4. De Anima on The Duane Berquist Lectures

1. Where the De Anima Fits: Aristotle's Books on Nature and Life, and the Value of Common Experience

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks where On the Soul belongs among Aristotle’s writings on nature, generation and corruption, and the biological works, and answers by following Aquinas’s prologue to his commentary on De Sensu et Sensato, which lays out an order moving from soul considered in itself to soul as embodied in particular living things. He pairs this with Physics I, lectio 1, reading closely from a handout titled “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I” to show that Aristotle starts from common experience—outward toward motion in the Physics, inward toward life in the De Anima—and pushes toward increasingly immaterial principles. He argues this progression trains the mind for metaphysics in a way later, more experimental sciences do not.

2. The Proemium of the De Anima: Why Knowledge of the Soul Is Most Desirable, and What 'Soul' Means

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the proemium to Aristotle’s De Anima, first showing how Greek and medieval philosophers used such openings—in Plato’s Timaeus, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and elsewhere in Aristotle—to state a work’s scope, order, and difficulty. He then follows Aristotle’s own claims: that all knowledge is good, that one science outranks another by the dignity of its object or by its certitude, and that the study of the soul wins on both counts. Drawing on Thomistic commentary, he explains why the soul’s existence is self-evident even though its essence is not, and why this makes the science of soul foundational to ethics, logic, wisdom, and theology alike.

3. Why Knowing the Soul Is Hard: How Natural Science Reasons, and the Phaedo's Two Views of the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening puzzles of Aristotle’s De Anima Book I: what genus the soul falls under, whether it admits one definition or many, and whether to study its substance, powers, acts, or objects first, reading Aquinas’s commentary alongside the text. He brings in two supporting passages—Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 56, on how knowing a thing’s substance grounds demonstrative knowledge of its properties, and Aquinas on Boethius’s De Trinitate distinguishing how natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics each reason (rationabiliter, disciplinabiliter, intellectualiter). He closes by returning to Plato’s Phaedo, contrasting the soul as separable substance against the soul as bodily harmony, setting up Aristotle’s later synthesis.

4. Aristotle's De Anima Proemium: Nature, Substance, and How to Define the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a prayer to St. Thomas Aquinas, then lingers over Gloucester’s cliff scene in King Lear to weigh an editor’s gloss on the word “clearest” applied to the gods. Turning to the proemium of Aristotle’s De Anima, he reads Aristotle’s near-synonymous terms “nature,” “substance,” and “what it is” as different names for the task of definition, drawing on Ammonius Hermeias and Metaphysics Book V to distinguish defining a thing by its cause or specific difference from defining it merely by an effect or property. He closes by raising the difficulty this creates for defining the soul itself, given the split between substance and accident, illustrated with the examples of time and health.

5. Error as Wandering: The Sadducees, 'You Err Through This', and Ignorance as a Cause of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a philological detour through Aristotle’s De Anima, following Euclid’s editor Heath on the Greek and Latin roots of “error” as wandering—the same root behind “planet”—and Aquinas’s remark that logic guides reason “orderly, easily, and without error.” He then sets Matthew, Mark, and Luke side by side on Christ’s exchange with the Sadducees over the resurrection, weighing variant readings such as “like the angels” against “equal to the angels” and the Greek behind “you err,” to show Christ diagnosing their mistake as rooted in ignorance of Scripture and of God’s power. He closes by tying this pattern of error-through-ignorance back to Aristotle’s account of causes and to the opening problem of De Anima Book I: why philosophers have held so many conflicting opinions about the soul.

6. Pius X on the Causes of Error: Pride, Curiosity, Likeness, False Imagination, and the Road of Inquiry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what actually causes error, starting from Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis and its distinction between remote causes lodged in the will—pride and curiosity—and the proximate intellectual cause, ignorance. He sets this alongside Aquinas’s own account of error in his commentary on the Epistles to Timothy and in the Summa Contra Gentiles, then works out how such causes operate accidentally, through coincidence, chance, and the removal of an impediment. Turning to Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and the proem to the De Anima, he examines likeness, false imagination, and mental “wandering” as further sources of deception, illustrating the pattern with examples from King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, and Scripture.

7. Are the Passions of the Soul Bodily? Emotions, the Will, and Immortality (De Anima I, Proemium)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up paragraphs 7–9 of the proemium to the De Anima, where Aristotle asks whether every passion of the soul—every emotion—involves the body, or whether something proper to the soul, above all thinking, might occur apart from it, a question bearing directly on the soul’s separability and immortality. He then turns to the emotions themselves, distinguishing the concupiscible from the irascible passions, and asks how far names like love, anger, or desire can be transferred to acts of the will and, more cautiously, to God. He draws on parallel treatments in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, De Veritate, and Summa Contra Gentiles to test where such transfer is legitimate and where it breaks down.

8. Concupiscible and Irascible Emotions, Human Pleasures, and Natural Philosophy's Definition of Anger

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why natural philosophy, unlike dialectic, must define passions like anger and fear by including bodily matter in the definition, not merely the formal account. Working from Aristotle’s De Anima, he examines how thumos and epithumia—the irascible and concupiscible appetites—relate to reason, comparing this to Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in the Republic and Symposium. He takes up the hierarchy of animal, human, and angelic pleasures, and turns to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae on the theological virtues, distinguishing their objects: truth, goodness, and mercy. Touching on Augustine’s Confessions and reflections on beauty and liturgical music along the way, he returns to the methodological point that inquiry into the soul’s passions eventually gives way to metaphysics once immateriality is at stake.

9. De Anima, Book Two: Defining the Soul by Division as Substantial Form and First Act

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book Two of Aristotle’s De Anima, asking how one can define something as elusive as the soul. He contrasts induction from particular examples with the method of division, arguing that only division can pin down so slippery a subject. Working through Aristotle’s opening divisions, he places the soul within the category of substance, then narrows it to form rather than matter or composite, and finally to first act rather than second act—using the analogies of geometric science versus its exercise, and health versus the living body. Aquinas’s commentary and cross-references to the Physics, Categories, and Posterior Analytics supply the background needed to grasp soul as the substantial form of a natural body.

10. Know Thyself; Aristotle's Divisions Toward Defining the Soul (De Anima II.1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from the Delphic command “know thyself,” arguing it is finally addressed to the rational soul asking what it itself is. He then follows Aristotle’s method of definition by division at the start of De Anima II: soul falls under substance rather than quality, under form rather than matter, and under first act rather than second act, or operation. He pairs this with the parallel division of body—natural versus artificial, living versus nonliving—that Aristotle needs to define soul as the first act of a natural body having life potentially. Along the way he draws on the Physics for matter, form, potency, and act, and briefly sets Aristotle’s account against the Phaedo’s picture of soul as harmony.

11. The Equivocation of 'Body': Matter Receives Forms in Order, from Friendship to Geometry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima and asks what precision the definition of the soul actually requires. He shows that “body” is said equivocally—once as a species of substance, once as the matter composing a living thing—and that “understanding” and “knowing” likewise need to be distinguished, on pain of the fallacies Aristotle catalogs in the Sophistical Refutations. Using examples from logic, mathematics, and letters forming words, he traces how matter receives its forms in a fixed order, then extends that pattern to friendship, love of God, and the stages of human growth, where lower perfections are taken up into higher ones.

12. The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Composed of Tools; How Body and Soul Are One

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of soul as “the first act of a natural body having life potentially” in Book II of the De Anima, pausing on the Greek organikon, which he argues means a body “composed of tools” rather than the vaguer “organic.” That distinction lets him explain soul and body as form and matter making one substance, against Plato’s dualism and the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration. He draws analogies from art’s relation to its tools and from political philosophy’s relation between constitutions and custom, and closes by previewing Aristotle’s coming comparisons of artificial tools like an axe to natural ones like the eye, plus a note on how a soul remains proportioned to its own body even after death.

13. The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Made of Tools: Explaining the Definition by Comparisons (Axe and Eye)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening chapter of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, tracing the chain of distinctions—substance, matter, form, composite, first act versus second act—that culminates in the definition of soul as the first act of a natural body equipped with organs, or “composed of tools.” He explains Aristotle’s two proportional comparisons, the axe’s capacity to cut and the eye’s capacity to see, used to show what “first act” means as opposed to actual operation. He closes on a question the text leaves open: whether the soul is in the body the way a sailor is in a ship, or in some other way, raising the issue of the soul’s partial separability from matter.

14. De Anima II.2: Definition and Demonstration, Wonder, and Reasoning from the Soul's Activities

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Chapter Two of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, asking how the definition of soul reached in Chapter One can be demonstrated by reasoning from what is more known to us back to what is more fundamental in nature. Drawing on the Posterior Analytics, he works through how a definition can function as a demonstration’s conclusion, premise, or condensed whole, illustrating the point with the geometric case of the mean proportional and homelier examples like a knife, marriage, and temperance. He then turns this apparatus toward Aristotle’s coming argument, in which the soul as the body’s first act gets shown through the more familiar operations of life—living, sensing, moving, understanding—functioning as a kind of middle term.

15. The Levels of Life, the Soul's Powers, and the Soul as That by Which We First Live

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what separates the living from the non-living, following Aristotle’s De Anima as it ranks life’s powers: nutrition can exist without sensation or understanding in mortal things, but never the reverse. He builds toward Aristotle’s account of soul as the substantial form of an organic body, using the analogies of science to soul and health to body to show what it means for soul to be “that by which” something first lives, senses, and understands. Along the way he distinguishes reason from imagination and brings in Aquinas’s commentary, along with theological parallels such as spiritual “feeding” and fatherhood among angels.

16. 'In Him We Live and Move': Worshipping God, the Beatific Vision, and Devotion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from Paul’s address at the Areopagus, “in Him we live, and move, and have our being,” and notes that Aquinas never comments on the verse directly. He instead borrows a parallel distinction from the Summa Contra Gentiles, where God is treated as our end, our mover, and our creator and sustainer, and uses it to read Paul’s words. From there he moves outward to the beatific vision as the soul’s union with God as both object and form of understanding, the light of glory, and how God moves the will without forcing it. He closes on devotion, hope, and love as they bear on prayer, drawing on Aristotle, Anselm, and saints such as Gertrude the Great and Francis of Assisi.

17. Councils on the soul as form of the body; the five kinds of powers, four grades of life and three souls

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with two conciliar texts—Vienne against Olivi and Fifth Lateran against Pomponazzi—establishing as doctrine that the rational soul is truly and essentially the body’s form. He then works through Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II, chapter 3, on the five genera of powers: nutritive, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and rational. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he shows how these five reduce to four grades of life and finally to three kinds of souls—vegetative, sensitive, and rational. Along the way he pauses over equivocal predication, the Greek behind Aristotle’s terms, and a comparison to the five notions, four relations, and three persons of Trinitarian theology.

18. The desiring powers: sense desire, the emotions, love, and Mill on pleasure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima account of the appetitive powers, distinguishing sense desire (epithumia), the irascible or spirited appetite (thumos), and rational will (boulesis), tracking the Greek terms into their Latin equivalents and back to Plato’s tripartite soul-city analogy in the Republic. He then catalogs the specific passions belonging to each appetite—love, desire, joy, hatred, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, boldness, anger—drawing examples from cats, soldiers, Sleepy Hollow, and Hamlet. The class ends by sorting out the vocabulary of love (eros, philia, agape, amor, dilectio) and weighing Aristotle, Mill, and Aquinas against each other on the nature and place of pleasure in human life.

19. Touch, thinking vs. understanding, and studying the soul through its objects, acts and powers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of Aristotle’s De Anima with Aquinas’s commentary, tracing how touch connects to pleasure, pain, and desire in animals, and how the soul’s powers—nutritive, sensitive, locomotive, rational—stand in a hierarchy he compares to nested geometric figures. He insists on a fixed order of inquiry: object before act, act before power, when trying to define any capacity of the soul. Along the way he works through the Greek terms behind desire and knowing—epithumia, boulesis, nous, dianoetikon, episteme, logismos—and their Latin equivalents, using Boethius’s image of rest and motion to distinguish understanding from discursive reasoning. He closes with a brief aside about Abraham Lincoln, unrelated to the text.

20. The Nutritive Soul: Answering Empedocles, Food as Object, Nourishment, Growth and Generation, and the Sacraments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the nutritive soul, though lowest, is called “first” in De Anima Book II: it is the power most common to all living things. He traces Aristotle’s claim that nourishment serves generation, the most natural act of life, echoing Plato’s Symposium on mortal beings imitating divine eternity by producing offspring. Turning to Aquinas’s commentary, he explains the soul as threefold cause of the body—mover, end, and substantial form, never matter—using the four causes from the Physics and homely examples like crafts and farm tools. He closes by comparing this threefold causality to how God causes the universe.

