La expresión como culminación del pensamiento

Sobre el verbo mental en Tomás de Aquino

Abstract

Under the denomination of ‘mental word’, the scholastic thinkers developed a remarkably heterogeneous doctrine on the concept. According to Thomas Aquinas’ version (which is what we will study in this work), the human understanding entails a product susceptible of several names (almost ten: verbum, formatum, conceptus, proles, emanatio, etc.) and many definitions both negative and positive. We must add to this the epistemic hybridity of this notion, which is often regarded as a philosophical one but almost always occurs in trinitarian contexts. The present paper pursues a double purpose. First, to identify the theoretical elements that make up this doctrine and to underline their divergence, which, cleverly hidden by Aquinas’ argumentation, usually goes unnoticed by the eyes of the critic. Second, to explain this constitutive heterogeneity of the notion of mental word as the inevitable result of the peculiar thomasian notion of philosophy, knowledge that is part of the theology and is transmuted by this.