal senses distinct from the imagination. Furthermore, when referring to the imagination in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas usually makes use of the Latin terms, " vis imaginativa " or "imaginatio " rather than " phantasia." Research for this article was undertaken through a Summer Seminar Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from the Denison University Faculty Development Fund. ~94 A NOTE: AQUINAS'S USE OF " PHANTASIA " 295 internal senses. The above passage asserts that the" phantasy," what Aquinas and other medieval philosophers refer to as the " phantasia," is an independent and separate faculty of the internal senses. According to this interpretation, in addition to the common sense,3 or sensus oommunis, there are four additional faculties of internal sense: the phantasy, the imagination , the estimative (or cogitative) faculty and the memory. In Weinberg's account, the phantasia is not the same faculty of inner sense as the imagination. In this article, I intend to show that Aquinas never held that the phantasia was a faculty of the internal senses distinct and separate from the other faculties mentioned in Weinberg's account . I suggest that Aquinas referred to the phantasia, either as another term for the imagination, or as a generic concept referring to those faculties of inner sense which were capable of utilizing phantasms. The former position is explicitly mentioned in the Summa Theologiae while the latter interpretation can be found in Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's on the Soul (In Aristotelis Librum De Anima Commentarium) . When used in the generic sense, the phantasia refers to the imagination , the estimative faculty (or the cogitative faculty in humans ) and the sense memory. These three faculties of the internal senses are those to which Aquinas ascribes the use of phantasms. It follows from this that the common sense as a faculty of awareness does not utilize phantasms. In the classical account from the Summa Theologiae in which he discusses his epistemological position on sense perception, 8 In discussing medieval epistemologies, it is important to realize that the " common sense " or sensus communis is indeed a faculty of sensation. It has no connection with what later philosophers like Thomas Reid in the Eighteenth Century and G. E. Moore in the early Twentieth Century have referred to as "Common Sense Philosophy." Furthermore, the common sense as a sense faculty has nothing...