Two Medieval Methods of Thought and Its Objects

How do we model thinking, and in what sense does our thought have objects? I review two models of thinking from the medieval Scholastic tradition, which I call the "gaze + sign" model (in Augustine and Abelard) and the "acquiring conscious being" model (in Albert and Aquinas). These two models offer interestingly different ways of conceptualizing both thinking and the object of thought. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, however, one begins to collapse into the other, with important implications for later conceptions of medieval theories of thinking, e.g., in Brentano.