21. Purity and Temperance: Shame and Honestas, Catharsis, and Aristotle's Rules for Acquiring Virtue

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account of the nutritive soul in the De Anima, starting from Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles, who tried to explain plant growth purely through the elements. Against this, Aristotle insists that fire and the elements cannot by themselves account for why living things grow to a finite, ordered limit; only soul explains that limit. Berquist then examines food as the proper object of the nutritive soul, distinguishing its three powers—feeding, growth, and reproduction—and, following Aquinas, compares these to baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. Along the way he draws on Heisenberg, Shakespeare, and Scripture to open up the range of Aristotle’s language.

22. Sensing as Undergoing: Empedocles, Potency and Act (De Anima II.5, Part 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening of Chapter 5 of De Anima, where Aristotle calls sensing a form of undergoing rather than acting. He pauses over the Greek and Latin terms behind this claim—paschein/passio, dunamis/potentia, aisthesis—showing how their standard English translations flatten meanings that shift across contexts. He then takes up Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles, whose theory that like knows like through material likeness would absurdly make the senses know themselves and perceive absent objects. Drawing on parallels from the Physics, Generation and Corruption, and Sophistical Refutations, Berquist uses the refutation to introduce the potency/act distinction governing sensation.

23. Two Abilities and Two Acts: Knowing, Learning and the Senses (De Anima II.5, Part 2)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to have a science versus actually thinking with it, tracing Aristotle’s distinction between two potencies—the ability to acquire knowledge and the ability to exercise knowledge already had—and their corresponding first and second actualities. He turns to Plato’s Meno and the doubling of the square to show what learning itself accomplishes, and to the etymology of “understanding” and the difference between alteration and a habit’s perfective actualization. He then applies the same structure analogically to sensation: the senses are acquired through generation as sciences are acquired through learning, and the act of sensing parallels actual consideration, though sensation grasps singulars outside the soul while understanding grasps universals within it.

24. The Kinds of Sensibles (De Anima II.6), Sweetness as Metaphor, and Happiness vs. Joy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Chapter Six of Book Two of Aristotle’s De Anima, where the sensible divides into three kinds: proper sensibles grasped by only one sense, common sensibles like shape and motion grasped by several, and accidental sensibles known only indirectly, through the intellect’s judgment. He works the distinction with plain cases—hearing a cat as opposed to merely hearing a sound, mistaking sugar for salt—before following a tangent into the metaphorical use of “sweet” and the etymology behind eudaimonia, felicitas, and happiness. The session closes by setting up the coming treatment of sight and touch.

25. Purity, Light and the Transparent: Aristotle's De Anima II.7 and Empedocles' Photons

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae on the virtues annexed to temperance, showing how purity and mildness rein in the unruly passions of lust and anger, drawing on Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet and on the etymology of “temper” and “wretched.” He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II, working through the account of the transparent, light, and color, and Aristotle’s rejection of Empedocles’s claim that light is a body traveling through space. Against this he sets Aristotle’s argument that illumination happens all at once rather than by locomotion, comparing this with Newton, Huygens, and Einstein on light, and reflecting on definition and demonstration as instruments of reasoning.

26. Sight versus Hearing, the Continuous, and Socrates and Christ as Spoken Teachers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Sensu et Sensato, read through Aquinas’s commentary, on why sight outranks the other senses for grasping the common sensibles—magnitude, figure, motion, number—all bound up with the continuous, while hearing holds a peculiar privilege: it is the sense through which a student receives speech from a teacher. From there he traces how terms like “before,” “beginning,” and “end,” which get their first meaning from continuous quantity, are later said analogically of God. He closes by weighing the spoken word against the written, drawing out the parallel between Socrates and Christ as teachers who taught by speaking rather than writing.

27. Touch, the Four Elements, and Reception Without Matter (De Anima II, chs. 11-12)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s treatment of touch, showing how hot/cold and wet/dry are the basic differences of body as body, tied to the old four-element theory of matter. He then turns to chapter twelve’s claim that sensation receives sensible form without matter, drawing on Aquinas’s commentary to distinguish material reception, where a new form displaces an old one as in carved wood or wax, from cognitive reception, where the form of another thing is grasped while one’s own nature stays intact. He closes on why sense organs, though they receive form immaterially, remain bodily and can be damaged by excessive sensibles, since each sense is a kind of proportion that can be thrown out of balance, like a musical instrument’s harmony.

28. Senses vs. Reason, Excess of Objects, and a Discussion of Evil as Privation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out De Anima Book II, chapter 12, asking why a sense organ can be overwhelmed and injured by an excessively strong object—too loud a sound, too bright a light, too intense a taste—while reason suffers no comparable damage from a supremely intelligible object. He traces the answer to the materiality of the sense organs against the immateriality of the intellect. A student’s question about whether non-existence can be called bad prompts a lengthy digression on privation and the goodness of creation, and along the way Berquist works through a passage in Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, Book IV, on how the Son receives the divine nature. The class ends looking ahead to Book III of De Anima and the inner senses.

29. De Anima III.1: Why Only Five Senses, and the Accidental Perception of Shape, Motion, and Number

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 2, working out the distinction between the “animalis homo” and the “spiritualis” man from the definition of soul as form of the body, contrasting the soul’s cognitive and appetitive powers with intellect and will. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 1, where Aristotle argues, with only probable certainty, that no sixth sense exists beyond the traditional five, reasoning from the sense organs’ relation to the four elements, and explains why common sensibles like shape, motion, and number are known only accidentally through the proper senses. Along the way he draws in Mary’s Magnificat, the soul-spirit distinction, and the nature of number and infinity.

30. Custom, Abstraction, and Sensing Our Own Sensing (De Anima III, ch. 2)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with examples—idiom and translation, travel abroad, C.S. Lewis on reading old books, and specialists like Claude Bernard and Descartes who absolutize one way of knowing—to show how custom and limited experience slow reason down when ideas have never occurred apart. He then moves to close commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 2, with Aquinas’s commentary alongside it, asking whether the very sense that perceives color or sound also perceives its own act of seeing or hearing. He works through how sensible-in-act and sense-in-act are one in being but differ in definition, setting up Aristotle’s case for an inward common sense that can tell white from sweet.

31. Sensible in Act, Sound in the Forest, and Praying with Other Religions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through De Anima Book III, pressing the puzzle of whether something “tasty” is actual or only potential before it is actually tasted, and considers concord and ratio in the act of hearing. He previews the next class’s question of whether one sense, or two senses together, can tell that white and sweet belong to different objects. The discussion then opens out into looser exchanges with students on pity and mercy, whether love is an act of will or of feeling, the difference between vocal and mental prayer, and whether one may pray together with people of other religions.

32. De Anima III, Lectio 3: The Common Sense and Judging White from Sweet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of how we can judge that white and sweet are different, when sight grasps one and taste the other—no single exterior sense can compare qualities it doesn’t itself perceive. Following Aristotle’s argument in Book III, Lectio 3 of the De Anima, read through Aquinas’s commentary, he shows why a unifying “common sense” is needed to discern such differences, using comparisons to syllogistic reasoning and spelling, and the image of a point as the shared origin of several lines. He extends that same point-analogy to the two natures and one person of Christ. Brief opening remarks mark the feast of St. Pius X.

33. De Anima III.3: Grasping and Judging, Sensing vs. Reason, and the Prevalence of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of De Anima III.3, where Aristotle begins separating the senses—including the inward senses—from reason, a distinction he’ll complete in chapter four. The core question: why did earlier thinkers like Empedocles and Anaxagoras collapse understanding into sensing, treating knowledge as a bodily process on the assumption that “like knows like”? Berquist answers by laying out grasping and judging as the two constituents of knowledge, working through examples from geometry and Shakespeare. He closes by tracing how the mind’s natural bent toward sensible and imaginable objects shapes, and constrains, Thomas’s later teaching on theological language about God.

34. De Anima III.3: Imagining vs. Thinking, the Estimative Power, and Digressions (Trinity, Hegel, Irving)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s arguments in De Anima Book III, first separating sensation from understanding, then drawing the harder line between imagining and thinking, with Aquinas’s commentary guiding the reading throughout. He tests the distinction against Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, showing where each confuses images with ideas. Turning to the internal senses, he explains common sense, memory, and especially the estimative power, using animal behavior to show how a creature perceives a non-sensible quality like “enemy” in what it sees. He closes with a digression from Metaphysics V’s treatment of unity and “part” to Aquinas’s theology of the Trinity and its traces in creation.

35. Reason Is Most Man; What Imagination Is Not (Aristotle's De Anima, Reading 5)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the fifth reading of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, where Aristotle proceeds by elimination: before saying what imagination is, he shows what it is not. Berquist follows the arguments separating imagination from sensation, from science or understanding, and from opinion, using dreams, optical illusions, and the sun’s apparent versus actual size as test cases. He also takes up Plato’s account in the Sophist, which treats imagination as a blend of opinion and sensation, and shows why Aristotle rejects it. The class ends at the threshold of reading six, where Aristotle turns to his own positive definition.

36. Imagination as a Moved Mover: Deception in the Senses (Reading 6)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 3 (roughly 428a–429a), reading it through Aquinas’s sixth and seventh lessons on the text. Against the idea that imagination freely combines images—a golden mountain—he argues it is instead a residual motion in the sense organ caused by a prior act of sensing, weaker than sensation and especially liable to err about common sensibles like size, shape, and motion rather than proper sensibles like color. He distinguishes the three kinds of sensibles and traces how error compounds as one moves from sense to imagination to reason clouded by passion, drawing examples from Othello and rhetoric. He closes by previewing chapter four’s turn to reason and understanding.

37. Part 1: Put Together, Whole and Part: Number, Matter and Form, Composed and Universal Wholes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How many ways can something be called a “part” or a “whole”? Berquist walks through Aristotle’s answer in Metaphysics V, testing it against semicircles making up a circle, numbers, genus-difference definitions, and the relation of a universal to its particulars. He brings in matter-form composition through the examples of a rubber ball and the union of body and soul, and draws an analogy between number and definition from Metaphysics VIII, echoed in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12. These distinctions then do real work: they let him trace how Aquinas argues, in Summa Theologiae q. 3, that God is free of composition, and they expose sophistical arguments that trade on equivocations over “part,” “whole,” and “before.”

38. Part 2: God Without Parts, the Trinity and Number, Debate on Number, and History as Incomplete Inquiry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how the three Persons of the Trinity can be really distinct without dividing God into parts, and answers that their distinction is relational rather than absolute—Father, Son, and Spirit are not pieces of a whole but terms of a relation. He then works through Aristotle’s account of whole and part more generally: how units combine to make a number like five or eight, how genus and difference compose a definition, and how matter and form compose a substance, comparing these to the parts of a continuous quantity. He closes by distinguishing the interior senses—common sense, imagination, memory, and estimation—and, in a brief tangent, explaining why history counts as an inquiry that can never be completed.

39. De Anima III.4: Grasping and Judging, and Why the Mind Is Not a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Aristotle’s fourth chapter on the soul’s knowing and judging part, working through Aquinas’s commentary and lesson divisions. He separates apprehension, the mind’s grasping of an object, from judgment, and shows how different sciences settle truth by returning to different starting points—sense, imagination, or reason itself. Turning to Aristotle’s argument against Anaxagoras, he traces the analogy with the senses to conclude that the intellect must be unmixed with any bodily nature if it is to receive and know all material things. Examples from geometry and logic illustrate the difference between undergoing as mere material alteration and undergoing as the receptive perfection proper to sensing and understanding.

40. The Mind as the Place of Species: Universals, Truth and Understanding vs. Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the section of De Anima Book III where Aristotle calls the intellect “the place of species,” asking what it means for forms to exist in the mind rather than, as Plato held, in a separated world of their own. Tracking the Greek terms eidos and nous against their Latin equivalents species and intellectus, he shows why reception of a universal differs from a body’s reception in continuous quantity, and how that difference proves reason cannot itself be corporeal. He closes by examining how “understanding” and “reason” get applied analogically across angels, God, and human beings—one more instance of the pattern of naming that runs through Aristotelian philosophy.

41. How the Senses and Reason Are Acted On Differently, Two Kinds of Ability, and What Reason Knows

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, Chapter 4, with Aquinas’s commentary as guide. He asks why the analogy between sense and intellect breaks down: a violently bright light or loud sound can injure the eye or ear, yet grasping a highly intelligible object never damages the mind—instead it sharpens its grasp of lesser, easier intelligibles, because intellect, unlike a sense organ, is immaterial. He then turns to the next lection, Aristotle’s distinction between first and second potency and act—the difference between the raw capacity to learn and the trained ability to use knowledge already acquired—before introducing the intellect’s proper object, the quiddity of sensible things, and what that implies for how the mind can speak of God only negatively and by analogy.

