Acerca de la naturaleza del objeto cognoscible. Tomás de Aquino y Averroes en los umbrales de la filosofía moderna

MARIANO PÉREZ CARRASCO

Cuadernos de Filosofía

Instituto de Filosofía Dr. Alejandro Korn, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UBA

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2012

0590-1901

To determine the nature of the intelligibe object is one of the most difficult problems of epistemology. That is why philosophical systems can be classified according to the way in wich they solve this problem. There are, in fact, two ways in which this epistemological problem was solved by thierteenth century philosophers: on the one hand, they thought the object of our knowledge was the very things—ans so they were realists; on the other hand, there were also some philosophers that thought that the object of our knowledge was not the very things, but some kind of representations or ideas of these things—and so they were representationalists. The dispute between Aquinas and Averroes is about this epistemological problem. My article aims to show that Aquinas misunderstood Averroes’ epistemology, and, doing so, he presents a proto-modern, representationalist theory of knowledge, that could be interpreted as a precedent of the Cartesian distinction between the formality and objectivity of ideas.