Thomas Aquinas on Intellectual Memory – Fr. Philip-Neri Reese, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fr. Philip-Neri Reese examines Thomas Aquinas’s theory of intellectual memory, tracing how Aquinas navigates conflicting authorities and ultimately defends the preservation of intelligible species in the possible intellect.

This lecture was given on June 17th, 2025, at Schloss St. Emmeram.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Fr. Philip-Neri Reese, O.P. is a Dominican Friar of the Province of St. Joseph and a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (the Angelicum), where he also serves as the assistant director of the Angelicum Thomistic Institute. Though his scholarly research mainly focuses on metaphysics (especially the scholastic metaphysics of St. Thomas and his later interpreters), he has also published on ethics, economics, Christology, and philosophical anthropology.

Keywords: Aristotelian Anthropology, Avicennian Epistemology, Habitual Knowledge, Imago Dei, Intellectual Memory, Intelligible Species, Memory, Possible Intellect, Verbal Dispute, Voluntary Cognition

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.8	The title of this talk is Thomas Aquinas on intellectual memory, sources, and development.
0:30.7	This is a new area of research for me, so it's been fun to kind of dive in.
0:37.3	It's still very much a research project in
0:41.2	Media Res, so I look forward to feedback and discussion about this. So, and providentially,
0:49.6	a number of the things that Prince Albert talked about this morning and that Father Reginald talked
0:54.3	about this morning have some nice resonances and overlaps with the subject of this talk.
1:01.2	So if you thought to yourself when you heard them talking about powers of the soul and
1:06.4	intelligible species and the will and how that works, you'll be very happy.
1:13.8	So the plan for this talk is very simple.
1:17.5	I want to start by introducing the problem of intellectual memory as Aquinas received it.
1:24.8	Then I want to look very briefly in a kind of paint-by-number
1:28.2	number's way at the three key authorities that inform Aquinas' treatment of this problem.
1:37.1	Then I want to give you a thousand-foot overview of Aquinas' anthropology,
1:44.9	and particularly with a view towards how that might incline us to give one sort of answer
1:51.4	or interpretation of Aquinas' position, and then I want to actually look at the texts.
1:56.7	And the text will be the lion's share of our attention.
2:02.7	And I'm gonna do it in a very developmental way.
2:07.7	So I studied Thomism in part under a man named Monsignor John Whipple.
	...

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