Beauty and transcendentals in St. Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

Thomas Aquinas did not give us a treatise on beauty. Thus, his thoughts on aesthetics are not always clear. In this paper, I engage in the well-known contemporary dispute, as to whether Aquinas takes beauty to be a transcendental. I distinguish between primary and secondary transcendentals and argue that it is not a primary transcendental. In doing so, I propose a necessary condition for something to be a primary transcendental, and I investigate Aquinas’ division of the primary transcendentals.