Peripatetic axiom

Thomas Aquinas

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Greek principle quoted by Thomas Aquinas

The Peripatetic axiom is: "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" (Latin: Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu). It is found in De veritate, q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19 by Thomas Aquinas.^[1]

Aquinas adopted this principle from the Peripatetic school of Greek philosophy, established by Aristotle.^[where?] Aquinas argued that the existence of God could be proved by reasoning from sense data.^[2] He used a variation on the Aristotelian notion of the "active intellect" (Latin: intellectus agens)^[3] which he interpreted as the ability to abstract universal meanings from particular empirical data.^[4]

References

^ Aquinas, Thomas. Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.
^ Leftow, Brian (ed., 2006), Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Questions on God, pp. vii et seq.^{[ISBN missing]}
^ Z. Kuksewicz, “The Potential and the Agent Intellect,” in: N. Kretzmann, e.a., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 595–601^{[ISBN missing]}
^ Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1969), "Thomas Aquinas", subsection on "Theory of Knowledge", vol. 8, pp. 106–107.^{[ISBN missing]}