Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Logic and Theories of Meaning . . . 373
the application of demonstrative logic belongs to the particular science, not to
logic itself. With dialectics things are different: dialectics does participate in the
investigations in the other sciences. 133 Therefore, dialectics is theoretical as well
as applied. Theoretical dialectics is a science, but applied dialectics is rather an
art: the art of reasoning or what we would nowadays call ‘critical thinking’.
In determining what the domain of logic is, we have to distinguish between
its matter and its subject. Logic is concerned with the operations of reason:
simple apprehension, judgment and reasoning. These three operations of reason
constitute the proper matter of logic. In the first operation the intellect grasps
simple things such as a man or a stone; in the second operation the objects thus
grasped are combined or divided, so that a proposition can be formed, in this
case: ‘a man is not a stone’. The third operation is the process from the known
to the unknown. The result or product of the operations of reason is intentions.
Intentions are the subject of logic and should not be identified with the acts of
reason, which produce them. Logic is concerned with acts of reason, but has
intentions as its subject. 134
Now we have to return to the question what an intention is. The word ‘intention’
basically means a tendency to something else. If we leave the intentions of the will
out of consideration, Aquinas uses the word ‘intention’ sometimes to designate the
intelligible species by which the intellect is informed in the act of cognition. Thus
informed, the knower expresses an internal word, the so called ‘intellected intention
(intentio intellecta). 135 This intention expresses the essence of the thing known,
which then exists not only in reality in the object, but also in the intellect of the
knower. It has a relation of likeness to the thing known. Intentions, according
to Aquinas, exist only in the intellect - Aquinas calls them “beings of reason”
(entia rationis) 136 – but it is important to see that the intentio intellecta has a
foundation in reality (fundamentum in re) and that it has a semantic as well as
an epistemological function. 137
An intention is first and foremost a likeness of an external object by which
that object is known. The intellect needs the external object to initiate its act of
knowing. Thus, this first intention has an immediate foundation in extra-mental
reality. In a second moment the intellect can also reflect upon its operation and
the media involved. As a result of the first act of knowing the nature of an extramental
object exists in the intellect. When the intellect is aware of how that nature
exists in the intellect, a logical intention is formed. For example, when the intellect
knows that a man and a horse are animals, it knows the nature of ‘animal’ as a
genus. This is the way in which the intention of genus is formed. Because this
logical intention can only be formed after the thing itself is known, later authors
call it a second intention. Aquinas himself does not use the terms ‘first’ and
133Schmidt [1966, p. 41].
134Schmidt [1966, p. 40 ff].
135For the relation between intelligible species and mental word, see Pasnau [1997, p. 256 ff].
136Translated by Schmidt as ‘rationate beings’, see Schmidt [1966, p. 52, n. 15].
137De Rijk [2005, p. 120 ff].