Using the Index Thomisticus Treebank to Interview Thomas Aquinas about Intellect and Will

The paper presents an experiment run on the Index Thomisticus Treebank, the syntactically annotated portion of the corpus collecting the works of Thomas Aquinas. After an introduction about the theoretical background of the annotation style of the treebank, the process to extract from the corpus the information about a set of words concerning intellect and will in Summa contra Gentiles is described. Then, the paper details the automatic induction from the treebank of two kinds of syntactic networks whose vertices are words and edges represent their syntactic relations in the treebank. The networks are used in order to provide a synoptic view and grasp of data, to answer a set of questions about intellect and will in Summa contra Gentiles. Finally, the paper discusses some general conclusions about the use of textual data in philosophy, following its objective to represent an example of how intellectual questions can be turned into experiments whose results are replicable.