Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God

3. Direct Realism and Aquinas’s Account of Cognition

81 Chapter 3 Direct Realism and Aquinas’s Account of Cognition In the second part of this book, my goal is to investigate and defend an alternative framework for understanding how human persons know the world as well as God. And this entails considering an alternative thinker, Thomas Aquinas, and the contribution Aquinas makes to helping us understand how human persons know the world as well as God. To start, then, we explore the contribution of Thomistic epistemology within the realm of philosophy . This is no detour, however: in turning to philosophy we do not leave the realm of theology entirely. As the reader will discover, Aquinas’s account of cognition does not remain pure epistemology in the way we moderns often have come to think of it: a philosophical discipline isolated from and even antithetical to central theological concerns, hence devoid of any theological application. In fact, in direct opposition to modern thought, Aquinas ultimately puts epistemology in the service of theology (rather than theology in the service of epistemology), which means that epistemology—far from being sublated by theology—becomes elevated and even perfected by theology, as the mind, in its journey from the world towards God, becomes elevated and perfected by God’s grace. Consequently, given Aquinas’s specifically theological convictions, which ground his exploration in philosophy, whatever philosophical exploration we conduct in this chapter will be done with an eye towards theological application: a task that awaits us in the chapters that follow. 82 contribution of thomistic epistemology The goal of this chapter is to show how knowledge or cognition on its most basic level is a relationship that holds between mind and world and, more specifically, binds mind and world together. On Aquinas’s view, mind and world simply belong together: as created by God, the mind is bent on knowing the world—a world that awaits being known by us—which specifically entails cognitive contact with the world and the objects contained therein. In the realm of epistemology, then, Aquinas is a realist. Moreover, as I interpret him, Aquinas is a direct realist in the following sense: in cases of veridical sensation and apprehension, we as cognitive subjects enjoy direct sensory and intellective access to objective aspects or features of empirical reality. This means that the world is directly accessible in sense experience as well as thought, such that in sense experience and thought we are in direct sensory and intellective contact with extra-sensory and extramental objects and states of affairs. In cases of veridical sensation and apprehension, therefore, mind and world do not meet at an interface: sense experience and thought do not mediate, or intervene in, our epistemic access to the world; they conjoin us to the world. From a robust direct realist perspective, however, it is not enough to claim that it is merely by having certain sense experiences or thoughts, or being caused to have certain sense experiences or thoughts, that we as cognitive subjects can be credited with genuinely experiencing or thinking about a world that exists independently of our minds.1 According to the specific form of direct realism I articulate and defend in this chapter, which I locate in Aquinas’s account of cognition, it is only by having sense experiences and thoughts that possess definitive content or form—once the senses and the intellect have been causally ‘in-formed’ (hereafter ‘informed’) by the world itself by way of passive reception and intellective abstraction—that we can be credited with occupying world-intending sensory and intellective states, in which we experience and apprehend the world as it objectively is. In sum, according to the Thomistic model of direct realism that I articulate and defend here, it is by virtue of possessing the requisite content or form— impressed on the senses and abstracted by the intellect—that the veridical sense experiences and thoughts we enjoy and possess bear directly on the world (and specifically, the sensible and intelligible features that constitute the world) and thereby unite us to the world, affording us objective knowledge of the world. 1. Hilary Putnam makes this claim in his Dewey lectures. See Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 3–70. aquinas’s account of cognition 83 Sensory Cognition and Direct Realism Aquinas’s account of cognition is based on the cornerstone claim that we, as cognitive subjects, always experience and...