Saint Thomas Aquinas: Key Concepts in Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics
Saint Thomas Aquinas: Theory of Knowledge
1. The Human Intellect Always Starts with Sensory Knowledge
In understanding, as understood, that is, in terms of spirituality, one can know all things, all truth without any limitation. But substantially, it is attached to a body endowed with material respects, that is, understanding, as humans, have as their object itself and given the nature of corporeal things. The link of understanding endowed with body organs imposes that intellectual knowledge starts from sensible knowledge. The understanding develops concepts from data supplied by sensitive knowledge.
2. Intellectual Knowledge is Achieved by Abstraction from Sensory Knowledge
Our concepts are universal and abstract: representing a plurality, disregarding individuals and their individual characteristics, they can preach each of the individuals or a group of the same species. Our sense perceptions are not universal, but individual: they represent concrete beings, unique and individual. It is necessary to use the abstractive capacity of understanding and its activity for abstraction. To know intellectually is to abstract the form of the individual subject, to bring out the universal from the particular, the intelligible species from sensitive images or ghosts.
3. Explanation of Abstraction Through the Double Intellect: Agent and Patient
Human understanding, finite or limited, as it does not know in fact or act, all things but has the potential, is understandable or possible. The patient or potential patient to know our opinion becomes effective by the action of the agent intellect. What the agent intellect extracts from the images is called the “printed intelligible species.” The patient intellect fertilized by the intelligible printed species passes from potency to act, it produces insights, the idea form that is called the “intelligible species express”.
4. Principle of Intelligibility
It defines truth as the conformity or fitness of the understanding with the truth in reality. It defends that in a strict sense it occurs only in trials or consciously enunciated truths. Truth possessed only occurs in trials and enunciations, because only here is there intelligence that affirms or denies what is or is not reality, that is, the essence of reality. A doctrine often called Saint Thomas’s intellectualism due to the confidence he has in human understanding.
Ethics
1. The Ultimate Good
He called for an ethics and argues that man’s ultimate end is happiness. He distinguishes between “objective happiness”: it is the supreme good that can bring happiness, and “subjective happiness”: it is the possession of that purpose or objective.
2. The Moral Law or Natural Law
The moral law is the order that rightly directs our actions to the last end, and is the objective standard of morality. Man shares the eternal law, which is the general planning that God does of everything in its order from all eternity. Natural law is the participation in the eternal law of man or rational creature. It also follows the requirements, tendencies, or inclinations of nature, as ordered to God as its ultimate end.
3. The Virtues
Habits are also required, certain operational, stable provisions of human acts that are permanently directed and oriented so that the ordering of the law. The operational virtues are good habits acquired by the repetition of acts of the same species. He distinguishes between intellectual and moral virtues.
Politics
His political theory has its foundation in natural law theory. He distinguishes different types of laws:
1. The Eternal Law
The law given by God always for all beings.
2. The Laws of Nature and Natural Law
They reflect the world of the eternal law: -The laws of nature. “Natural law is the eternal law with which God governs man or rational creature. The dynamics and trends set incline us to a purpose and tell us what we should do or avoid to achieve it. Among these dynamics is the natural inclination of man to live in society: society springs from human nature itself, which inclines man to live in order. Civil society and the state is the common good.
3. The Divine Positive Law
4. The Human Positive Law
It must meet these conditions:
- “It should adhere to natural law and divine law.
- “It can only be given by the community itself in its totality, which performs the duties of it.
- “It must be directed and oriented towards the common good.
He distinguishes different forms of government:
- Fair Forms: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
- Unfair Forms: tyranny, oligarchy, and demagoguery.