Dr. Therese Scarpelli Cory  joined Seattle University’s department of philosophy in 2010.  In 2005 she entered the graduate program at the School of Philosophy in the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, earning her PhD in 2009 with a dissertation on self-knowledge in Aquinas, directed by John Wippel.  From 2009-2010, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgetown University’s Martin Center for Medieval Philosophy in Washington, DC.  Her paper “Diachronically Unified Consciousness in Augustine and Aquinas” was awarded the 2011 Founder’s Prize from the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.  

  Dr. Cory’s research examines medieval cognition theories, with special focus on Thomas Aquinas.  She is particularly interested in tracing the influence of Arabic thought on cognition theory in Aquinas and his predecessors, and is an active member of the “Aquinas and ‘the Arabs’ International Working Group.”  Her current research projects include Aquinas’s “turn to phantasms,” which is at the heart of his view of the relationship between mind and imagination, and the ways in which 13^th-century theories of reflexivity and the soul (for instance in Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure) incorporate themes from the “Liber de causis,” an anonymous Arabic text inspired by Proclus which was originally thought to be Aristotelian in origin.  She is also finishing a book on Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge.