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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2010
The soul has two cognitive powers. One is the act of a corporeal organ, which naturally knows things existing in individual matter; hence sense knows only the singular. But there is another kind of power called the intellect. Though natures only exist in individual matter, the intellectual power knows them not as individualised, but as they are abstracted from matter by the intellect's attention and reflection. Thus, through the intellect we can understand natures in a universal manner; and this is beyond the power of sense.
(St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 12, a 4; responsio.)Introduction
I shall approach the theme of understanding and verstehen by way of considering the purported (and I believe, real) difference between human and other animals in respect of the intellectual rationality of the former.
English-language philosophy in the broadly analytical tradition is currently in a humanistic phase. I mean by this that there is now a widely-shared inclination to reassert the existence and the validity of interpretative and evaluative styles of description and explanation. Sometimes (indeed, for the most part) this gives rise to forms of conceptual dualism, as in some of the uses made of the contrast between scientific and manifest images, objective and subjective views and causal and rational explanations.
Of course, to observe a duality is not necessarily to accord parity of esteem to both parties.
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