Self-knowledge according to St. Thomas Aquinas

Abstract:

Self-knowledge has been considered in some great philosophical systems as the first and necessary fundament of human knowledge and science, but the path that was supposed to get opened in that way encountered soon unsurpassable barriers, because the very possibility of such self-knowledge was questioned by the philosophies that followed. Instead, in an aristotelian and thomist way of thinking, the self cannot be the first thing known, and yet, there would be no knowledge in general without some kind of original knowledge of the self. In this paper we try to illuminate the problems involved in this issue in the perspective opened by Francisco Canals and the reading of some key texts of St. Thomas Aquinas

Key words:

Self-knowledge, self, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Canals