The Review of Metaphysics

Volume 66, Issue 2, December 2012

Aquinas’s Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate

The author seeks to clarify the theoretical relevance of a problem developed by Aquinas in his Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate: how can our intellect recognize the ontological and epistemic priority of a sense substance? The difficulty seems to arise from the Platonic vinculation among intelligibility, necessity, and universality, and therefore from the opposition between intellegibility and the main properties of the sense substance: individuality and becoming. The coherence of Aquinas's solution is here examined: how to maintain the Aristotelian vinculation among being, individuality, and activity with the Platonic assumption about the ontological and epistemic priority of the form. A solution is offered by the author regarding the capacity of the human intellect to go beyond the representation of the formal dimension of being in order to perceive its existential dimension. This solution (here only sketched) suggests the metaphysical consistency of human experience.