Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) by Aquinas Thomas

Author:Aquinas, Thomas [Aquinas, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141908182
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1998-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

17. Definitions of Soul. On Aristotle’s De anima, 2, 1–3(1268)

It was while he was still teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome that Thomas Aquinas wrote his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. The year was 1268. The following year he would return to Paris and function as one of the two Dominican regent masters for another three-year term. The situation in Paris was such that we can easily find motivation for commenting on Aristotle, but in Rome at Santa Sabina the Parisian turmoil could not have motivated Thomas. Indeed, internal evidence makes it clear that he was not aware of the distortion of Aristotelian doctrine that came to be called Latin Averroism.

Thomas knew the writings of Aristotle from the very outset of his career. At Naples he would also have become acquainted with the interpretations of Averroes and Avicenna. Later at Cologne, he attended Albert the Great’s commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics and prepared the manuscript for the stationer. Father Chenu1 finds it the most natural thing in the world that Dominican theologians would teach courses in such philosophical works as the Ethics. In any case, prior to 1268 there is no such work from Thomas Aquinas.

We can trace through the writings of Thomas a growing confidence in his own reading of Aristotle. Very early on he is taking exception to the Commentator and this is true as well in the Commentary on On the Soul.

Aristotle’s definition of the soul, indeed definitions, figure in Thomas’s writings early and late. In the passage below we have a close textual reading of the passages in Aristotle Thomas had been relying on.

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