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Document Details : Title: Are the Divine Ideas Involved in Making the Sensible Intelligible? Subtitle: The Role of Knowledge of the Divine in Bonaventure's Theory of Cognition Author(s): METSELAAR, Suzanne Journal: Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales Volume: 79 Issue: 2 Date: 2012 Pages: 339-372 DOI: 10.2143/RTPM.79.2.2959639 Abstract : In this article, I investigate the way in which knowledge of the divine (and particularly of the divine ideas) is involved in the mechanism of human cognition. On the basis of a discussion of Bonaventure’s pivotal texts on this subject, I show that knowledge of the divine is involved in making the created intelligible: by means of an act of judgment, in which recourse to the divine ideas is taken, an intelligible species can be abstracted from a sensible representation. This means that Bonaventure does not maintain an ‘Aristotelian account of abstraction,’ as some scholars defend. Furthermore, I show that both abstraction and analysis (i.e., resolution) involve an act of judgment in terms of a comparison of created being to first being. Therefore, the priority of the divine in the first act of cognition is twofold: both on the level of abstracting the intelligible from the sensible and on the level of a complete analysis of what has become known, preliminary knowledge of the divine is necessary. |
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