Two Models of Thinking - Fordham University Faculty

object’s sensory image is a real agent in the process of intellectual cognition,even though it cannot act without the agent intellect’s intervention. 30Subsequently, Aquinas preferred to refer to sensory images as something like(quodammodo) the matter on which the agent intellect performs its action. 31 Inboth cases, the object and its image can be described as a necessary but notsufficient cause of an intelligible species.Aquinas’s contention that the object plays a causal role in the act ofthinking was the key move that allows him to explain an act of thinking’sintentionality. It is because an object, through its sensory image, has a causalrole in the process of intellectual cognition that the form received in theintellect is the form of a certain object. 32 Consequently, the act of thinkingtriggered by the reception of a certain form is an act of thinking about acertain object because it is the reception of form of that object that triggeredthat act of thinking.It is the third point in Aquinas’s strategy, however, that is particularlyworth noticing. Aquinas held that, once the possible intellect receives theform of a certain object from the agent intellect, the possible intellect becomesitself an agent.This point may be easily missed. Because the human intellect ispotential with respect to its operation of actually thinking about something, itmust be made actual by the reception of a form (i.e. an intelligible species).Before learning what it is to be a cat, I only have the capacity to think aboutcats. Thus, in order to actually think about what it is a cat, I must receive theform felinity in my possible intellect. According to Averroes’ interpretation ofAristotle, this is just what to think is. Once the possible intellect receives the30 De Ver., q. 10, a. 6, ad 7: “Ad septimum dicendum quod in receptione quaintellectus possibilis species rerum accipit a phantasmatibus, se habent phantasmata ut agensinstrumentale vel secundarium, intellectus vero agens ut agens principale et primum; et ideoeffectus actionis relinquitur in intellectu possibili secundum condicionem utriusque et nonsecundum condicionem alterius tantum; et ideo intellectus possibilis recipit formas ut intelligibilesactu ex virtute intellectus agentis, sed ut similitudines determinatarum rerum ex cognitionephantasmatum […].”31 ST I, q. 84, a. 6: “[…] ex parte phantasmatum intellectualis operatio a sensucausatur. Sed quia phantasmata non sufficiunt immutare intellectum possibilem, sed oportet quodfiant intelligibilia actu per intellectum agentem; non potest dici quod sensibilis cognitio sit totaliset perfecta causa intellectualis cognitionis, sed magis quodammodo est materia causae.” Aquinasrejected the view that senses and sensory images merely provide the intellect with an opportunityfor producing the intelligible species or obtaining them from something else (such as a separateintelligence). Rather, the senses and sensory images play a genuinely causal role in the productionof an intelligible species. See ST I, q. 84, a. 4.32 See in particular the last clause of the text quoted above, at note 30.14