![]() ![]() ![]() Aquinas’s adherence to the Active Principle Model for abstraction requires us to rethink his account of how we come to know essences-a process that turns out to be much more tentative and incremental than previously thought. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” While this language is typically read as metaphorical, I argue that Aquinas means it in a technical sense, so as to model intellectual abstraction on the activity of physical light as he understood it, from theories proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. Many contemporary interpreters of Aquinas-including Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, and Anthony Kenny-have failed to notice this alternative model, reading him instead as a proponent of some form of the standard account of abstractionism. The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. This chapter suggests that the evolution of Ockham’s theory of concepts during his career is probably the key for our understanding of this crucial distinction. On the other hand, he says that these concepts, equivalent to simple natural kind terms in the mind, directly refer to singular substances thanks to external relations of causality and likeness, on which their signification is based. This treatise opens many windows on to the debate on semantics in the late. But if only accidents are cognized in se does this mean that material substances are necessarily cognized in alio? How could this “something else” lead us to the cognition of something we have never experienced? The difficulty here is how we should understand his view concerning the acquisition of simple substance concepts like “man” or “horse.” On the one hand it seems that we have no direct acquaintance with substances. Bacon was a very original semanticist and some of his theories helped pave the way for Ockham a few decades later. For, Ockham affirms that no material substance is cognized in se. The main issue is the possibility of an externalist theory of mental contents. The aim of this chapter is to show that this distinction raises some important problems for his philosophy of mind and more broadly for his nominalism. William of Ockham frequently mentions a distinction between two modes of cognition: in se and in alio. ![]()
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