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  • Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Too-Many-Thinkers Problem
  • Kendall A. Fisher

According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, human beings are set apart from all other animals because of their capacity to reason.1 By grasping and employing universal concepts, we are able to understand the natures of things—not just recognize and know their particular instances. We can, of course, know particulars. I might imagine a giant donut, deliberate about which of my shirts to wear today, or judge that the milk in my fridge is still fresh. When I do, for Aquinas, I do so with my brain-based inner-sense organs.2 But when I grasp universals—for instance, when I understand what it is to be human or contemplate the good—I cannot do so with a bodily organ. In Aquinas’s view, the universal character of intellective understanding demands an incorporeal faculty.3 Accordingly, he believes that human beings have to be partly corporeal and partly incorporeal to carry out the full range of essential nutritive, sensitive, and intellective human acts.

This has significant ramifications for Aquinas’s account of human ontology and, in particular, his account of the human soul. In his view, the soul is the actuality of the human body, and as such, it is the principle of existence and organization that, united to prime matter, forms a three-dimensional, living, sensitive, rational substance—the human being.4 However, as we have seen, he maintains that intellective cognition cannot take place in the [End Page 106] ensouled matter of the body. Instead, he argues that the soul must serve as the part of the human being with which we perform our intellective acts.5 In this respect, the soul’s role goes beyond that typical of substantial form. Rather than simply serving as a principle by which the human being or some part of her operates, the soul itself performs intellective acts. It has an operation in its own right—that is, per se.6

Because of the soul’s role in intellective cognition, some have worried that Aquinas commits himself to too many thinkers.7 Where we should have just one thinker—the human being—we end up with two: the human being and her soul. The concern arises because Aquinas seems to endorse the following:

  1. 1. The human being understands.

  2. 2. The soul understands.

  3. 3. The human being and soul are not identical.

Claim 1 is nonnegotiable. Humans are rational animals. They must understand and must, therefore, be the proper subjects of intellective acts. Aquinas insists on this, especially in his anti-Averroist polemic, where he repeats the refrain “hic homo intelligit” (“this human understands”).8 But because intellective operations require an incorporeal faculty and we are not wholly incorporeal, we cannot perform these operations with our whole selves.9 Instead we do so with our souls. For this reason, Aquinas frequently attributes acts of understanding to the soul itself.10 And so we get claim 2. Furthermore, Aquinas believes that at death, the soul does not perish but continues to exist in a separated state. With Divine assistance, the separated soul continues to perform intellective acts.11 This reinforces claim 2. Moreover, if the soul is the understander after death, there seems to be no principled way to rule it out as an understander during life. [End Page 107]

Lastly, Aquinas denies that I am identical with my soul. Even after death when my soul is all that remains, it is not me.12 Although my soul is a part of me (and a very important part indeed!), considered on its own, it is not a human being, which by definition I am. As rational animals, humans are essentially sensitive. But for Aquinas, sensation can only take place in corporeal organs.13 Since the soul is incorporeal, it cannot sense. Thus it cannot be an animal, rational or otherwise. In Aquinas’s view, therefore, there is more to me than my soul, and I am not identical with it; this is claim 3. Taken together, claims 1–3 seem to entail two—or rather too many—thinkers.

A number of commentators have attempted to respond to the too-many-thinkers...

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