De Notione Structurae

CD/mp3 383. A lecture delivered in Latin at the Collegium Aloisianum, Gallarate, Italy, on the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, 7 March 1964. An English translation by Michael G. Shields appears in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 14:2 (Fall 1996) 117-32. Sponsored by Fr. Matthew L. Lamb. The lecture may be divided into four sections, as in the Shields translation. The first contains preliminary observations on abstraction, but for the sake of getting at the meaning of Aquinas’s statement that the intellect ‘is able to abstract those things that in reality are not separate – not all of them, however, but some of them’ (In Boethium De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3). What is intrinsically ordered to something else cannot be understood apart from that other. There is a structure to the things understood together. The next three sections have to do with three particular structures: the structure of the thing known, the structure of knowing, and the structure of the link between knowing and the known, or objectivity. The structure of potency, form, and act in the thing known corresponds to the structure of experience, understanding, and judgment in the knowing, and the two correspond to the structure of experiential, normative, and absolute objectivity.