Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar (...) view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts. (shrink)

This study brings together two thinkers whose work illustrates the idea of mental life as a kind of vital striving, Thomas Aquinas and Edith Stein. On the side of Aquinas, whereas his theory of intentionality has often been understood in quasi-semantic terms, as cognitive act's reference to or signification of something, in reality it is better understood as a kind of vital striving toward the cognitive object. Stein, for her part, famously develops the notion of a living "I," which I (...) argue reflects many of these same insights. The study does not make any claims about historical influence (even though Stein is well-known to be familiar with Aquinas's cognitive theory). Rather, its goal is to open up the possibility for recasting intentionality in teleological terms, as a striving for some good—while also having implications for the history of intentionality, by opening up new interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts? Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as 'dog' and 'beauty', and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently? I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extramental realities is rooted in the fact that embodied (...) and non-embodied intellects grasp different kinds of universals by means of different kinds of intelligible species (intellectual likenesses), which elicit in them different “modes” of understanding. By spelling out what exactly it means to be an embodied knower, on Aquinas’s account, I argue, we can also shed new light on his mysterious claim that the embodied intellect “turns to phantasms”—the imagination’s likenesses of individuals—in its acts of understanding. (shrink)