42. The Object of Reason: What a Thing Is, Universals and Immaterial Understanding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a handout on Shakespeare, asking how angels and demons can move the imagination and color the light of reason differently depending on whether their intent is good or malicious, with Macbeth as the test case. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, reading the intellect as a receptive power and working through Aristotle’s distinction between a thing and “what it was to be” that thing. Examples of circles, water, and flesh show why understanding takes hold of the universal immaterially, while sense and imagination remain tied to material singulars. He ties the discussion to Aquinas’s commentary and to the simplicity of God and the angels.

43. Speaking About God: Wise vs. Wisdom, and the Two Objections on Undergoing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a theological digression, using Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, on why names like “wise,” “just,” and “good” apply to God only by affirmation and denial: our concepts, fitted to things composed of matter and form, cannot capture a God who simply is what he has, unlike Plato’s separately existing universal forms. Examples like health and healthy, sweetness and sweet, illustrate the point. He then returns to Aristotle’s De Anima, taking up two objections about how an immaterial understanding can be acted on by material things, and why identifying understanding with the thing understood doesn’t make everything self-understanding—setting up the need for an agent intellect. Along the way he flags translation problems, especially with “suffering” (paschein) and “power” (dunamis), that obscure Aristotle’s Greek in English versions.

44. Why the Understandable Doesn't Always Understand; Reading Aristotle through Thomas; Liberal Education

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s puzzle, in De Anima Book III, of why understandable things do not always themselves understand, reading the text alongside Thomas Aquinas’s exposition. He draws out the distinction between potential and actual intelligibility, arguing that a thing becomes actually understandable only through separation from matter, and shows how this degree of immateriality grounds the division of speculative philosophy into natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics. Along the way he pauses over the etymology of theoria and speculatio, insists on Aquinas as a necessary guide for reading Aristotle well, and closes with remarks on reverent study, liberal education, and Scripture.

45. De Anima III.5: The Agent Intellect as Light—Separable, Impassible, Unmixed, and Act

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the chapter of the De Anima where Aristotle distinguishes two intellects: the possible or “undergoing” intellect, able to receive the natures of all things, and the agent intellect, which actively renders material things—potentially intelligible in themselves—actually intelligible. He follows Aristotle’s analogies of matter and art, and especially of light illuminating potential color, to show how the agent intellect abstracts universal natures from sensory images. Reading with St. Thomas’s commentary, he examines the four properties Aristotle assigns to this intellect—separability, impassibility, unmixedness, and being essentially act rather than potency—comparing it to Anaxagoras’s Nous and drawing out its bearing on immaterial beings like angels and God.

46. De Anima III: The Agent and Possible Intellect, and the Natural Light of Reason versus Faith

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account in De Anima III of the two intellects: the possible intellect, which undergoes and receives, and the agent intellect, which acts, illuminating the analogy to matter and form and to an artist’s craft. He brings in Aquinas’s commentary, and turns to Thomas’s prologue to the commentary on Isaiah, following Jerome, to weigh prophetic vision and the natural light of reason against the light of faith, with St. Paul’s rapture as a case of possible supernatural illumination. He contrasts this Aristotelian epistemology with Plato’s forms, and closes with Metaphysics IX’s claim that act is prior to potency, pointing the discussion toward the divine mind as philosophy’s highest object.

47. Intellect, Imagination, and the Two Acts of Reason: Nature vs. Reason and Will

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes working through Aristotle’s account of the passive and agent intellect, distinguishing the brain-bound “particular reason” or cogitative power from the immaterial act of understanding, and explaining why the mind must still turn to images even once it has grasped a concept. He then takes up chapter six, where Aristotle lays out simple apprehension of what a thing is and judgment of truth and falsity through composition and division, setting these against the further act of reasoning. Along the way he uses examples—numbers, Shakespeare, cases of brain injury—to show how the soul’s partial independence from matter is being argued, and contrasts Aristotle’s account with modern confusions in Sartre and Mill about nature, reason, and will.

48. Understanding the One and the Indivisible: Line, Point, Good and Evil, and Reason vs. Sense

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a puzzle from Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III: how can the mind grasp something indivisible, like a geometric point, when knowledge normally proceeds by distinguishing parts? He shows that such things are known negatively, and draws out the parallel to Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity, where God too is approached through the via negativa. He then moves to Aristotle’s comparison of sense and reason, distinguishing perfect from imperfect acts through the contrast of seeing and walking, and explaining why sensation reaches good and bad only through pleasure and pain while reason grasps them universally. Along the way he brings in Plato’s Meno, the Gospel of John’s use of logos, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics on act and potency.

49. Phantasms and Understanding: Aristotle on Intellect, Mill on Higher Pleasures, and the Five Intellectual Virtues

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the passage from sensitive to intellectual soul in Aristotle’s psychology, asking how phantasms make understanding possible and how reason judges good and bad apart from mere pleasure and pain. He brings in an Osterwee article on Mill’s utilitarianism to test whether “higher” pleasures—art, music, thought—can be ranked without appeal to something above pleasure itself, man standing between brute and angel. Shakespeare, Plato’s Meno and Symposium, and Kierkegaard supply further cases linking imagination, love, and reasoning. He closes by laying out Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues—understanding, science, wisdom, prudence, art—divided between theoretical and practical reason.

50. De Anima III.8: The Soul Is in Some Way All Things – the Hand as Tool of Tools, and Locke's General Triangle

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, with Aquinas’s commentary, that the soul is in some way all things—not by material composition, as Empedocles held with his theory of like knowing like, but because sense and intellect receive forms in potency. He develops Aristotle’s comparison of the hand, “tool of tools,” to the intellect as “form of forms,” reading closely from a handout on Physics I. The class ends on the mind’s dependence on phantasms, using Locke’s confused account of the general idea of a triangle to show the difference between imagining one particular figure and understanding, in potency, what belongs to all triangles.

51. Imagination vs. Thought: Truth in Statements, Universal vs. Singular, Words and Metaphor, Music, and Loving Reason and Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, read through Aquinas’s commentary on De Anima, that imagination deals only in images—never true or false—while thought becomes true or false only in judgment, the “intertwining” (symploke) of two thoughts. He asks why understanding, though it grasps universals, still depends on singular sense images, or phantasms, to do so. Along the way he draws on the handout of Natural Fragments of the first philosophers and material from DHB Volume I to open onto related questions: why metaphor works, what music and poetry are for, and how self-love relates to loving reason and wisdom.

52. De Anima III.9 (Lectio 14): What Moves the Animal? Plato's Division of the Soul, and Why Neither Feeding, Sensing nor the Looking Mind Is the Cause

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what in the soul accounts for locomotion, the animal’s capacity to move itself from place to place. He first sets aside Plato’s division of the soul in the Republic into reason, spirit, and desire, showing why it fails to answer the question. He then follows Aristotle’s argument that nutrition, sensation, and even reason taken by itself cannot be the cause, using the example of stationary sea creatures that sense but never locomote to sharpen the point, before turning to literary illustrations from Shakespeare and Tocqueville.

53. Practical Reason, Incontinence and Self-Control; Dividing the Soul by Its Root: Emotions, Tragedy and Comedy, Choice and the Image of God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does reason sometimes fail to govern action? Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima Book III to contrast the incontinent man, who knows the right course yet acts against it, with the continent man, who feels the same pull of desire but masters it. He sets this against the larger distinction between speculative and practical reason and the virtues attached to each—understanding, science, wisdom, prudence, art—then maps the concupiscible passions (love, desire, pleasure, hate, pain) and the irascible ones (hope, despair, boldness, fear, anger) onto Aristotle’s theory of motion. He closes by tying intellect and will together as the seat of the image of God, drawing on Shakespeare, Homer, and Mozart’s major and minor keys to illustrate self-control and its collapse.

54. De Anima III.10: Desire, Practical Reason, and Looking Before and After

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima III.10 with Aquinas’s commentary, asking what the two sources of animal motion are and how they finally converge on a single object, the good as desired. He traces the Greek terms—nous, orexis, epithumia, thumos—against Aquinas’s Latin, distinguishing theoretical from practical reason and the concupiscible from the irascible appetite. The key contrast is between sense desire, bound to what is present, and reason, which looks before and after to future consequences. He illustrates this with scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hamlet, and Henry IV Part One, plus an example from Dickens, showing the pattern at work in ordinary moral choice.

55. Knowing in Some Way, Choosing the Apparent Good, and the Deliberative Imagination

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of animal motion in De Anima, tracing the mover-moved structure: the good as unmoved mover, appetite as moved mover, the body as instrument. He dwells on the “immediate pleasant thing” that appears simply good, linking this to the sophistical fallacy—drawn from the Sophistical Refutations—of confusing what is so “simply” with what is so “in some way.” He then contrasts animal sensitive imagination with human deliberative imagination, where reason applies universals to particular acts. Examples from the Meno and from contemporary debates like abortion show how this confusion underlies everyday moral error.

56. The Soul as Gateway, Naming God's Simplicity, and Student Questions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes Aristotle’s chapters twelve and thirteen on how the soul’s powers are ordered, read with Aquinas’s commentary, and proposes moving next to Aquinas’s treatise on the soul in the Prima Pars. The conversation then opens out past the text itself: how to speak of God’s attributes both concretely and abstractly, as when we call him wise and also call him wisdom, given divine simplicity; how reason grasps before and after and draws distinctions; and whether the will remains fixed after death. Students press him with questions throughout, and the talk drifts at points into other authors and ordinary things like food and bread before returning to these themes.

57. De Anima: The Order Among the Soul's Powers, and the Senses of 'Before' (Why Breathing Isn't Better Than Philosophizing)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading the final chapters of Book II of De Anima with Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist takes up the order among the soul’s powers: why the nutritive is prior to the sensitive, and the sensitive prior to the intellective, since each higher power presupposes the lower without being reducible to it. He shows why touch, alone inseparable from animal life, counts as the most fundamental sense. Much of the class turns on a single distinction—“prior in being” versus “prior in goodness”—worked out through homely examples: eating and philosophizing, letters and words, plants and animals. The point is to guard against the common mistake of assuming that what comes first in existence must therefore be higher in worth.

58. De Anima's Last Chapter: Why Touch Is Necessary, Then the Summa and Music's Power Over the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the final chapter of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, rejecting the view that soul is reducible to elements like fire or air and showing why touch, unlike sight or hearing, is necessary for an animal’s existence—excess in tangible qualities kills, while excess in other senses only damages the organ. He draws on Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and Psalms commentary, De Koninck on touch and certitude, and Hegel’s ranking of the arts to contrast touch’s interiority and sympathy with sight and hearing as the “spiritual” senses bound up with beauty and moral formation through music. He ends by announcing the class’s next text: the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, questions 75 through 89.

59. Music, the Psalms, and the Mass: Prayer and Praise Set to Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Homer’s sirens and Shakespeare’s sonnets to ask what music does to us: does it appeal to reason, or bypass it, as in military marches and Nazi propaganda? He then turns to Aquinas’s commentary on the Psalms, distinguishing prayer as petition from prayer as praise, and considers why there are a hundred and fifty psalms and how that number echoes in the structure of the Rosary. He maps the Mass’s own sequence—Kyrie, Gloria, Creed, Sanctus, Agnus Dei—onto Mozart’s liturgical settings, and closes with the Martha and Mary Gospel passage, reading vocal praise of God as a foretaste of the beatific vision.

60. The Soul in the Summa: Introduction to Question 75

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the treatise on man in Question 75, first locating the study of the soul within the Summa’s order of spiritual creature, bodily creature, and man. He explains Thomas’s threefold Dionysian division of essence, powers, and operation, and asks why theology considers man chiefly through the soul, contrasting this treatment with Aristotle’s De Anima. He previews the seven articles ahead, focusing on two errors Thomas corrects: the Pythagorean view of the soul as a mere accidental “harmony,” and the Platonic view, drawn from the Phaedo, of the soul as a complete separate substance—against which Thomas argues the soul is a subsistent substantial form. He ties this to the Mass, the psalms, and the doctrine of the resurrection and Assumption.

