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'Experimentum' in Aquinas: How all Knowledge of Nature Begins in the Interior Senses - Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Fr. Thomas Davenport corrects two misunderstandings of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology — the caricature that Aquinas relies on an intuition of essences and the oversimplification that the agent intellect automatically abstracts universals from phantasms — by recovering Aquinas's notion of experimentum, an ordered, pre-universal knowledge produced by the cogitative power's active collatio of particular intentions stored in memory, which prepares the phantasm for abstraction and shows that all knowledge of nature begins in the interior senses. This lecture was given on July 16th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events. About the Speaker: Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P., is professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where he teaches philosophy of nature and epistemology. He has written and spoken on the relationship of faith and science in a variety of venues, including being a main contributor to the Thomistic Evolution project. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2017 and is working on his second PhD in philosophy.  Keywords: Agent Intellect, Aquinas, Cogitative Power, Collatio, Experimentum, Interior Senses, Memory, Phantasm, Proper Accidents, Substantial Form