Philosophy 43151
Second Paper -- Due April 7

Papers will be 6-7 pages in length, double spaced and in an 11-point or 12-point proportional font.  

Your second writing assignment will be perhaps a bit more challenging than the first.  

What I want you to do is to compare and contrast angelic intellective cognition with human intellective cognition as St. Thomas understands them.  I ask only that you include somewhere in your paper a comparison of angelic and human cognition of corporeal things, i.e., material substances.  Other than that, it is up to you to determine which points of comparison and contrast you want to talk about and/or emphasize, and also up to you to determine the order in which you deal with the various topics.  So this will be something of a challenge.  (Perhaps St. Thomas's own orderly discussion of angelic cognition will be of some assistance to you.)  Make sure that you structure the paper clearly and that you make that structure clear to me, the reader.

You should begin by reading all of the section on angelic cognition (qq. 54-58) and all of the section on human acts of intellective understanding (qq. 84-88) in preparation for writing the paper.  I suggest that, for background purposes, you also read q. 14, aa. 1-5 on God's knowledge, to give yourself yet another point of comparison.  This is a pretty sizable chunk of reading, and so you should begin soon.

My fervent hope is that by the time you sit down to write the paper you will have lots of background ideas from your readings, from our class meetings, and from the work you did on your first paper.  My goal is to have you use this paper to penetrate a bit more deeply into material that you already have a pretty good general grasp of.