61. Is the Soul a Body? Objections, and Why We Picture the Soul as a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a short account of how the Summa’s article format condenses the fuller medieval disputed question, then turns to the first article of Aquinas’s treatise on the soul: whether the soul is a body. He works through the three objections, which draw on ancient views that the soul must be bodily since it moves the body and knows bodily things, then the sed contra from Augustine, and the corpus’s opening move, grounding the inquiry in Aristotle’s De Anima account of soul as the first principle of life shown through self-motion and knowledge. Along the way he uses examples from Shakespeare, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Plato’s Parmenides, and Locke to show how hard it is to think past imagination when the subject is immaterial.

62. The Soul as Act of the Body, and Substantial vs. Accidental Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what the soul is by reading through the body of Article 1 of Question 75, where Aquinas argues the soul must be the first principle of life rather than a bodily organ such as the heart or eye, which are only secondary sources of vital activity. He follows Aquinas’s analogy to accidental forms like heat and shape to explain how soul stands to body as act to matter, then works through the replies to the first three objections, touching the unmoved mover, cognitive reception versus material composition, and two senses of bodily contact. He closes by distinguishing substantial from accidental form generally, preparing the later claim that the human soul’s operations exceed what body alone can account for.

63. Summa I q.75 a.2: Is the Human Soul Subsisting? Why the Intellect Is Not a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the human soul is something subsisting, walking through the article’s three objections and Aquinas’s reply, which draws on Aristotle’s De Anima and Augustine’s De Trinitate. The core argument: because the intellect can know the natures of all bodies, and understanding occurs without any bodily organ, the intellect’s operation cannot be confined to matter—so its mode of existence must be immaterial, following the principle that operation reveals mode of being. Along the way he digresses into Plato’s Theaetetus and Parmenides, Aristotle’s life and school, and the distinction between continuous and discrete quantity, using these to reinforce the case for the soul’s immateriality before turning, time permitting, toward Article 3.

64. Replies to Article Two: Hoc Aliquid, and Is the Brain the Organ of Thought?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s answers to the objections against the soul’s incorporeal, subsisting character in Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 2. He sorts out what Aquinas means by “hoc aliquid,” and how Aristotle’s dialectical remarks in the De Anima are to be read. The longest stretch treats the dependence of thinking on the brain—injury, alcohol—arguing this touches the soul only through its object, the phantasm, not as a bodily organ, with sight and hearing offered as illustrative parallels. He closes with informal remarks before turning to the next article.

65. Article Three: Are Animal Souls Subsistent? Sense vs. Intellect, Proportion, and Greek Humility

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Three of Aquinas’s treatise on the soul (Summa Theologiae I, q. 75), asking whether the souls of brute animals are subsistent. Against the Platonists, Aquinas distinguishes understanding, which needs no bodily organ, from sensation, which always involves bodily change—so only the human soul subsists apart from the body. Reading from his handout on Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 13, and from his paper on Plato’s Phaedo, Berquist places Aquinas between Plato’s soul-as-complete-substance and Simmias’s soul-as-harmony, showing how Aristotle’s account of substantial form holds the truth in each. Student questions follow on animals and the afterlife, Greek philosophical humility, and God’s mercy versus justice.

66. Summa I, Q.75 a.4: Is the Soul the Man? Body and Soul, and Truth as the Mean Between Extremes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 4 of Question 75: whether the soul alone is the man, or whether “man” names the composite of soul and body. He works through Thomas’s case against the Platonic reading, using Plato’s Alcibiades and Augustine’s City of God as foils, and shows how the objection turns on genus, species, and difference in defining natural things. He treats the reply’s use of St. Paul’s “inner” and “outer” man, then draws out parallels to Trinitarian and Christological heresies and to Aristotelian ethics, where truth likewise lies between two extremes. He also reads from Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI and his own handout notes on that text.

67. Summa I, Q.75 a.5: Is the Soul Made of Matter and Form? Objections, the Answer, and Form Received Universally

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of Question 75: is the soul composed of matter and form? He lays out the objections built on act and potency, participation, and the properties attributed to matter, then follows Aquinas’s twofold answer—first from the general account of soul as form, then from the specific character of intellectual understanding, which receives forms universally rather than as individuated in matter. He shows how the soul can still be composed of essence and existence without having matter, and along the way distinguishes that composition from the substance/existence composition found in angels.

68. Q.75 a.5 Replies: Proportioned Abilities, Angels as Form and Being, and Pride as the Mother of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the replies to objections in Q.75 a.5, asking why God as pure act need not be matched by some single “pure potency” the way prime matter underlies bodily things. He shows how intellect, will, and the senses each receive divine perfection according to their own proportioned nature, contrasting faith with charity and sight with hearing, and distinguishing angels—form without matter—from the composition of being and essence in material creatures. He digresses at length into Charles De Koninck, the difference between masculine and feminine love as treated by Francis de Sales and Paul VI, and pride as the hidden cause of error in scholarship.

69. Summa I q.75 a.6: Why the Human Soul Is Incorruptible (Per Se and Per Accidens, Form and Existence, No Contrariety in the Understanding)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether the human soul is corruptible. He shows why the soul, though it can be corrupted per accidens through the body’s dissolution, cannot be corrupted per se, since it is subsistent and has understanding as an operation of its own, not dependent on any bodily organ. He also explains why a subsisting form cannot be separated from the existence proper to it. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics, Plato’s Phaedo, and Dionysius’s Divine Names, using examples from poetry and acting to show how the mind holds contraries in knowledge without contrariety.

70. Q.75 a.6 continued: The Natural Desire to Exist Forever, Socrates in the Phaedo, and Replies to the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 6: since nature does nothing in vain, the natural desire of intellectual beings to exist forever must point to something real and attainable, namely the soul’s incorruptibility. He ties this to Aristotle’s claim that all men by nature desire to know, and to the setting of Plato’s Phaedo, before working through the article’s replies—on texts comparing man to beasts, on what it means that the soul is created, and on how the soul’s knowing changes once separated from the body. He draws on Aristotle’s De Anima and Generation of Animals, with digressions on Boswell’s Johnson, Sartre, and St. Gertrude, then turns briefly to article seven.

71. Q.75 a.7: Are the Soul and the Angel of One Species? Lowest Species, Origen's Error, and Understanding Compared with Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 7 of Question 75: are soul and angel of one species? He lays out three objections—drawn from their shared final end, the nobility of “understanding” as a specific difference, and the soul’s ordering to body—before giving Thomas’s answer, that angels are immaterial subsisting forms individuated by species alone, while each human soul is proportioned to its own particular body and depends on sense images to understand. Along the way he digresses through geometric examples like squares and oblongs to explain lowest species versus genus, Aristotle’s division of intellectual virtue, and Origen’s mistaken doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence, closing by answering the three objections and pointing ahead to Question 76 on the soul’s union with the body.

72. Summa I, Q.76, Art. 1: Is the Understanding Soul the Form of the Body? The Objections, and Words for Beginning, Mode and Happiness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 1 of Question 76, on whether the intellectual soul is united to the body as its form, first sketching all eight articles of the question, including the unicity of the intellect against Averroes and whether the whole soul is present in every bodily part. He lingers over Aquinas’s vocabulary, tracing “principium” and “modus” and comparing Latin, Greek, and English terms for happiness (felicitas, eudaimonia) and understanding (intellectus, nous), reading from the handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument.” Along the way he names the errors Aquinas is answering—Averroistic monopsychism and the Platonic or Origenist picture of the soul as an imprisoned angel—before turning to Article 1’s objections themselves.

73. The Remaining Objections and Aristotle's Proof That the Soul Is the Form of the Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 1, where objectors argue that the soul cannot be a bodily form because understanding is immaterial and universal while bodies are particular and material. He unpacks Aquinas’s answer, grounded in Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II: a thing’s form is that by which it first acts and lives, so the soul is truly the body’s form even though understanding and willing occur without a bodily organ. Sensing, nutrition, and movement, by contrast, belong to the soul-body composite together. Along the way he draws on the Metaphysics and Physics, plus everyday examples, to sharpen terms like intellectus, form, and act and potency, and to reject the Platonic view that the soul alone is the human person.

74. Averroes' Mistakes, the Soul Not Wholly Immersed in the Body, and St. Teresa, Mother of Spiritual People

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Averroes’s theory that the intellect is one separate substance touching individual men only through phantasms, and shows why Aquinas rejects it along with any “mover” account that would make body and soul two things loosely joined. Working through Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 1 and q. 12, he argues instead that the intellective soul is truly the substantial form of the body even though understanding and choosing exceed what any bodily organ can do, and traces what this means for the soul’s subsistence and its natural bent back toward the body. He closes by reading ten minutes from the handout “Nature and Kinds of Love,” turning to wisdom that comes through charity rather than study, with St. Teresa of Ávila as the example.

75. Summa I q.76 a.2: Is There One Intellect for All Men? Against Averroes and Plato

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does every human being think with the same, single intellect, or does each person have his own? Berquist lays out the article’s objections, built from Plato’s separated Forms and Averroes’s claim that one separate intellect serves all mankind, then works through Aquinas’s answer: each soul is proportioned to and united with its own body as substantial form, so a shared intellect for the whole species is impossible. He also takes up why diverse phantasms cannot rescue Averroes’s position, and touches on individuation in material versus immaterial substances and on angelic inequality and love of the common good.

76. Replies to the Objections, the Central Question of Philosophy, and Thessalonians 5 and Psalm 99: Rejoice, Pray, Give Thanks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the replies to objections in Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 2, pressing the question of how the intellective soul, though individuated to each body, can still know universals shared by many knowers — weighing Aristotle’s account of abstraction against Plato’s. He contrasts one thing known with the many who know it, working out what individuation of soul to body actually requires. He then reads Psalm 99(100) and 1 Thessalonians 5, showing how their pattern of rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks mirrors the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity as Augustine organizes them in the Enchiridion, closing with Augustine and Paul VI on love, praise, and music.

77. Summa I q.76 a.3: One Soul or Three? The Objections, Substantial Form, and the Meaning of Per Se

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does a human being have separate souls for vegetative, sensitive, and intellective life, or one soul doing all three jobs? Berquist lays out the case for plurality drawn from Plato, from Aristotle, and from ecclesiastical authority, then follows Aquinas’s argument that the soul is a single substantial form. To make sense of that argument he digresses into Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, working out what necessity and per se predication mean and how they bear on demonstration. He fixes the abstract points with plain examples—worms, a piece of wooden furniture, a syllogism—to show why one soul, not several cooperating souls, must account for a human being.

78. One Soul in Man: Predication, the Sign from Intense Activity, and Souls Compared to Numbers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question whether man has a single soul or separate vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls, and argues for their unity against the view that treats them as distinct substantial forms. He draws on Aquinas’s reasoning from per se versus per accidens predication, from the observed fact that intense activity in one power impedes another, and from the comparison of the soul’s powers to numbers or geometric figures, where the higher grade contains and perfects what the lower has. Throughout, he ranges through examples from logic, Scripture, the saints, Shakespeare and Dryden, and composers like Mozart, Bach, and Handel to make vivid the hierarchical ordering of nutrition, sensation, and understanding in one form.

79. Replies to the Objections and Soul vs. Spirit in Scripture (1 Thessalonians, the Magnificat, John 4)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the objections and replies bearing on whether the intellective, sensitive, and nutritive souls in man form one substance, weighing arguments from corruptibility versus incorruptibility, genus and species, Aristotle’s embryological order of ensoulment, and how “animal” and “rational” combine to define man. He then turns to Scripture—1 Thessalonians 5:23, the Magnificat, Gethsemane, and Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well—to show how “spirit,” “soul,” and “body” track the distinction between the soul’s immaterial and bodily powers without implying two souls. Analogies drawn from geometry, friendship, and ordinary moral judgment help clarify how one soul can be described generically or specifically.

80. ST I q.76 a.4: Is There Another Substantial Form in Man? The Objections (with Digressions on Antonomasia, Synecdoche and Mixture)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens Aquinas’s inquiry into whether the human body requires a substantial form distinct from the rational soul itself. He first digresses on antonomasia, the rhetorical figure of naming by an outstanding trait, drawing examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, and historical speeches, before turning to synecdoche and the nature of mixture in bodies. He then lays out the article’s four objections, which appeal to friendship, number, and the composition of mixed bodies to argue that soul alone cannot account for the body’s own perfection. Against these, he presses toward Aquinas’s thesis that one substantial form, the soul, suffices for both bodily and rational life.

81. The One Substantial Form: Being Simply vs. Being in Some Way, and How Higher Forms Contain the Lower

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article defending the unicity of the substantial form in man, against an objection drawn from the principle that a thing has only one substantial being. Working through Aquinas’s reply, he draws out the logical distinction between being simpliciter and being secundum quid, testing it against ordinary cases like health, geometrical knowledge, and being present in a room. He then returns to the article’s own point: that the higher substantial form, the intellective soul, virtually contains the powers of the lower forms it replaces, using Aristotle’s comparison of forms to numbers to explain how one form can do the work of many.

