St. Thomas Aquinas on the Halfway State of Sensible Being

Abstract

I n a provocative article challenging the received interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas's theory of sensation, Sheldon Cohen has argued that holds that the reception of a sensible form, whether natural or spiritual, is always a physical event.)l Whether or not we agree with the validity of this interpretation, there would seem to be no room for controversy regarding its content. But such is not the case. In replying to Cohen, John J. Haldane takes him to be challenging the view that for Aquinas the reception of sensible forms involves immateriality.2 This, however, completely misconstrues Cohen's point. Cohen takes Aquinas to equate natural reception with receiving materially and spiritual reception with receiving immaterially,3 so in asserting that for Aquinas the spiritual reception of a sensible form is always a physical event, his point is that the immaterial reception of a sensible form is always a physical event. Even though this controversy seems to derive solely from Haldane's misreading of Cohen, I shall argue in this paper that the evidence Cohen cites for his interpretation raises legitimate questions about what he means by saying that for Aquinas the immaterial reception of sensible forms is always a physical event. More importantly, the ambiguity in Cohen's interpretation points to interesting issues about Aquinas's own understanding of what it is to be incorporeal or non-physical and about his account of the metaphysics underlying sensation, including the very consistency of that account.