St Thomas Aquinas and John Haldane on knowledge of material things

Abstract

Contemporary philosopher John Haldane advances a version of Thomas Aquinas's well-known doctrine that in knowledge the knower and thing known are somehow one. Haldane calls his version of this claim the "mind-world identity thesis", and it is meant to answer the question of intentionality: how to describe the way thoughts are related to things. In the thesis I engage two specific aspects of Haldane's presentation: (i) his view that a Thomist may defend sensory cognition as an entirely material process, and (ii) his view that "intentional being" is the special criterion of cognition or intelligence. Against these, I argue that any presentation of the "identity thesis" must follow Thomas in (i) holding sensory cognition to involve immateriality, and (ii) recognizing "intentional being" as information at once present in the environment and detectable by knowers. My thesis demonstrates that these two components of Thomas's philosophy of mind are indispensable to any work on the question of intentionality from within Thomas's account, and it offers corrections to a presently influential answer to the question.