82. Replies to the Objections, Knowing the Composed Before the Simple, and the Catechism's Definition of Hope

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist walks through objections and replies in Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 4, where Aquinas defines the soul as the “first act of an organic body having life in potency,” drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima and De Generatione et Corruptione to address substantial form, elemental mixture, and how the soul moves the body through its organs. He raises the question of why we know composed things before simple ones, using act/potency and the dialectical tools of difference and likeness. In the second half he turns to Summa Theologiae I, q. 12 and the Catechism’s definition of hope, breaking it into its component parts and relating it to eternal life, the Our Father, the beatitudes, and Aquinas’s treatment of happiness and wonder.

83. Summa I, Q.76 A.5: Why the Understanding Soul Is Joined to Such a Body (Touch, Reason and the Hand)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of Question 76, where Aquinas defends why the human soul is united to flesh and blood rather than to something purer such as fire or air. He traces the argument’s reliance on touch as the most fundamental sense, requiring a body of “mean” complexion, and on the soul’s many powers demanding diverse organs. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics, Dionysius, and concrete illustrations—Anaxagoras’s remark on the hand, and the heightened sensitivity of touch shown in Christ’s Passion—to explain why reason and the hand together substitute for the fixed instincts and built-in weapons other animals possess.

84. Metaphorical Theology and the Metaphor 'Sweet'; Q.76 A.6: No Accidental Dispositions Between Soul and Body (Simply vs. In Some Way)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a question pitting St. Ephrem’s metaphorical, poetic speech about God against St. Thomas’s supposedly dry dogmatic dissection, and answers it by showing Thomas’s own division of Dionysius’s names of God—proper, metaphorical, and Trinitarian—and his handling of the metaphor “sweet” in the Psalms commentary, so that Thomas himself speaks both properly and poetically. He then works through Article 6 of question 76 on the union of soul and body, asking whether the understanding soul is joined to the body through accidental dispositions, tracking the objections and Thomas’s answer on substantial form, matter, and quantity. Analogies—candy on a road trip, cookie dough, geometric figures—illustrate the simpliciter/secundum quid distinction throughout.

85. Article 7 and the objections to Article 8: whether something joins the soul to the body, with a digression on Augustine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas on the soul-body union: whether some intervening body is needed to join soul to body, and whether the whole soul is present in each part of the body. He draws out the distinction between quantitative parts and essential, matter-form parts to show why no medium like a “subtle spirit-body” or celestial light is required, refuting Platonic images of the soul as pilot of a ship along the way. Aristotle’s hylomorphism grounds the argument, and everyday analogies—a spoken word, a Manhattan, a rubber ball—illustrate how form unifies a whole. The class closes with Augustine’s claim in De Trinitate that the whole soul is in the whole body and in each part.

86. The body of Article 8: the whole soul in every part, kinds of wholes, and the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Church

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the body of Article 8, where Aquinas asks how the soul can be entirely present both in the whole body and in every part of it—unlike an accidental form, such as an engine’s arrangement or a house’s structure, which cannot survive division. To answer, he lays out Aristotle’s distinctions among quantitative, essential, generic-differential, and universal wholes, adding Aquinas’s own category of the “potential whole,” and shows how each bears differently on the soul’s relation to organs like the head and heart. He resolves objections touching the will, the intellect, and bodily “principality,” then draws the analogy to the Holy Spirit as soul of the Church before turning briefly to Question 77 on the soul’s powers.

87. Summa I q.77 a.1: Is the Soul's Essence Its Power? Act and Ability, Properties, and Augustine's Hard Sayings

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first article of Summa I, q. 77: whether the soul’s essence is the same as its powers. He tracks Thomas’s argument that essence, as act, and powers, as ordered to operation, belong to different genera and so cannot be identical, working through the objections drawn from Augustine’s De Trinitate on mind, knowledge, and love. He turns to Porphyry’s logical distinction between accident and property to explain how the powers relate to the soul as a “potential whole,” flowing naturally from its essence. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s De Anima, Boethius, and Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy to place Thomas’s treatment against its sources.

88. Summa I q.77 a.1–2: Differences and Properties, the Definition of Faith, and Why the Soul Has Many Powers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on the soul’s powers in Summa I, q. 77. He first shows, against objections about composition and act-potency, that substantial differences are usually grasped only through accidents and clusters of properties—reaching for Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the definition of a square, and Augustine’s definition of faith as parallel cases. He then turns to the second article’s question: why does the human soul require a diversity of powers, when God is utterly simple and angels more unified? The answer turns on man’s place “on the horizon” between spirit and body, attaining angelic perfection only through multiplicity.

89. Q.77 a.3: Powers Distinguished by Acts and Objects; Active vs. Passive Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of how the soul’s various powers are distinguished from one another, following Aquinas’s answer: powers differ according to their acts, and acts differ according to their objects. He lingers over the Greek dunamis and the difficulty of rendering it in English as “power” versus “ability,” then works out how an active power relates to its object as moving cause while a passive power relates to its object as end or term. He draws on Aristotle’s De Anima—common sense, contraries, sight and touch—and a fragment of Empedocles to illustrate the point, closing by setting up Article 4’s question of the order among the soul’s powers.

90. Essential vs. Incidental Differences, the Fallacy of Accident, and Replies to the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the Summa’s question on the soul’s powers, asking why some differences among objects diversify a power while others don’t—the per se versus per accidens distinction. He runs through the objections and replies: the priority of act to potency, whether the object stands extrinsic or intrinsic to the power, contrariety within one genus, and how a single subject, like God or a beloved person, can be the object of really distinct powers under different formal aspects, as with faith and charity, or a woman loved differently as wife, mother, daughter, and sister. He repeatedly invokes the fallacy of accident to sharpen the point, ranging through Heraclitus, Plato’s Symposium, Cicero, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet along the way.

91. Higher Powers and Universal Objects; Q.77 a.4: The Order Among the Powers of the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on the powers of the soul, asking why higher powers grasp more universal objects—reason gathering what the senses take in piecemeal, will reaching toward the common good beyond sense-bound desire. He lays out Aquinas’s three ways of ordering the powers: by nature, where the perfect precedes the imperfect; by generation, where the imperfect comes first; and by object, where sight outranks hearing and hearing outranks smell. Examples range from Aristotle and the angelic intellect to animal behavior and the concupiscible versus irascible appetites, before Berquist digresses into tragedy and comedy, Achilles, Coriolanus, and Falstaff to show how lower faculties can dispose the soul toward philosophical life.

92. Summa I q.77 a.5: Are All the Powers of the Soul in the Soul as Their Subject? Soul and Spirit, and the Meanings of 'Of'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether every power of the soul has the soul alone as its subject, or whether some powers belong to the composite of soul and body. Working through Thomas’s objections and response, he separates understanding and willing, exercised without a bodily organ, from sensation and nutrition, which require the body. He draws on Aristotle’s De Anima and De Somno et Vigilia, along with Metaphysics VI, and pauses to consider how Scripture uses “soul” and “spirit” differently. The class closes mid-argument, having answered the first two objections and clarified that “powers of the soul” can mean either the soul as subject or as source, before Article 6.

93. Reply to Augustine and Plato: Truth Between Two Extremes, and Must We Know Things the Way They Are?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the third objection in question 77, article 5, where Augustine’s Platonic language raises the question of which powers belong to the soul alone and which belong to the body-soul composite. He sets this against Plato’s and Aristotle’s differing answers, using the Phaedo’s conflicting arguments about the soul’s existence before and after the body as a case where truth sits between two opposing errors—a pattern he also traces through Trinitarian and Christological heresies. From there he turns to a wider question: must the way we know follow the order of reality itself, or can mathematics and natural philosophy proceed differently? He closes with notes on theological word choice and how Latin, Greek, French, and English each shape philosophical expression, before setting up article six.

94. Summa I q.77 a.6: How the Powers Flow from the Soul's Essence, Properties in Geometry, and Grace and the Theological Virtues

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether the powers of the soul flow from its essence, walking through the objections and Aquinas’s reply in Article Six. He draws the distinction between substantial and accidental form, then turns to geometry—intersecting lines, the properties of a triangle—to show how properties “naturally result” from a nature without any change or motion in it. On that model the soul’s powers emanate from its essence as from a cause, whether final, efficient, or material. He closes by comparing this to how the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, flow from sanctifying grace in the soul, before opening Article Seven.

95. Before and After: Senses of Priority and Why Breathing Isn't Better than Philosophizing (ST I q.77 a.7, Part 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether one power of the soul causes another, tracing the objections and respondeo of Article 7. To do so he lays out Aristotle’s several senses of “before” from the Categories—priority in time, in being, in reason, and in worth—illustrated with examples like bricks and fireplaces, sliced bread, and billiard balls. He then turns to Socrates’s Apology and a ranking of bodily, external, and psychic goods, using the being/goodness distinction to explain why philosophizing outranks mere breathing even though breathing is prior in being, and to weigh the relative loss of faith, hope, and charity.

96. Order Among the Powers of the Soul, Foresight, and Replies to Objections (ST I q.77 a.7, Part 2)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out his treatment of the order among the soul’s powers, distinguishing two ways the soul’s essence is “before” its powers: as a higher, moving cause and as a receptive, matter-like principle, which explains why reason outranks sense in one order while sense comes first in generation. He uses this to show Aristotle’s method of tracing equivocal terms like “before” and “end” back to an ordered core sense, against the confusions he finds in Feuerbach and Marx. The class then moves into prudence and foresight, drawing on the Secunda Secundae and historical cases—Socrates’s trial, MacArthur at Incheon, Churchill and Chamberlain, Nixon in Caracas—to mark off philosophy’s grasp of universals from prudence’s concern with contingent, singular action.

97. Powers of the Separated Soul: Article 8, Love and Emotion, and Mozart's Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 8 of Question 77: do all the powers of the soul remain in the soul once separated from the body at death? He distinguishes intellect and will, rooted in the soul alone and so surviving actually, from the sensitive and nutritive powers, rooted in the soul-body composite and surviving only virtually, “as in a root”—testing this against pseudo-Augustine’s De Spiritu et Anima, Aristotle, and the Lazarus and the rich man of Luke 16, with a glance ahead to Question 78. He then turns, via the “Nature and Kinds of Love” handout, to the difference between felt emotion and the will’s own love and joy, drawing on Shakespeare, Augustine’s Retractions, and an extended treatment of how Mozart and the Baroque composers order the passions under reason.

98. Summa I, q. 78, a. 1: Why Five Genera of Powers, Four Grades of Life, Three Souls

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the first article of Question 78, where Aquinas asks whether the powers of the soul should be distinguished into five genera: vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and intellectual. Drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima, he shows how these five map onto the traditional four grades of life and three kinds of souls, using a right triangle’s 3-4-5 sides and examples like sensory adaptation to temperature to illustrate how powers differ by their objects. He closes on the soul’s twofold relation to things beyond itself—receiving through knowledge versus tending outward through love—and how this distinction bears on the soul’s relation to God now and hereafter.

99. Summa I, q. 78, a. 2: Nutritive, Growth and Generative Powers, and the Sacraments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second article of Aquinas’s question on the soul’s powers, tracing the fourfold objections and reply that ground the vegetative soul’s three powers—nutritive, growing, and generative—in Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II. He dwells on why the generative power outranks the others, as the creature’s closest approach to the sensitive soul, drawing on Plato’s Symposium and Dionysius’s Divine Names, with Shakespeare’s sonnets and Spenser’s Epithalamion illustrating reproduction as a pursuit of god-likeness through perpetuation. The class ends by mapping the three powers onto Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, lingering on the Eucharist as “living bread.”

100. ST I q.78 a.3: How the Five Outer Senses Are Distinguished (Natural vs. Spiritual Change)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the objections to Aquinas’s claim that there are exactly five exterior senses, raised from the categories of accidents and from the distinction between common and proper sensibles, along with difficulties peculiar to touch and taste. He then lays out Aquinas’s own solution: the senses differ according to how sensible qualities act on and are received by their organs, either naturally or spiritually, with sight the most spiritual and touch and taste the most material. Examples like cooking smells, swimming in the ocean, and refrigerated food illustrate the different modes of sensory reception at stake.

101. Beauty, the Higher Pleasures, and Aquinas's Replies on the Common Sensibles, Touch and Taste

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why only sight and hearing count as “spiritual” senses capable of grasping beauty, while taste, touch, and smell stay bound to bodily need and are shared with animals. He works out the distinction between proper, common, and accidental sensibles, then ranks pleasures into bodily, aesthetic, and intellectual kinds. The class closes on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, a. 3, walking through his replies to objections on whether touch and taste are each a single sense or really genera dividing into further species.

