João Lázaro Ribeiro Caixeta

This project investigates the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, with an emphasis on its assimilation into inventive logic under the influence of the Arab tradition mediated by Averroes. The hypothesis is that Aquinas knew the work through Hermannus Alemannu's translations, based on Averroes's Middle Commentary, which reinterprets it as a logical treatise on the poetic syllogism and fictional representation (takhyīl). The research proposes that this reception allowed Aquinas to incorporate the treatise into the rational domain, reconfiguring the concept of repraesentatio in his philosophy as a sensitive and imagistic operation, not merely an intellectual one. Through textual exegesis of the five direct mentions of the Poetics in Aquinas's works (e.g., Summa Theologiae, De Malo, Expositio Posteriorum) and a comparative analysis with Arab sources, the study aims to demonstrate that the Poetics, in his system, is not only a treatise on poetry but also a logical tool that broadens the understanding of reason as capable of operating on the singular, thus filling a gap in studies that have ignored the presence of the Poetics as logic in Thomistic thought.