Toward a Thomistic Theory of Attention

Drawing on contemporary research in philosophy and psychology, this is the first study to provide a systematic treatment of attention in the writings of Aquinas. How cognitive agents direct their attention, whether freely or as necessitated by objects, was for him an important topic of investigation. In doing so, he developed a rich vocabulary around the theme of attention. Aquinas understands attention to be a feature of finite cognitive agents—animals, humans, and angels—whose mental activity proceeds piecemeal. For such agents, and in contrast to God, cognition is necessarily selective. Aquinas variously speaks of attention as a capacity, an activity, and an outcome. Qua capacity, attention is a finite resource that gets used up in the process of being deployed. Qua activity, attention is mental prioritizing—foregrounding some items while backgrounding others. Qua outcome, attention is the result of this prioritization, the precise angle under which an item is taken up to be known. Each of these three aspects are examined in successive sections of the article. In general, for Aquinas, attention is the priority structuring that ensures the unity of an individual’s cognitive life as it unfolds in time. Aquinas’s main source for this reflection was St. Augustine. Hence, in its first part, this paper examines how Augustine thematized the topic of attention.