Interiority and Human Experience: Dominicus de Flandria on the Interior Senses

Abstract

This paper takes up the topic of the interior senses and sensible cognition as elaborated by Dominic of Flanders, a fifteenth-century Dominican thinker, in his short commentary, Expositio super libros De anima. At a time when Averroistic Aristotelianism was flourishing, and as nominalism spread across the Continent, Dominic’s account of the soul and the interior senses demonstrates a commitment to Thomas Aquinas and, more broadly, scholastic realism. Dominic adopts the fourfold model of the internal senses advanced by Thomas. He carries forth Thomas’s insistence that the sensus communis is both the root (radix) and end (terminus) of sensitivity as such and the individual senses; he follows Thomas in privileging the cogitativa, and posits a more perfect form of memoria in man. Our study concludes by looking briefly at his Quaestiones in XII libros Metaphysica, where we find an innovative account of experimentum, which reveals the thought of a capable philosopher.