Recontextualization of the Concept of Teaching: If Man Could Teach and Call Himself Teacher. The Thomas Aquinas’s „Commentary“ on "De magistro" of Augustine
Recontextualization of the Concept of Teaching: If Man Could Teach and Call Himself Teacher. The Thomas Aquinas’s „Commentary“ on "De magistro" of Augustine

Summary/Abstract: The current paper will explicate and examine the linkage between the brief reinterpretation of the concepts „teaching“ (ad docendum, docere, doctrina) and teacher (magister), conducted by Thomas Aquinas mainly in his Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, question 11, where he refers to the substantial treatise of Augustine De magistro, and the specific character of his contemporary doctrinal and cultural practices, compared to the one, which Augustine knew and had to consider in the time, when he was building his own theory of transmission of knowledge. The work also very briefly outlines the contemporary with Thomas educational and cultural practices, bringing them into comparison with those that were known to Augustine in the time in which he builds his theory of transmission of knowledge.The text aims to show the interpretational turn that Thomas Aquinas undertakes, in order to preserve the main Augustinian thesis that God is the ultimate intrinsic teacher, but at the same time, using Aristotle’s theory of potency, to open the possibility for the human being to be a teacher. Thomas demonstrates that one person could teach another not in the role of an internal cause, but as an external secondary cause, as the teacher only helps the learner to activate his own intrinsic power of knowledge acquisition, inborn to him as an active potency (potentia activa).

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