Abstract

A final word is mentioned on the relation of self-knowledge to realism, a realism understood as being grounded on the recognition of the mutual otherness of man and world within the unity of the knowing act. ;Man is present in the dual junction between himself and the separate substances, and between himself and the world. It is the act of knowing that reveals oneself and the world as distinct. This is due to the fact that one is aware by his self-presence that there is an opposition between the flowing temporal character of the world and the rigid, ontological density exhibited by oneself in knowing that world. Man is aware by his presence to himself that he dominates an immobile region which is the locus of the past and future; yet, in a sense, it transcends all temporal modifications. One's self-presence is that point of transcendence beyond the temporal succession of one's life. What one is present to is an unconceptualizable, immobile, and indivisible actuality that grounds and supports past, present, and future. Man is in close, subjective proximity to his existence , an existence which he knows as immortal and incorruptible. Man's personal, habitual self-knowing capacity and its resultant individual self-perceiving glance guarantees his abiding identity and his distinction from the world. One's radical, incommunicable individuality is known as a time-transcending presence, a presence discovered in time, but not determined by time. ;Human self-knowledge places man within the spiritual hierarchy of St. Thomas. The human intellect is similar to the divine intellect and the angelic intellects insofar as it possesses the ability to grasp itself, to possess itself intellectually because of its self-subsistent form. Aquinas quotes Dionysius who claims that through the reduction of many things to one by reflection, souls are held worthy of acts of understanding equal to those of angels, insofar as this is proper to human souls. Habitual self-knowledge is, in some way, a participation in that distinctive self-knowing capability possessed by every intellectually subsistent substance. The glimpse that man obtains by his self-presence is similar to the understanding of a first principle in that it cannot be demonstrated or proved; it is an immediate evidence. ;There is another type of self-knowledge in which the soul is known with reference to that which is common to all souls. This common or universal self-knowledge enables one to grasp the true nature of the soul, i.e. what the soul is and what its proper accidents are. ;This dissertation is an inquiry into the meaning and significance of Aquinas' doctrine of self-knowledge. It is composed of two main divisions, exegetical and interpretative. The exegetical section begins with a consideration of the problem of self-knowledge and its relationship to the history of philosophy and, in particular, to neoscholastic scholarship. After justifying the need for such a study, we proceed to examine the immediate historical influence and philosophical context for St. Thomas' texts on self-knowledge. A close, exegetical treatment of Aquinas' texts is then undertaken with a view to obtaining a precise statement of his doctrine. The central text is De Veritate X,8. Here Aquinas establishes the two kinds of knowledge that the soul may have of itself. First, there is that knowledge of the soul which is proper to itself only. Proper knowledge of the soul enables one to know the soul as it exists in this, particular individual. This type of knowledge indicates that the soul is, just as one perceives that one has a soul