An Expository Analysis on Aquinas’ Notion of Separatio as the Realistic Inception of Human Cognition

Abstract

In his interpretation of the initial apprehension of reality, Aquinas designates two basic intellectual processes through which being is comprehended. According to Aquinas, the mind‟s second operation, that involves judgement is responsible for the perception of being as real and existing. This judgment is also known as separatio. The other, as the first immediate apprehension, communicates an incomplete notion of being by way of simplex apprehensio. In a bid to understand being holistically, following Thomas Aquinas‟ depiction, some Thomist scholars, like Gilson, Maritain, Fabro, and others have stressed the role of judgment. Others too, have had various nuances of the notion and role of judgement in the cognition of being as real and its attributes. These attempts brought about the quasi-perennial irresolute controversy of the place of judgment in the metaphysical apprehension of being as actual. In this study, I wish to determine Aquinas‟ proper distinction of separatio from the first intellectual act of apprehension as the proper place of metaphysics given its modus operandi. For this investigation, questions 5 and 6 of Thomas Aquinas‟ commentary on Boethius‟ De Trinitate are very significant as Aquinas vividly articulated the function of separatio as abstractive judgment in these discourses.