The Characteristics of Prophetic Imagination in Aquinas

In his detailed discussion of prophecy, Aquinas talks about the way the prophetic knowledge is acquired, and takes the most appropriate supernatural cognition of the prophet to be an imaginational one. In this paper I will talk about the characteristics of this special cognition. I will first talk about the faculty of imagination in Aquinas, then discuss about his position against Ibn Sina which takes the prophetic knowledge to be a perfection of the faculty of imagination. Aquinas takes the prophet as a normal human individual and takes his prophecy to be a divine intervention without there being any capacity inside the prophet which distinguishes him from other human beings. In order to reject the interference of the prophetic imaginations with the images of the perception, Aquinas upholds the isolation of the prophet's perceptions at the time of receiving the prophecy. This is against the account given by some Muslim philosophers such as Fārābī.