«Intelligere formaliter solum connotat aliquid ut apparens». Peter Auriol on the Nature of the Cognitive Act

Although Auriol’s philosophical psychology has received increasing attention among contemporary scholars in medieval philosophy, his use of connotation has gone largely unnoticed. The aim of this paper is to delve into Auriol’s definition of cognition as a connotation. In his view, cognizing is nothing more than making things appear to the mind. Each concept is the extra-mental particular plus its property of being cognized by or appearing to the mind. It is nothing other than a real individual co-signifying or connoting its being conceived. Being thought as a connotation, then, for Auriol intellectual cognition ultimately describes the following experience: the appearance of something to and its conscious reception by a cognizer.