The Discursive Power

Sources and doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa according to St. Thomas Aquinas

Klubertanz, George P. 2021. The Discursive Power. Sources and doctrine of the Vis Cogitativa according to St. Thomas Aquinas. 2o ed. Hassell Street Press.

Only a philosopher with strong antiquarian interests cares to know every little detail of the doctrine of St. Thomas. At first sight, the vis cogitativa might seem to be such a minor point, incapable of yielding any new philosophical insight. In St. Thomas himself, the vis cogitativa appears to be insignificant, for he used it but little in his positive synthesis, and only a little more in his discussion and polemic. Modern writers on St. Thomas and on Thomistic psychology seem to take the same point of view; they devote very few paragraphs to the "cogitative power”.

This relative neglect of the vis cogitativa has a quite plausible explanation. Man is a being of many activities. Some of them are obvious; others extremely important. For example, man’s sense activities are SO evident that it requires an effort to ignore them. Man's intellectual operations, on the other hand, are his specifically human ones; and so are of the first importance, both practically and theoretically. It can easily be concluded that economy of effort warrants us in getting rid of everything but the most obvious and essential questions in psychology.

In this streamlining of psychology and the theory of knowledge, modern students of St. Thomas and modern Thomistic writers have separated themselves more and more from the thinkers that study man in his concrete wholeness.