'Experimentum' in Aquinas: How all Knowledge of Nature Begins in the Interior Senses - Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P.

Podcast: The Thomistic Institute · The Thomistic Institute

Opublikowano: 2026-09-22

Fr. Thomas Davenport corrects two misunderstandings of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology — the caricature that Aquinas relies on an intuition of essences and the oversimplification that the agent intellect automatically abstracts universals from phantasms — by recovering Aquinas's notion of experimentum, an ordered, pre-universal knowledge produced by the cogitative power's active collatio of particular intentions stored in memory, which prepares the phantasm for abstraction and shows that all knowledge of nature begins in the interior senses. This lecture was given on July 16th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies. For more information on upcoming even...