PAZ PEDREIRA DE FREITAS CATAPANO

Our aim, with this research, is to explain how Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, gives an account on how immaterial beings, or pure intelligences, have knowledge of singular composed substances, whose individuation principle is, precisely, matter. In order to do so, first, the dissertation sets out to explain the difference, proposed by the dominican friar, of knowing things as they are contained in the mind of God as scientific ideas, as they are virtually contained in God as possible effects, and, finally, as things in themselves - even though suck knowledge of things in themselves is imparted by God. Afterward, the dissertation continues in discussing how is it possible for an universal intellection to give an adequate knowledge of particular things, through an analysis of the question of how superior and inferior angels differ among themselves by the universality of their intellections. The dissertation ends with a confrontation of other possible answers to the original question, the explanation of their insufficiency to explain the theological and philosophical positions of the day, and presenting the elements of Aquinas' final position.