102. ST I q.78 a.4: The Interior Senses (Common Sense, Imagination, Estimative Power, Memory)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 4, where Aquinas argues for four interior senses against objections that would multiply or collapse them. The key distinctions are between receiving sensible forms and retaining them, and between perceiving sense qualities and grasping non-sensible “intentions” such as usefulness or harm. He sets Aquinas’s fourfold scheme against Avicenna’s fivefold one, and explains how, in humans, the estimative and memorative powers sharpen into the cogitative power and a properly rational memory because of their nearness to reason. Cat and animal examples illustrate instinctual judgment as distinct from ordinary sense perception, with a brief look ahead into question 79.

103. Summa I q.79 a.1: Is the understanding a power of the soul or its essence? Being and doing, God as pure act, and love as emotion versus chosen love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist surveys the whole of Question 79 on the soul’s intellectual powers before settling into Article 1: whether understanding (intellectus) is a distinct power of the soul or identical with its essence. Against objections drawn from Augustine and Gregory, Aquinas holds that in any creature being and understanding differ, so understanding must be a power—only in God, who is pure act, are being and understanding the same thing. Berquist uses this to open onto neighboring distinctions, contrasting will with sense appetite and love as mere emotion with love as an act of will, drawing on Shakespeare to illustrate the difference between felt love and chosen love.

104. Q.79 a.1, last replies, and a.2: Angels and mind, the first cause as the best thing, Socratic consistency, and understanding as a passive power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the closing replies of q.79, a.1, taking up how the will relates to mind, whether immateriality alone accounts for a power of understanding, and how angelic intellects differ from the human. He digresses at length—Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” against the divine mind, the chicken-and-egg problem as Aristotle resolves it in Metaphysics IX, the convertibility of the first cause with the best thing, and Socrates’ elenctic method illustrated from the Meno—before turning to a.2 and Aristotle’s threefold sense of “undergoing” in De Anima III to ask whether understanding is properly a passive power.

105. Summa Theologiae I, Q.79, Articles 3-4: The Agent Intellect, and Whether It Belongs to the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a short scriptural aside on Jude’s Greek, distinguishing the “soul-bound” man from the man of “spirit,” to set up the session’s theme of the mind’s higher powers. He then turns to Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, asking in article 3 whether an agent intellect must be posited at all, working through the objections and Aristotle’s De Anima to explain why intellect needs something to make phantasms actually intelligible, contrasted with Plato’s separately subsisting forms. He uses the analogy of light — as light actualizes color to be seen, the agent intellect actualizes what is potentially understood — and carries this into article 4’s question of whether this agent intellect belongs to the soul, closing with a distinction among the light of reason, of faith, and of glory.

106. Summa Theologiae I, Q.79, Articles 4-5: The Agent Intellect and the "Father of Lights" of James 1:17

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist answers objections in Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, articles 4 and 5, on how the agent intellect abstracts universals from phantasms and how the soul can be at once in act and in potency without contradiction. He turns to James 1:17, reading the Greek behind “every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning,” to show how Thomas’s account of an unchanging, higher light behind the mind’s derived, discursive light fits the scriptural language of gift and immutability. Along the way he distinguishes experience, imagination, and intellection, and sets Aristotle’s and Plato’s differing images for intellectual light side by side. The class closes by opening onto the next verse of James, on God begetting us by his will.

107. Summa Theologiae I, Q.79, A.5: Is the Agent Intellect One in All Men?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of Question 79 of the Summa: is the agent intellect a single shared substance in all human beings, or is it multiplied along with individual souls? He works through Aristotle’s arguments for the intellect’s immateriality before turning to Aquinas’s answer, that since the agent intellect is a power belonging to each soul, it exists in as many instances as there are souls rather than as one separate thing common to everyone. Along the way he pauses over the many senses in which things can be called “one,” reaching for Heraclitus, Shakespeare, and the ordinary phrase “returning love” to sharpen the point. The recording ends mid-story, with Berquist starting an anecdote about Father Boulay.

108. The Agent Intellect, the Father of Lights, and Memory in the Understanding (Avicenna, Habitual Knowledge, History vs. Poetry)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, articles 5 and 6, asking first whether there is one agent intellect for all human beings, then whether memory is a power of the intellective soul. He sets Avicenna’s account—that intelligible species are not retained but must be re-received each time from a separate agent intellect—against Aristotle’s distinction between habitual and actual understanding, arguing that knowledge once abstracted can remain possessed even when not actively being considered. He clarifies the difference between imagination and intellectual abstraction with examples drawn from Homer and Shakespeare, Locke and Berkeley on universals, and Augustine’s account of memory in the Trinity.

109. Remembering That We Understood: Replies on Intellectual Memory, the Definition of Eternity, and the Beatific Vision

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the replies in Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 6, where Aquinas answers objections about whether memory belongs to the intellect: how memory relates to universal species rather than particulars, how the intellect can know its own past acts of understanding, and how an understood form can exist “habitually,” neither fully in potency nor fully in act, drawing on Aristotle and Avicenna. From there he follows the article’s threads outward, turning to Aristotle’s Categories on “before,” “after,” and “together,” Boethius’s definition of eternity in the Consolation of Philosophy, and related passages in Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium, before touching Aquinas’s angelology of morning and evening knowledge and the beatific vision.

110. Summa I q.79 a.7: Is Intellectual Memory a Separate Power? Augustine, Peter Lombard and the Authority of Aquinas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Seven of Question 79: is intellectual memory a power separate from the understanding, or does Aquinas fold it back into a single intellectual power? He works through Augustine’s De Trinitate, where memory, understanding, and will appear as a triad, and shows how Aquinas reads that language without multiplying faculties, comparing it to Aristotle’s distinction of passive and agent intellect. He brings in Peter Lombard’s Sentences as a check on how Aquinas handles inherited authorities, and draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics on divine self-knowledge and Plato’s Phaedo on philosophy as preparation for death to widen the question of what memory and understanding mean for an immaterial power.

111. Article 7 Replies and Article 8: Reason and Understanding as One Power, Motion and Rest, Episteme and Natural Understanding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out the reply to article 7—whether memory is a power distinct from intellect—drawing on Augustine’s arguments and the analogy between a habit and its act. He then turns to article 8: are reason and understanding two separate powers in man, or one? Working through Thomas’s reply, he develops the analogy of motion and rest, with reason as the discursive movement of thought and understanding as its resting terminus, and locates this within the division of the speculative sciences—natural philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics—by their relation to matter and motion. He fills out the argument with Boethius, Dionysius, and Aristotle, and examples from geometry, the treasure-house image, and Archimedes.

112. Reason, Will and Nature: Why Natural Understanding and Natural Willing Are the Roots of Thought and Choice

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 8 to ask whether reason and will stand outside nature, or are nature “plus something”—as three is two plus one, or man is animal plus something more. Against Sartrean and Millian pictures that set freedom against nature the way virtue is set against vice, he traces Aquinas’s case for natural understanding (first principles, synderesis) and natural willing (of happiness, good) as the fixed starting points from which discursive reasoning and free choice of means proceed. He draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and the Boethian comparison of understanding to eternity and reasoning to time, with examples from Plato’s Symposium and Lesser Hippias and Shakespeare. The class ends on what is really “oneself” in a choice, using courtroom cases of passion versus premeditation.

113. ST I q.79 a.9: Higher and Lower Reason in Augustine, and Names Equivocal by Reason (Wisdom and Science)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 9, where Aquinas weighs Augustine’s distinction, from De Trinitate, between higher and lower reason against the question of whether this marks two distinct powers of the soul or merely two acts of one rational power. Drawing also on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and John Damascene, he traces Aquinas’s objections and answers. A long stretch is given to how names like “wisdom” and “science” are analogically equivocal—using man and woman, noun and verb, plant and tree, habit and disposition as examples of a common term kept for one sense while a new name marks the more excellent case. He closes by linking higher and lower reason to the principle that higher sciences furnish principles to lower ones, as arithmetic does for music and geometry for medicine.

114. Article 9 continued: Necessary and Contingent Knowledge, Contradiction, Opinion and Certitude

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s reply to objections on how the “scientificum” and “ratiocinativum” relate to Augustine’s higher and lower reason. He works through the distinction between necessary, eternal knowledge and contingent, temporal knowledge, drawing on geometry and natural science to show what makes reasoning demonstrative rather than dialectical, and turns to ordinary deliberation to show how the same division operates in practical matters. He then moves to Aristotle’s treatment of contradictory statements in the Peri Hermeneias, closing the discussion of opinion and certitude begun earlier. Contemporary comparisons drawn from politics, cooking, and architecture illustrate the points while Berquist keeps the reading anchored in Aquinas’s own text.

115. Article 10: Intelligentia and Intellectus; Thinking About, Thinking Out, Understanding; Mercy, Hope and the Kinds of Pride

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 10 of question 79 on the soul’s powers: does “intelligentia” name a faculty separate from intellectus? He weighs objections drawn from the pseudo-Augustinian De spiritu et anima, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Damascene, and argues that intelligentia names an act of understanding rather than a distinct power. Along the way he distinguishes thinking, knowing, and understanding in English against the Latin grades of intellect—agent, possible, in habitu, adeptus—and reflects on the difficulty of translating such terms across Latin, French, and English. He closes with remarks on hope, humility, and mercy in prayer, drawing on Catherine and Faustina and a homily of John Paul II, before previewing the remaining articles of question 79 and Aquinas’s division of the intellectual virtues.

116. Summa I, Q.79, Art.11: Are Speculative and Practical Intellect Different Powers? (Seeing vs. Doing; Knowing vs. Loving)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether the speculative and practical intellect are distinct powers of the soul. Working through the article’s objections and body, he argues they are one and the same power, distinguished only by its end: truth known for its own sake versus truth directed toward action, illustrated by the eye used simply to see against the eye used to steer. He draws on Aristotle’s commentaries—Physics I, lectio 13, and Metaphysics VI, lectio 4—to ground the distinction, and turns to how truth and goodness differ as objects of intellect and will, closing with a look ahead to the five intellectual virtues.

117. What Is Virtue? A Thing's Own Act, Moral vs. Intellectual Virtues, and the Two Ends of Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Plato’s idea that virtue is a thing’s “own act,” working through knives, eyes, herbs, and money before asking what this means for human beings. He turns to Aristotle’s division of virtue into moral virtues, seated in will and emotion, and intellectual virtues, seated in reason itself, and presses on why reason splits this way. The key distinction is between speculative and practical reason—knowing versus doing and making—as the root of that division. Drawing also on Plato’s Republic and Meno and touching Aquinas, he uses everyday analogies and habituation to set up a further, fivefold breakdown of intellectual virtue for a later class.

118. The Five Virtues of Reason: Foresight, Art, Natural Understanding, Episteme and Wisdom (with Equivocal Names)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How many virtues does reason have, and why do writers count them differently? Berquist sets Aristotle’s own grouping of episteme, prudence, and art against natural understanding and wisdom, then lays that beside Aquinas’s division by speculative versus practical reason. Working from cooking, carpentry, military command, and child-rearing as test cases, he distinguishes doing from making and traces prudence’s reach from the individual through household to city. He closes by weighing these natural virtues against their supernatural counterparts, the gifts of understanding and wisdom, using the equivocal naming discussed in q. 79, a. 12.

119. Summa I, Q.79 a.12: Synderesis as the Natural Habit of Practical First Principles (reason as nature, Heraclitus on listening to reason, habit and power)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Article 12’s question—whether synderesis names a special power distinct from reason—alongside Jerome’s gloss on Ezekiel and Augustine’s arguments from the Trinity and free choice. Aquinas’s answer, that synderesis is not a power but a natural habit, gets compared to how the intellect’s grasp of first speculative principles is itself a habit rather than a separate faculty. Two handouts, “Distinction of the Roads in Our Knowledge” and “The First Statement and King of Statements,” anchor the point that reason works from principles given by nature. Heraclitus’s remark on listening to the logos, read alongside Aristotle, illustrates what it means for reason itself to be natural before turning to Article 13 on conscience.

120. Summa I, Q.79 a.13: Conscience as an Act; Studiousness, Figures of Speech (Antonomasia, Synecdoche, Metonymy), and Emotions Ruled by Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Taking up Article 13 of Question 79, Berquist asks whether conscience names a power of the soul, and concludes it does not: conscience is properly an act, the application of knowledge to particular deeds through testifying to what has been done, binding one to act, or accusing and excusing after the fact—though people loosely call it a habit, meaning the synderesis it flows from. He draws on Origen, Basil, Damascene, and Augustine, and illustrates guilty conscience with Shakespeare’s Richard III, Irving, and Dickens. The class closes by examining the rhetorical figures antonomasia, synecdoche, and metonymy in scriptural and Shakespearean examples, and previews the coming questions on sensitive and rational appetite.

