The first chapter notes the divergent meanings which the Latin term resolutio acquired through being used to translate several different Greek terms, as well as being different senses by Thomas’s predecessors. A survey of the different contexts in which the term appears in Thomas’s treatises manifests a basic distinction between those texts in which it refers to physical processes affecting sensible substances and those in which it refers to intentional procedures, whether logical, epistemological or metaphysical. Finally the chapter considers briefly the terms most often taken as synonyms: reductio, abstractio, reflexio, and via iudicii, noting further that inductio, deductio, and examen have likewise been regarded as synonyms by some commentators.

The second chapter is a general account of Thomas’s theory of human knowing in order to locate resolution within this broader perspective. It examines the Aristotelian background of Thomas’s epistemology, noting the modifications he made in transposing Aristotle’s insights into a mental universe which, by reason of the Christian belief in creation, vastly differed from that of the Stagerite. It points out, further, the diversity between Thomas’s day and our own as to the primary meaning of knowledge or science: whereas to us it is an abstract body of knowledge, to Thomas it was a concrete term naming a qualitative perfection of the human knowing power. Science consisted in the habitual presence in the intellect of immaterial concepts derived from material things.

Since this is so, the thing as known has a different mode of being than the thing as existing, which raises a question regarding the correspondence of the former to the latter. In Thomas’s view, what assures us of the truth of our knowledge is resolution. As human understanding is a gradual and cumulative activity involving several distinct steps which we today call simple apprehension, judgment and reasoning, there are several types of resolution.

The third chapter investigates the resolution proper to judgment, which Thomas calls “reduction to the senses”: an explicit recognition of the two-fold origin of any known fact in sense experience and intellectual activity. Whatever is known must be reduced to the senses either directly or indirectly in order to be known truly; the type of reduction used in a particular instance corresponds to the way in which the knowledge was originally derived from the senses.

The fourth chapter studies the resolution proper to reasoning: the latter derives its content from sense experience, but its formal structure is dependent upon the principles of intelligibility to which all human knowing must conform. The truth of the conclusion of a process of reasoning is established when it is perceived as either implied in or conforming to these first principles.

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which metaphysics reduces the plurality of the sciences to a unity through resolution to being (ens) and the first cause of beings. For Thomas, however, even metaphysical resolution is incomplete, for it attains the existence of a first cause, but not its nature. Accordingly, chapter six follows Thomas beyond metaphysics into the realm of faith, where resolution functions, not as an epistemological technique, but as an existential pilgrimage back to the God from human beings have come through creation.

The conclusion of this study is that Thomas’s doctrine of resolution is a synthesis of an Aristotelian epistemological procedure and the Neo-platonic way of salvation, carried out under the influence of his Christian faith. The basic meaning of resolution for Thomas is always that of a return to the source, which includes both the sources of our knowledge and the source of our being. All the specific types of resolution are finally integrated when the human knower, being united with God in eternity, knows all things, himself included, in their creative source.

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because it departed so much from the ancient cosmological consensus. It was only in the time of Newton that convincing physical arguments were able to overcome the legitimate objections against heliocentrism, which had looked like a mathematical hypothesis with no physical meaning.

Thus from the perspective of the history of science, as well as from that of Aristotelian scholarship, it is important to examine the details of Aristotle’s philosophy of mathematics with particular attention to its relationship with the physical world, as

reflected in the so-called ‘mixed’ sciences of astronomy, optics and mechanics. Furthermore, we face a deep hermeneutical problem in trying to understand Aristotle’s

philosophy of mathematics without drawing false parallels with modern views that were

developed in response to the foundational crisis at the end of the 19th century. On the

one hand, it is an inescapable fact about our mode of understanding that we cannot jump

over our own shadow, as it were; so that we cannot avoid asking whether Aristotle was

a platonist, or an intuitionist, or a logicist, or a formalist, or some kind of quasiempiricist.

When pursued in this way, the attempt to grapple with Aristotle’s philosophy of mathematics is reduced to asking how well his view matches one of the standard modern views that were developed within an entirely different problem-situation in the history of philosophy. But, on the other hand, one wonders whether it is even possible to recover the original problem-situation in which Aristotle’s views about mathematics

were developed.

The following positions are then proposed and defended:

(1) Scientific states of affairs are given in an originary way to the experiencing scientist during the course of scientific observation.

(2) Scientific observation involves a special non-objective use of the instrument; one in which the noetic intention is embodied in the instrument joined, physically and intentionally, with the scientist; this non-objective use is characterized by a hermeneutical shift in the subject-object cut so as to place the instrument on the subject side of the cut, and the instrumental signals in a position of a “text” to be “read” in a “context.”

(3) Scientific experimentation in the fullest sense involves the possibility of a human subject embodying himself in instrumentation not only for the purposes of observation, but also to create that context, physical and noetic, which is the condition of possibility for the scientific object to manifest itself in observation.

(4) The historical fact of scientific revolutions confirms the hermeneutical aspect of experimental science and adds a dialectical movement to its history.

(5) In consequence of what has been said, we can outline the moments in the genetic constitution of scientific objects as elements of the life-world of the scientist; the scientist first learns the objective use of instrumentation, then, through acquired expertise, he passes to a non-objective use of instrumentation characterized by the following: intentional or subjective embodiment in instrumental artifacts, a hermeneutical shift in the subject-object cut, and the assimilation of instrumental signals to a text.

(6) Technological artifacts make possible modes of observational givenness which, unlike experimental science, are constituted by human technical interests; within this context scientific terms are used with analogical meanings.

(7) Quantum mechanics as a physical science gives a logical model, the Q-lattice, for the relation between context-dependent and dialectically related languages, that is, languages supposing relatively non-compossible modes of subjectivity.

(8) Quantum mechanics cannot be understood without recourse to a transcendental language that is the dialectical synthesis, in a Q-lattice, of physics and psychology.

(9) The hermeneutic aspects of natural science and technology have momentous consequences for the evolution of human subjectivity and the life-world.