If it is, well, then I've got a problem. I just love the following passage from chapter one. Excuse me, I meant Chapter One. There I discuss how there are two ways to try to understand sensation: by making an analogy between it an sub-cognitive processes and by making an analogy between it and higher operations. The latter captures something missing in the former. More interestingly, the higher operation that Aquinas compares it to is judgment, which is closely related to speech acts. That dovetails with a new thought I've had recently, based on what I've read in Thomas Reid (i.e., that Aristotelians are to be faulted for using naturalistic analogies to understand things like sensation), and that is: when seeking to describe the so called metaphysical aspects of cognition, operation, desire, and the like we should prefer analogies taken from speech acts--like judgment.
"We propose that Aquinas compares the way in which the common sense is related to the proper senses to the way in which a principal efficient cause is related to many instruments because of his concern with the unifying nature of the common sense's operation. That is, the common sense does not duplicate the actions of the senses in judging their objects; instead, it takes on their operations as parts of its own activity. In appropriating their operations, the common sense acts as a principal efficient cause does with respect to its instruments. A strictly passive common sense, however, could not appropriate the acts of the proper senses. Hence, if the common sense were strictly passive in receiving immutations, it would act in isolation from the proper senses rather than in union with them. For example, the common sense and vision would perceive the same object, color, through two separate, albeit simultaneous cognitive activities.
"In order to support our thesis, we must consider how the common sense is passive inasmuch as it receives an immutation, yet it is active inasmuch as it performs a judgment. "Note also that sense and intellect not only receive the forms of things but also have a judgment of them." "Est etiam et aliud considerandum, quod sensus et intellectus non solum recipiunt formas rerum, set etiam habent iudicium de ipsis;. . ." CDS cap. 18 (45.2:99.217-19).
"By calling sensation an "immutation," we compare it to natural immutations, which are passive in the strict sense. As the recipient of an immutation, the common sense is the patient of a transitive activity (albeit not according to the strict meaning of "patient"), for it is the terminus of the action of the sensible object upon the senses. The direction of this transitive activity seems to be the opposite of the one implied by comparing the common sense to a principal efficient cause. Hence, if sensation were strictly an immutation, then the common sense could not be like a principal efficient cause.
By calling sensation a "judgment," however, we compare it to the operation of the intellect, which is active in a more excellent way than any sense power. As a judicative power, the common sense power performs an operation that has the proper sensible qualities of the extrinsic thing as its object or terminus. This statement presupposes that the object of the operation is in the cognitive power in some way. See ST I, q. 14, a. 2, c. (FEDP trans., 1:73).
"In this way, the common sense is the principle rather than the terminus of this judicative activity, and its operation parallels that of other agents (although it is not an agent according to strict meaning of the term). Thus, by focussing on the common sense as judicative, we see that it is active in some way; this characterization in turn allows us to see how it uses the proper senses as instruments."
...Cut and pasted from somewhere in Chapter One of my dissertation.
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