The Internal Sense(s) in Early Jesuit Scholasticism

Against the background of the medieval theory of internal senses of Avicenna and Aquinas the author presents a survey of the theories of internal senses as advocated by the early Jesuits, namely by Francisco de Toledo (1534–1596), Manuel de Góis (1543–1597), one of the so-called Conimbricenses, and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Although all these Jesuits consider Aquinas’s tenet of the four really distinct interior senses to be the probable view, each of them takes a more or less reductionist stance against it. In Suárez this eliminativist approach even results in the theory of the single interior sense called phantasy. In conclusion, this Jesuit reductionism is compared to the Zeitgeist of the classical early modern philosophy exemplified by the names of Descartes and Locke.