Neither 'Direct Realist' nor 'Representationalist': Thomas Aquinas and Species Intelligibilis as Principle for Metaphysical and Intellective Acts

Abstract

Many prevailing philosophical iinterpretations of Aquinas's account of human cognition follow what this thesis calls the "Standard Model," wherein species intelligibilis is abstracted or derived through agent intellect, received or "deposited" in possible intellect, retained there, and subsequently instrumentalized in concept formation, judgment, reasoning, and further intellectual operations. Despite significant differences between "Direct Realist" and "Representationalist" interpreters, both frequently retain this explanatory architecture.

This MA project challenges that Standard Model by arguing that it reflects what Therese Scarpelli Cory calls a "fundamental misconstrual" of the role of species intelligibilis. Building on Cory's "Formal Constituent View," the thesis restores species intelligibilis to the metaphysical order of form and formal principle: that by which possible intellect is actualized and from which intellectual operations proceed, rather than a produced "third thing" subsequently put to use. Species intelligibilis remains genuinely similitudo, or likeness, but likeness belongs to a formal, metaphysical order rather than functioning as an additional cognitive instrument.

The thesis then extends this metaphysical approach by highlighting recent works by Gloria Frost, Martin Kostelecky, and Bernard Lonergan and examining Aquinas's account through metaphysical terms such as act and potency, reception and activity, development, operation, object, and end. Although these accounts differ over the ordering and termini of intellective operations, taken together they support an alternative in which species intelligibilis remains the formal principle of an internally differentiated act whose operations are specified by their respective objects and ends.

The result challenges the production-deposit-retention model itself and argues that species intelligibilis is the principle from which intellectual operations proceed, not a derived product deposited in intellect and instrumentalized within them.