121. Aquinas on Desire (ST I, Q.80, A.1–2): Why the Soul Has a Power to Desire, and Why Sense Desire and Will Might Be the Same Power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 80 of the Prima Pars, on the soul’s appetitive power, working through Article 1: whether appetite is a power distinct from apprehension. Following Aquinas, he argues that inclination follows upon form, and that knowing beings, which possess the forms of other things through sense and intellect, need a distinct power to desire what they know, beyond mere natural inclination. Drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima and John Damascene, and everyday cases like hunger, anger, and love, he works through the article’s three objections and asks why desire, not love, names this power, before previewing the distinction between sensory appetite and will.

122. Aquinas on Sense Desire and the Will (ST I, Q.80, A.2): Two Powers, the 'Moved Mover', Universal and Particular in Action, and Temptation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the appetitive power in animals is the same as or distinct from the rational appetite, or will, in human beings. Since sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge differ essentially, he follows Aquinas’s argument that the desires following upon them must likewise be distinct powers, reaching back to Aristotle’s De Anima and Metaphysics on the object desired as an unmoved mover and appetite itself as a moved mover. He brings in related material on love from the Commentary on the Sentences and the Prima Secundae, along with Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics, and uses examples from Hamlet and Teresa of Ávila to show how sense-desire differs from will and how reason’s universal judgments must be applied to particular acts to actually move someone.

123. Aquinas, Summa I, Q.81 a.1: Sensuality as a Desiring Power — Knowing as Rest, Loving as Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first article of Question 81, where Aquinas asks whether sensuality is a power of knowing or a power of desiring. Reading against the background of Augustine’s De Trinitate and Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he traces Aquinas’s case that sensuality belongs to appetite, not cognition, likening knowing to rest and desiring to motion. He follows this into related territory in Aristotle’s De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics on love and emotion, and closes by asking why two people can share knowledge of contrary things but cannot share love of contraries, before breaking ahead of the second article.

124. Q.81 a.2: The Concupiscible and the Irascible — Two Powers of Sense Desire

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of why the sensitive appetite must be divided into two distinct powers rather than one. Working through the objections and the respondentio of article 2, he explains the concupiscible as ordered simply to what sense finds pleasant or harmful, and the irascible as ordered to overcoming obstacles that threaten or block such goods. Drawing on Aristotle, Plato, and John Damascene, he traces the psychological interplay between the two—anger can blunt desire, and desire can blunt anger—using everyday and animal examples, and notes the estimative power’s role in triggering irascible responses.

125. The Eleven Emotions: Their Place in Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Music, and Talk About God (with a Digression on Mozart)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working from the Summa Theologiae’s treatment of the passions, Berquist lays out the eleven emotions: love and hate, desire and aversion, joy and sadness on the concupiscible side, and hope and despair, fear and boldness, and anger on the irascible side, the latter arising only when a good or evil is hard to attain or resist. He then asks how these same names get applied, analogically, to acts of the will and, still more guardedly, to God, who has no passions in the strict sense. Examples from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Mozart show the same map organizing persuasion, drama, and music, so that ethics, rhetoric, poetry, and talk about God all turn out to depend on getting this list straight.

126. Summa I, Q.81 a.3: Do the irascible and concupiscible appetites obey reason? The political, not despotic, rule of reason over the emotions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the sense appetites—irascible and concupiscible—obey reason at all. Working through the objections and the respondeo, he distinguishes two ways reason governs the passions: through the cogitative power that presents things under a rational light, and through the will’s command over bodily execution. Drawing on Augustine, John Damascene, and Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, he explains why this rule is political rather than despotic, like a father governing a son rather than a master a slave, so the passions can resist even as reason moderates them. He fills out the abstract distinctions with anecdotes from ordinary life and literature.

127. Imagination in God's service, 'one' and being, and Q.82 a.1: Does the will will anything by necessity?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out a lingering objection: why do the exterior senses balk at reason’s command while an interior power like imagination submits to it, and how does scripture’s use of metaphor put the imagination to work in God’s service, drawing on both the Summa and the Sentences? He then turns to q. 82, a. 1, asking whether the will wills anything by necessity, sorting out natural necessity, necessity of the end, and necessity of coercion, and comparing the will’s built-in pull toward beatitude to reason’s grasp of first principles. Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima, Augustine’s City of God and On the Trinity, and glancing contrasts with Mill and Sartre on liberty fill out the discussion.

128. Summa I, Q. 82, Art. 2: Does the Will Will Everything of Necessity? The Last End, Particular Goods and the Vision of God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 2 of Question 82, asking whether the will necessarily wills whatever it wills. He lays out the three objections, then Thomas’s answer, which parallels the intellect’s necessary assent to first principles against contingent truths with the will’s necessary desire for happiness as last end against particular goods, which it can refuse. Examples ranging from choosing ties and restaurant orders to Vanity Fair, Romeo and Juliet, and Alexander the Great illustrate why only the direct vision of God leaves the will no room to turn away. He closes by beginning Article 3, on whether the will is moved of necessity by a lower appetite.

129. Summa I, Q. 82, Art. 3: Is the Will Higher Than the Understanding? Simply vs. In Some Respect, Sight vs. Hearing, and Loving God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aquinas asks whether the will is a higher power than the understanding, and Berquist follows his reply through the crucial distinction between being higher “simply” and “in a certain respect.” He draws on q. 12’s treatment of the intellect to ground the claim that intellect is nobler as such, then tests that claim against comparisons Aquinas himself uses—sight versus hearing, and the arts of music, tragedy, and painting. The class turns on why loving God can make the will’s act higher, even though intellect remains simply the more excellent power.

130. Summa I, Q. 82, Art. 4: Does the Will Move the Understanding? End and Agent as Two Kinds of Mover

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 82, Article 4: does the will move the understanding? Working through Aquinas’s objections and reply, he draws out the distinction between moving as an end and moving as an efficient agent, showing how will and understanding can each be said to move the other without contradiction, since they move in different respects. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, De Anima, and the doctrine of the four causes to ground the distinction. He closes with Aquinas’s answer to the objection that this produces an infinite regress, tracing counsel and understanding back to God as first principle.

131. Summa I, Q. 82, Art. 5: Irascible and Concupiscible in the Will, and an Introduction to Free Judgment (Liberum Arbitrium)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa I, q. 82, a. 5: does the will contain distinct irascible and concupiscible powers, as sense appetite does, or are these only unified acts of one rational appetite? Because the will’s object is the universal good rather than a particular sensible good, he shows how Aquinas argues that words like love, hope, and anger apply to the will only in a stripped-down, non-bodily sense—with love and joy alone said of God properly rather than metaphorically. He draws in related passages from the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aristotle’s Ethics, the pseudo-Augustinian De Spiritu et Anima, and Plato’s Republic, before turning briefly to q. 83, a. 1 to open the question of free judgment, liberum arbitrium.

132. Summa I q.83 a.1: Is Man of Free Judgment? Reason, Contingency, and God Moving the Will

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does man have free will, or is his judgment as fixed as an animal’s instinct? Berquist takes up the objections marshaled against liberum arbitrium from Romans, Philippians, Jeremiah, Proverbs, and Aristotle, then follows Aquinas’s answer: rational judgment differs from instinctive judgment because reason can weigh particulars against universals rather than reacting by fixed nature. He works through Aquinas’s replies to the objections, especially the claim that God’s moving the will doesn’t cancel human freedom but works through the will’s own nature, adding etymological notes and a comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet along the way.

133. Nature, Habit and the Fixed Will After Death; the Beatific Vision; Article 2: Free Will Is a Power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up article 1 of question 83 on whether man has free will at all, then article 2’s question of whether free will (liberum arbitrium) is a power, a habit, or a power joined with habit. Habits, he notes, incline a person toward one consistent way of acting, while free will stays indifferent between acting well or badly—so it must be a power, not a habit. Along the way he treats article 3 and draws on question 12’s discussion of the beatific vision to ask how the will’s fixity after death fits with a nature capable, in this life, of judging against its own inclinations.

134. Free Choice and the Will (Summa I, Q. 83, aa. 3–4) and an Outline of How the Soul Knows (QQ. 84–89)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether free choice belongs to appetite or to reason, working through articles 3 and 4 of Summa I, Q. 83. He follows Aquinas’s argument, drawing on Damascene and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that choice is an act of will as moved and informed by reason’s counsel—illustrating the point with a brief aside to Hamlet’s indecision. Question 19, on will in God, comes in as a point of comparison. He closes by sketching the shape of questions 84 through 89, which will treat how the soul, united to the body, knows bodily things, itself, and immaterial substances.

135. Summa I, q.84 a.1: Does the Soul Know Bodies Through the Understanding? Heraclitus, Plato's Forms, and the Central Question of Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether the intellect can know bodily things, starting from Heraclitus’s claim that constant change makes bodies unknowable. He shows why Plato answered by positing immaterial, immobile forms as the only objects certain knowledge could grasp, then follows Aquinas’s article 1 reply: the mode of knowing need not mirror the mode of the thing known, so the intellect can know material, changing bodies immaterially and universally. He works through Aquinas’s replies to Augustine’s objections and to the objection from bodily mutability, closing on what this implies about the soul’s immateriality, with reference to a handout on Aristotle’s first principle.

136. Summa I, q.84 a.2–3: Does the Soul Know Through Its Own Essence or Through Innate Forms? Empedocles, Plato's Meno, and the Blank Tablet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does the soul know material things because it already contains their likenesses within its own essence, or because it receives their forms from outside? Berquist traces this question back through Empedocles’ doctrine that like knows like and Plato’s theory of innate forms, tested against the recollection argument of the Meno, then follows Aquinas’s case that knowing requires the immaterial reception of a form, not material identity with the thing known. He shows why the human intellect must begin in pure potency, a blank tablet, rather than pre-stocked with intelligible species, weighing replies to Augustine, Aristotle, Dionysius, and Gregory the Great along the way.

137. Summa Theologiae I, Q.84, Article 4: Against Avicenna, Understanding Requires the Senses

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether human beings understand by having intelligible forms poured into the soul from separated substances. He lays out Avicenna’s position—already distinguished from Plato’s self-subsistent forms—that a lowest angelic intellect directly impresses understandable forms on us, then follows Aquinas’s objections in Article 4 showing why that account cannot explain why the senses and the body are necessary for knowing at all. He brings in supporting material from Plato’s Phaedo, Dionysius, and Aristotle to show instead how sensible things become actually intelligible through abstraction, closing with a brief look ahead to Article 5.

138. Summa Theologiae I, Q.84, Articles 5-6: Knowing in the Eternal Reasons, and Heraclitus on Common Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Article 5 of Question 84, where Aquinas takes up Augustine’s Platonic-derived claim that we know things “in the eternal reasons” present in the divine mind. He draws out Aquinas’s key distinction between knowing something as an object of vision and knowing it as the source that makes vision possible, illustrated by the analogy of light and the agent intellect: natural reason participates in the eternal reasons without directly beholding them. Moving briefly into Article 6, he brings in Heraclitus’s fragments on common reason and divine law, along with Romans 1:20, John 1:9, and passages from Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions, and works through related notes on Book One of the Physics.

139. Summa I q.84 a.6: Does Our Knowledge Come from the Senses? Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle's Middle Way

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether intellectual knowledge is derived entirely from sensible things, tracking Aquinas’s answer to objections drawn from Augustine. He frames the article as staking out a middle ground: Democritus reduced understanding to sensation and body, while Plato located knowledge in immaterial separated Forms untouched by matter. Aristotle’s alternative, worked out through Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI, has the agent intellect abstract universal understanding from phantasms without collapsing intellect into sense. Berquist illustrates the stakes by comparing this error of “adding to” or “subtracting from” the truth to analogous mistakes in Trinitarian and Christological heresy, distinguishing throughout the roles of sense, imagination, and understanding.

140. Summa I q.84 a.7: Why We Think Through Images, and Why the Brain Isn't the Organ of Thought

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why human understanding always requires turning to mental images, even when the mind is using knowledge it already has, and walks through Aquinas’s argument in Summa I, q.84, a.7 that the intellect’s proper object is the whatness of material things existing in particulars. He uses the analogy of sight and color to show that the brain is not the organ of thought but only the seat of phantasm-production, the object side of cognition, touching briefly on article 8 as well. The session turns into a logical digression on if-then syllogisms, distinguishing the valid forms—affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent—from the invalid ones, testing them against examples drawn from the brain-thought question itself.

