Matthew Glaser

This essay articles that there is no need to abandon an information processing view of cognition in order to account for awareness and self-awareness in Aquinas' theory of mind. One might argue that Aquinas's model of mind, in combination with an information processing analogy of cognition, invites us to view the thinking subject as a mind which is a thing composed of various independent powers, and that this means Aquinas cannot account for awareness or first-personal self-awareness. Yet Aquinas' view of the mind's relation to the subject is quite different. For Aquinas, the various sensitive and intellectual powers involved in cognition are not ontologically distinct from the subject. Awareness and self-awareness are both attributable to the subject, who is the whole human being, in virtue of the kind of "information-processing" by which the subject is aware of objects in the world and of their own actions in the world.

While many people think of self-knowledge as about having particular knowledge of oneself, and contemporary philosophers think of self-knowledge as about knowing one’s own mental states, historically, many thinkers have thought about self-knowledge as about knowing one’s nature. This is clear in Thomas Aquinas’s account of self-knowledge. Yet how is knowing one’s nature, which is one of the least individual aspects of oneself, self-knowledge rather than more general anthropological knowledge? This article defends the idea that there is a knowledge of one’s nature which qualifies as self-knowledge and not just anthropological knowledge. In particular, it defends Aquinas’s conception of self-knowledge in dialogue with contemporary epistemology and Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. It is argued that Aquinas’s account of self-cognition describes a first-personal knowledge of our nature which is self-knowledge insofar as it is acquired through reflection on one’s experience of oneself in contrast to third-personal anthropological knowledge.