Aquinas’ Balancing Act

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gyula Klima
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Human Intellect

Abstract In this paper, I will primarily argue for the consistency of Aquinas’ conception, according to which the human soul, uniquely in God’s creation, is both the inherent, material, substantial form of the human body, and the subsistent immaterial substance underlying the immaterial operations of its immaterial, rational powers, namely, intellect and will. In this discussion, I will point out that typical challenges to Aquinas’ conception usually rely on semantic or ontological assumptions that can plausibly be denied in Aquinas’ own conceptual framework. Since the issue of consistency merely assumes the less than self-evident claim of the immateriality of the human intellect, I will also provide a brief sketch of what I take to be Aquinas’ most promising proof of this claim.

The Human Soul and the Human Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Robert Pasnau ◽  
Christopher Shields
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Soul

The Mind, the Brain and the Face

Philosophy ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 60 (234) ◽  
pp. 477-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cockburn
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’.1 ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Anyone who believes that Wittgenstein's remarks here embody important truths has quite a bit of explaining to do. What needs to be explained is why it is that enormous numbers of people, people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by reading Descartes or Dennett, are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways which appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many people appear to find no difficulty at all in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being—for example to disembodied ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ or disembodied brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed; but, rather, to one part of the living human being—the brain, for example. Now if this incredibly widespread tendency is the expression of confusion then we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without it it will be difficult to undermine the tendency; and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.

Thomas Aquinas (I)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Entire Study ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Bodily Resurrection ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Structure Of Matter

This chapter restores the place of the body within Aquinas’s theory of the composition of human nature, explaining his account of the body’s autonomy relative to the soul. The central arguments of the entire study are elaborated: theological problems, particularly the bodily resurrection, led Aquinas to emphasize the body’s goodness; Aquinas thinks that the individuality of the whole person had its origins in matter; the individual body’s autonomy is underpinned by its unique ‘dimensive quantity’—a corporeal form, but an ‘accidental’, not a substantial form, which individualizes the body’s matter. These arguments are established through attending to: essence and its relationship to the individual; the beauty of the human body; embryology, heredity, and the structure of matter; and individuation. A theme running through the chapter is Aquinas’s radical remodelling of Peter Lombard’s concept of the ‘truth of human nature’, i.e. that from which the resurrected body will be constituted.

Avicenna on the Origination of the Human Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyed N. Mousavian ◽  
Seyed Hasan Saadat Mostafavi
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

According to the common wisdom, among both contemporary scholars and classic interpreters, Avicenna is committed to ‘Co-origination’: The human soul is temporally originated with the human body. Against the common wisdom, we will argue that Co-origination is ambiguous and vague and thus its attribution to Avicenna is in need of clarification and precisification. The problem is broken down into two sub-problems: First, the problem of the origination of different souls/powers, namely the vegetative, animal and rational, in humans, and second, the problem of the relationship between these souls/powers. Based on our solutions to these two sub-problems, we will offer our own reading of Co-origination according to which Avicenna is not committed to the view that the human soul is originated with the ‘human body’ in its ordinary sense.

Can Duchampian and Darwinian Virtual Objects Ever Behave Themselves?

2013 ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Dew Harrison ◽  
Eugene Ch’ng
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Work Shift ◽  
Virtual Objects ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Collaborative Art ◽  
Physical Interactions ◽  
Human Intellect

The chapter presents the trajectory of a collaborative art practice towards intuitive interaction for visitors accessing virtual spaces to achieve a shared holistic understanding of a complex system. From initial explorations into the efficacy of associative media for constructing conceptual-based artworks, in that hypermedia developed from the intent of augmenting human intellect, behaviours were applied to hypermedia data items. The rationale for this is explained through developments in the ongoing ‘Deconstructing Duchamp’ project, where ‘flocking’ behaviours have been applied to Duchampian digitised items to observe the familial relations within, and key to his work, at play. Following this project, a second work ‘Shift-Life’ has proceeded to further develop the idea of allotting animal-like behaviours to electronic data items giving them the appearance of possessing a basic intelligence. By then, observing their response to our physical interactions, we can glean a clearer understanding from their inter-relationships of a complex conceptual framework.

Quodlibet VII

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-51
Author(s):  
Turner Nevitt ◽  
Brian Davies
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

This chapter presents Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibet XI, which dates from the first time that Aquinas functioned as a master of theology at the University of Paris. It contains Aquinas’s answers to questions about God, angels, and human beings. Specifically, it deals with: God’s infinity; God’s knowledge; God’s predestination; angels: Do they move in an instant?; the human soul: Are the sensitive and intellective soul one and the same substance?; the human body: Will the numerically same body rise again?; the sacrament of confirmation; the sacrament of the Eucharist; the sacrament of marriage; and fraternal correction.

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