Folia Theologica 12. (2001)
Tibor Rászlai: Aquinas ont the Infallibilty of the Intellect
THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE INTELLECT 125 and divisio because individual things and their forms may or may not be as they are judged to be. "When Aquinas, using 'intellectus' to refer to the intellect in its first operation, repeatedly tells us, "intellectus non potest esse falsus" - "the intellect cannot be false", there is one clear and un- controversial sense in which Thomas intends this statement; in the FOI, an idea is formed, but there is no assertion about whether the form does or not does not exist in rebus, in substances in the world. Truth and falsity only enter in the SOI, when there is a judgmental compositio or divisio - an affirmative or negative judgment. But, in the FOI, no false judgments are made because no judgments are made; and thus the FOI cannot be false (or true, for that matter).8 So this is not an indefectibility which is due to being always correct or true, but, rather, to stopping short of judgmental compositio or divisio, in which thought and reality are "compared" (a "comparatio", as Aquinas says) and assertion is made. To say that intellect is indefectible in this sense is, of course, not to say much; it is like saying that the Pope is infallible as long as he makes no claims about God or the world, and even the most anti-Papal Protestant could agree with that! But is there an epistemologically more interesting sense in which the FOI is not liable to error? In his commentary on book III of Aristotle's De anima, Aquinas suggests there is.9 There he writes that there are two senses in which the FOI is not liable to being false: "This intellection (in the first operation of the intellect) is with regard to that about which (the intellect) is not false: not only because what is non-complex is neither true nor false, but also because it is not deceived with re8 In de Anima, III., XI., 760. Anthony KENNY in Action, Emotion and Will. New York, 1963, 225-227. 9 É. GILSON: History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. London, 1955, 376. (Translated for hung. Zoltán Turgonyi. Budapest, 2000.) My own position is closer to M.-D. CHENU's, who held that Aquinas intended to present Aristotle’s views in the commentaries, but always with the intention to advance his own inquiry; so we can expect him to say therein if the thinks some philosophical claim is philosophically unjustified; Introduction a l’Etude de Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Montreal, 1950, 177. (Translated for hung. Laszlo Odrabina. Budapest, 200.)
