Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham on the Knowledge of Singular Objects

Abstract

In this thesis I compare three differing accounts of singular knowledge offered by philosophers during the High Medieval Period, namely, the accounts proposed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), and William of Ockham (1287-1347). By singular knowledge, I am referring to the cognition of singular objects qua singulars by the intellect. In the introduction of this thesis I situation my discussion within the context of the so-called ‘problem of singulars’ – the problem of how information about singular, material objects ‘gets into’ the realm of immaterial thought and reasoning. In the subsequent chapters, I discuss how the aforementioned thinkers attempt to explain the processes that allow for singular objects to take on cognitive content. I argue that Aquinas’s account either contradicts the broader tenets of his philosophy of mind, or alternatively collapses into a form of empiricism (one that Aquinas would elsewhere seem to repudiate). I argue that Ockham’s ‘act theory’ of singular cognition fails to explain how cognitive acts come to signify specific classes of objects in the extramental world. I discuss Scotus’s theory of intuitive cognition, and suggest that it provides a via media between the abstractionism of Aquinas’s account, and the nominalist conceptualism of Ockham’s theory.