Yanfu Chen

The challenge of reconciling Aristotelian cognitive principles with Augustine’s famous assertion that the human mind “always knows itself but does not always think of itself” sparked intense debate among late thirteenth-century scholastic thinkers. This article delves into a compelling response to this issue: the theory of individual self-cognition articulated by the Oxford Dominican Thomas Sutton (ca. 1250–1315). Sutton’s account not only offers a rigorous critique of Henry of Ghent’s doctrine of the “hiddenness of the mind” but also reveals crucial parallels with Thomas Aquinas’s perspective on self-cognition. However, this study challenges the existing tendency to overlook Sutton’s originality. It argues that Sutton significantly departs from Aquinas by refining the concepts of dispositional and actual self-cognition, offering a fresh interpretation of Augustine’s adage within an Aristotelian framework.

The question of whether the human mind cognizes itself through its essence or through intelligible species was a central concern among late 13th-century scholastics. This article traces Henry of Ghent’s distinctive responses to this problem. In Quodlibet I, qq. 12-13, Henry defends the view that the embodied intellect, in a state of potentiality, requires the actualization by intelligible species to cognize extramental things, while leaving unresolved the issue of how the embodied mind knows itself. In his later writings, however, Henry, drawing on Augustine, advances the Direct Intuition Model (DIM), according to which the mind directly cognizes its own existence and distinctness through its self-presence. Meanwhile, he also develops the Reflection Model (RM). This model posits that self-cognition occurs when the mind reflects on its prior acts, which requires the mediation of the universal phantasm. While both DIM and RM appear to be rival accounts, I argue that they are complementary aspects of Henry’s unified theory of self-cognition. By integrating dispositional self-knowing, intuitive self-thinking, and introspective self-reflection, Henry develops a highly original theory of self-cognition.