Aquinas on Human Self-knowledge

Therese Scarpelli Cory. Aquinas on Human Self-knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 241. Cloth, $90.00.

Self-knowledge is sometimes regarded as a modern philosophical problem about which the medievals have "nothing interesting to say" (215). Moreover, even medievalists often assume that self-knowledge is only an "insignificant appendage to [Aquinas's] account of cognition" (4). In response, Therese Cory aims to show that Aquinas developed a novel approach to self-knowledge and that the result is a "strikingly sophisticated theory" (3). More ambitiously, Cory argues that self-knowledge is "central to Aquinas's conception of human cognition and personhood" (7). While she offers a strong case for the first two claims, the last requires a further study in which its full implications can be considered.

Cory divides her study into two parts, devoted to the historical and philosophical claims respectively. The first chapter challenges the interpretation that Aquinas adopts Aristotle's abstractive approach to self-knowledge at the expense of Augustine's intuitive theory. Nevertheless, Aristotle's thesis that our self-cognition depends on knowing extramental things becomes the "central claim" (63) in Aquinas's thought about self-knowledge. Chapter 2 tracks three phases of maturation of Aquinas's views: from distinguishing between selfawareness (knowing that the soul is) and quidditative self-knowledge (knowing what...