PERSON
Thomas Aquinas
The thirteenth-century Dominican friar who took the act of understanding apart with more precision than almost anyone in the history of the West—and whose anatomy of the intellect has become, seven centuries later, the sharpest instrument we have for asking whether machines understand anything at all.
Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 into an Italian aristocratic family who locked him in the family castle for a year to break his resolve to join the Dominican order. He did not break. He became the foremost theologian of the age, the author of the unfinished
Summa Theologica, and the thinker who built, from Aristotle and the Christian inheritance, the most complete account we have of how a mind moves from the sensory surface of the world to the grasp of what a thing actually is. His fellow students called him the dumb ox; his teacher Albert the Great replied that the bellowing of this ox would one day be heard through the whole world. It was. What makes Aquinas indispensable now is not his theology but his anatomy of the mind—specifically, his insistence that grasping a
universal is a different act, wholly different in kind, from tracking