The Ground of First-Personal Self-Awareness in Aquinas

Abstract

This paper develops an account of the ground of first-personal self-awareness in Thomas Aquinas's thought. Some have grounded first-personal self-awareness in Aquinas's thought by looking to the way he thinks about the conditions for intelligible cognition and the immaterial nature of intellectual thought. This paper argues that these are the wrong grounds for thinking about first-personal self-awareness in Aquinas. Instead, it offers up a different way of grounding first-personal self-awareness in Aquinas's broader metaphysics of cognition and the experience of the operations of one's own cognitive powers as a means in contrast to the experience of the operations of others’ cognitive operations as objects.