141. Summa I, Q.84 a.8 and Q.85 a.1: Judgment, Sleep and the Binding of the Senses; Understanding by Abstraction from Images

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I, Q.84, a.8: whether the understanding’s judgment is impeded when the senses are bound, as in sleep, and why knowledge rooted in sensible things is proportionately hobbled when sense and imagination shut down. He then takes up Q.85, a.1, on whether the human intellect understands material things by abstracting form from phantasms, setting the human way of knowing — starting from matter and climbing imperfectly toward the immaterial — against angelic and divine knowing, and against Plato’s separated forms. Along the way he ties the argument back to Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and De Somno et Vigilia.

142. Summa I, Q.85 a.1, Replies: Two Kinds of Abstraction, Plato's Error, and Common vs. Individual Matter

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How can the mind consider a nature apart from the individual matter it exists in, without lying about reality? Berquist tracks Aquinas’s answer in the replies to Q.85, a.1, distinguishing abstraction “by composition and division,” which can err, from simple or absolute consideration of a nature, which cannot. He extends the point through mathematical abstraction—individual, common, and intelligible matter—and Aristotle’s agent intellect illuminating phantasms, setting this against Plato’s three-tiered cosmos and Marx’s materialist reversal of it. Examples from geometry and a Shakespearean sonnet show that understanding still turns on images, even though what it grasps is not really separate from them.

143. Aquinas: The Intelligible Species Is How We Understand, Not What We Understand; Why the More Universal Is Known First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s Question 85 on the intellect, first asking whether the intelligible species is itself what the mind knows or merely the means by which it knows things — a distinction he uses to expose the error of representationalism, with a nod to the Logos of John’s Gospel as a contrasting case of knowledge in the known. He then turns to article three: why the more universal is known before the more particular, following Thomas’s account of the mind moving from confused, indistinct grasp toward distinct science, anchored in Aristotle’s Physics I. He illustrates the argument with examples from sense perception and geometry.

144. Aquinas' Replies on Universals: Two Orders of Nature, Whole and Part, and the Mistakes of Descartes, Spinoza and Hegel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s replies in Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 3, on why confused, general knowledge comes before distinct, particular knowledge — Aristotle’s two orders of nature, generation and perfection, and the “more known to us” versus “more known by nature.” He illustrates the point with wine-tasting, embryology, and Aristotle’s bat, then works out how whole relates to part and genus to species. He then shows what happens when this order is reversed: Descartes and Spinoza make clear and distinct ideas the measure of certainty, and Hegel collapses the bare notion of being into God — a move Aquinas answers directly in the Summa Contra Gentiles.

145. Aquinas, Summa I q.85 a.4-5: Knowing Many Things at Once, Discrete vs. Continuous Time, and Why We Must Compose and Divide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the intellect can understand several things simultaneously, and whether it must always operate by composition and division—affirming and denying one thing of another. Working through the objections and replies of Summa I q.85, a.4-5, he draws on Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and Categories to distinguish continuous bodily time from the discrete “before and after” of discursive human thought. That successive, step-by-step movement from grasping what a thing is to judging about it is contrasted with the simultaneous, undivided knowledge proper to angels and to God, illustrated throughout with examples drawn from geometry and logic.

146. Aquinas, Summa I q.85 a.5-6: The Mind's Statements and Identity, and Whether the Understanding Can Be False

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up q. 85, articles 5 and 6, asking why the intellect’s act of composing and dividing—joining or separating subject and predicate in a judgment—introduces temporal language that cannot apply to God’s eternal knowledge, and how such mental composition relates to, yet differs from, real composition of form and matter or accident and subject in things. He then turns to article 6, on whether the understanding can be false, distinguishing the intellect’s near-infallibility in simply grasping essences from its liability to error once it composes, defines, or reasons. He illustrates the point with optical illusions, mistaken flavors, and examples of confusing a dog for a cat or one wine for another, closing with a brief look toward article 7.

147. Summa I, Q.85, Articles 7–8: Why Some Understand Better Than Others, and Whether We Know the Indivisible First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles on the human intellect. Article Seven asks whether one person can understand the same thing more perfectly than another; truth itself admits no degrees, but individuals differ in intellectual power owing to bodily disposition and the quality of imagination, memory, and cogitative power. Article Eight asks whether the intellect knows the indivisible before the divisible, distinguishing three senses of “indivisible”—the continuous, the specific or definitional, and the absolutely simple, like the point or the unit—to explain why, unlike the order followed in geometry, we ordinarily know composite material things before their simplest principles.

148. Q.85 a.8 Replies and Q.86 a.1: Why the Mind Knows Causes Last, and How It Knows Singular Things

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the replies to objections in Summa I, q. 85, a. 8, asking why our knowledge moves from sensible effects to causes and principles rather than the reverse, using Euclid’s point-and-line relation and Aristotle’s Physics to show why universals come first. He contrasts this order of knowing with the rationalism of Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel, and illustrates the effects-before-causes pattern with Sherlock Holmes and Heisenberg. He then opens q. 86, a. 1, on whether the human intellect knows singulars directly or only indirectly by reflecting on sense images, closing with a preview of the next question on how the intellect knows itself and higher things.

149. Aquinas Summa I q.86 a.2–3: Can Our Mind Know Infinitely Many Things? Potential vs. Actual Infinity, Meno's Paradox, and Knowing Contingent Things

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Can the intellect know an infinity of things? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s answer by distinguishing potential from actual infinity, borrowed from Aristotle’s Physics, and separating God’s formal infinity from the privative infinity of matter. He shows how the mind grasps something like “odd number” universally rather than by counting through every instance, and flags Feuerbach’s mistake of running these two senses of “infinite” together. Closing, he opens Article 3, where Aquinas splits contingent things into those taken just as contingent and those bearing a necessity rooted in form—matter giving individuation and contingency, form giving necessity.

150. Aquinas Summa I q.86 a.3–4: Matter, Form and Necessity in Contingent Things; Knowing the Future: Eternity, Causes, Dreams and Animals

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working from Summa Theologiae I, q. 86, Berquist closes out the question of how intellect grasps singular and contingent things, weighing the difference between universal definition and the divisibility of continuous quantity. He then turns to the following article’s question — can the intellect know future things? — tracing the ways this happens: through God’s eternal knowledge, through necessary or probable causes, and through dreams, celestial influence, or spiritual illumination. Along the way he takes up objections drawn from sleep, animal instinct, and mental derangement, with side references to Aristotle’s De Anima, Boethius’s Consolation, and Augustine’s Confessions. He closes by announcing the next question, on the soul’s self-knowledge.

151. Know Thyself: How the Understanding Soul Knows Itself Through Its Act (Summa I, Q.87, a.1), with Descartes, and Why the Indistinct Is More Certain

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first article of Question 87, asking whether the human soul knows itself directly through its essence or only through its acts. Because the human intellect stands to the intelligible order as prime matter stands to sensible form, Aquinas argues it cannot know itself the way angels or God do, but only as it is actualized in knowing something else. Berquist draws in Augustine’s De Trinitate and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, then sets this against Descartes’ cogito, and against Heisenberg and de Broglie on certitude versus clarity and distinctness — asking why what is less distinct can still be more certain.

152. How We Know Our Habits Through Their Acts (Q.87, a.2): Faith, Charity, and the Principle 'Propter quod unumquodque tale, et illud magis'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does the soul know a habit—faith, charity, an intellectual virtue—directly through what it is, or only through the acts it produces? Berquist reads through the objections, sed contra, and Thomas’s response and replies in Summa Theologiae I, q.87, a.2 and a.3, anchored on Aristotle’s principle that a thing possessed of a quality on account of something else has that quality more fully in the source. He tests the principle with ordinary cases—sweetness, wetness, saltiness—then extends it to premises and conclusions, means and ends, and movers, showing where an objector wrongly collapses the order of efficient causality into the order of finality. The class ends by contrasting the ancients’ humility before divine wisdom with the pride of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx.

153. Part 1: How the understanding knows its own act, with angels, the letter analogy, Russell's sophism and knowing the will (ST I q.87 a.3–4)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does the intellect know its own act directly, or only by reflecting back on itself after knowing something else? Berquist follows Aquinas through q. 87, articles 3 and 4, asking how angels know their own understanding compared to how human beings do, and why the human mind reaches its own act only after first grasping material things. He uses the analogy of reading a letter to show the difference between knowing a thing and knowing one’s knowing of it, brings in Russell’s sophism as a case where self-reference goes wrong, and extends the question to whether the will is known in the same reflexive way the intellect is.

154. Part 2: Truth and good, wits and dimwits, self-rule of the mind, and whether we can know immaterial substances (ST I q.87 a.4 – q.88 a.1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the reply to the second objection of q.87, a.4, where Aquinas explains how truth and goodness fall under each other as objects of intellect and will, then the reply to the third objection, weighing Augustine’s account of “notions” stored in memory. He opens q.88 on whether the soul knows immaterial substances such as angels, reading its first objection alongside Aristotle’s remark that our intellect stands to the most intelligible things as the owl’s eye to sunlight. He digresses through the handout “Pride as a Cause of Error,” Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima, and Augustine’s Confessions, treating pride’s role in error, the will’s proper docility toward wiser authorities, and the paradox of the mind’s self-rule.

155. Aquinas, Summa I Q88 a1: Can we know the angels in this life? Plato, Averroes, and names made equivocal by reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Can human beings, in this life, understand immaterial substances like angels? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s answer in Question 88, examining Averroes’s claim that a single separate agent intellect joins with us to grant knowledge of separated beings, and Aquinas’s rejection of that view on Aristotelian grounds: our understanding depends on sense images drawn from material things, not on union with a separate substance. He brings in Augustine’s alternative suggestion that self-knowledge offers an imperfect route toward grasping immaterial reality. Along the way he explains how words get made equivocal by reason, using “understanding” against “reason” and “finger” against “thumb,” with examples drawn from geometry and everyday ethical speech.

156. Q88 a1–a3: Knowing immaterial substances through material things, and whether God is the first thing we know

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles of question 88 of the Summa’s treatise on the soul. Article 2 asks whether our intellect, which abstracts its ideas from images of bodies, can reach angels and separated substances at all, or only know them negatively and by comparison. Article 3 then asks the sharper question of whether God, as first cause and first truth, must be the first thing known by the mind, or whether what is most knowable in itself remains, for us, hardest to grasp. Berquist reads the objections and replies closely, with a handout page on the order of the discourse and the Aristotle text open alongside.

157. Summa I, Q.88–89 a.1: God Is Not the First Thing We Know; Why the Soul Is Joined to the Body (Brevity, the Square, and Teaching Weaker Minds)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Summa I, Q.88, arguing that since human understanding in this life works through sensible images, we know God only by way of creatures, never directly. He then turns to Q.89, a.1: can the soul, once separated from the body, still understand? Working through the objections and the start of Thomas’s response, he rejects the Platonist claim that the body only impedes thought, and explains why the human soul, unlike higher separated substances, needs many particular concepts rather than a few universal ones. He illustrates the point with analogies from Euclid’s isoperimetric theorem, Planck’s simplicity principle, and rhetoric, breaking off mid-argument.

158. Summa I, Q.89 a.1–4: Replies on the Separated Soul; Its Knowledge of Angels, Natural Things and Particular People

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three questions Aquinas poses about the soul after death: can it know separated substances like angels, can it know natural things, and can it know particulars? Since the soul no longer has a body to abstract images from, its understanding now depends on forms infused by God—a shift Berquist explains partly by working through a difficulty in Aristotle’s De Anima about understanding as a kind of motion, alongside Augustine’s De Trinitate. He distinguishes confused, universal knowledge from knowledge of singulars, using examples from Shakespeare, Plato, and saints such as John Bosco, Dominic, and Teresa of Avila to show how personal relation or God’s own ordering lets a separated soul still know particular people.

159. Summa Theologiae I, Q.89, Articles 5-8: The Separated Soul's Knowledge of Distant Things and the Living

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second half of Question 89, where Aquinas asks what happens to a soul’s acquired science once it is separated from the body. He traces the move from article 5, on whether such habits remain at all, through article 6’s question of whether their acts persist, to articles 7 and 8, which ask whether spatial or temporal distance limits a separated soul’s grasp of events, and whether the dead—the blessed especially—know what befalls the living. Along the way he sets out Aquinas’s objections, his sed contra citations from Scripture, Aristotle, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, and the resolving distinction between knowledge tied to sense powers and knowledge belonging to intellect. He closes by assigning the next four articles.