Aquinas on Process

Many important studies have been devoted to processuality in Thomas Aquinas, but only a few concern the specific notion of process and its ontological status. The purpose of this paper is to clarify this notion in Aquinas. A significant concept for philosophy, process is often understood to refer to interpersonal or even apersonal procedures that can be described as objectively established. Science, for example, is a paradigmatic case of this sort, for it may be taken to refer to a set of procedures that are over and above the individualscientists who adopt them. Thisisfor Aquinas a wrong understanding of what the process of science is. Aquinas does not reserve any distinct place to processes within the Aristotelian table of categories. For him, the concept of process does not have any distinct ontological counterpart; it only expresses an idiosyncratic way of describing actions. And since actions can be metaphysically reduced to an agent’s motions, it follows that only subject-agents and their motions correspond to processes in his ontology. Moreover, since all actions are individual, so are all processes. On my reconstruction, Aquinas’ faith in the sufficiency of Aristotle compels him to reduce process to the category of action, steamrollering over all the problems.