Folia Theologica 12. (2001)

Tibor Rászlai: Aquinas ont the Infallibilty of the Intellect

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T. RASZLAI

gard to what it is (quod quid est), as is said below."10 11 Later Aquinas further explains the sense in which the intellect cannot be falsem and is indeed true, in this second way: he writes, "the intellect in understanding what is non-complex is true insofar as it is assimiled (adaequatur) to the thing understood."11

It seems, then, that Aquinas wants to say the FOI is indefectibile not only in the sense of being neither true not false by stopping short of judgments about the world, but also, more positively, it is in some sense "always true".12 For the sake of convenient reference, let us label the former doctrine the doctrine of the infallibility of the intellect, and the latter the doctrine of the veracity of the intellect.

The sense of Aquinas's infallibilty doctrine seems unproblematic; but what does Aquinas mean in claiming that the intellect is always veracious?

II.

Insofar as they speak of veracity, advocates of the weaker reading seem to suggest that Aquinas's subject correctly grasps the content of her own ideas, and thus has a veracious grasp of certain analytic claims13; but, of course, this sort of veracity is compatible with the possibility that her ideas do not correspond to any real essences. Although I believe, for a variety of exegetical reasons, that this interpretation cannot stand, the limitation on the length of this paper prevents me from presenting all of them here. Thus in this section, I shall offer only some central considerations motivating a stronger reading.

In Aquinas's main argument for his claim that the FOI is always true, he compares this operation of the intellect to sense perception, arguing that the former is always veracious in a way analogus to

10 In de Anima, III., XI., 746.

11 In de Anima, III., XI., 761.

12 „Intellectus... secundus quod intelligit quid est res, verus est semper“ In de Anima, III., XI., 761.

13 Lonergan writes that, in the FOI, „as yet one knows not the thing, but the idea of the thing“ {op. cit., 8.). Insofar as the FOI is veracious, then it would seem to be in regard to its knowledge of „the idea of the thing“.