Aquinas
The supernatural account of the soul
The human soul itself is a subsistent entity. It functions in a way that is totally independent from the body. Non bodily and susbsistent.
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throug ht he intellect, a human being can cognise the natures of all bodies.
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that which can cognise certain things must have none of those things in its own nature.
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therefore the intellectural principle cannot be body.
That which exists in the intellect naturally, will impede the cognition of other things. So if there is a specific kind of body like fire in the human soul, then the human soul would be impeded by this firely nature to cognise anything other than the fire like the elements of water. This is becaue the primary quality of the fire is defined by its function of heating, and if the human soul is defined by such a quality then it is excluded from receiving else, like being cold or solid.
Therefore if the intellectual principle were to contain within itself a kind of body, it wouldn’t be able to cognise all kinds of bodies.
If something happens to a bodily organ, then that bodily organ’s feature will impact how we see a sensory object.
It is impossible for the intellect to understand things in such a way that we can locate the power of thinking in any bodily organ. Our power of thought is something totally immaterial.
Aquinas is trying to tell us that we have reached the conclusion of (1).
The power of vision is somehow for Aquinas not just in your eyes, but also in your brain.
Our human knowledge however starts with how we first perceive the world external to us, and by further abstracting those sensory features we are able to derive the nature of different kinds of bodies.
The intellect itself is part of the soul. Aquinas says that the human intellect is a power of the soul, necessarily and essentially flowing from the nature of the human soul. It is something we cannot be deprived of.
For Aquinas, the intellect depends on the body in a very unique way. If our focus is totally attached to a particular object, our intellect may be activated in order to attempt to grasp the particular nature of the bodily thing. But our sensory power work in different ways, they must inhere in a specific bodily organ.
The act of the intellect must be issued solely by the intellective soul itself Thinking cannot be a material process in the body.
Origen argues that when God created the world, he created all the souls at the same time, and then our bodies were given to us one by one. For Thomas Aquinas this is not possible. For TA, there is an embryo at the beginning of life, this is the vegetative soul which is able to provide the basic life which enables us to grow into having an intellectual soul.
When the final day comes, the soul will return to our body. They will be reunited.
The body does not share in any human understanding, thinking or understanding itself is not a physical process.
The intellect is introduced in the body after a certain point by God, or by the movement of the heavenly bodies. But the intellective soul can only happen when the body and vegetative souls have grown to a certain extent.
From this particular substantial form of human, certain powers proceed, like everything related to living.
By doing all this kind of living activities we are identified as something actually living. A human life can be displayed by two major living activities, cognition and movement.
For TA the way the human soul is joined to the body is through the way in which it activates our organs to do certain functions. This is the essential way in which we live as humans. Can you imagine the human soul be attached to a table or an animal body? It doesn’t seem to work.
It seems that human beings are composed of two fundamental distinct entities, the soul with a spiritual nature and indepnedent existence, on the other the soul-body composite with a corporeal nature.
Is TA a dualist?
In a weak sense yes. But not really. Aquinas clearly rejects the platonic view that human beings are identified with their human souls. The human soul alone never explains the nature of the human.
Human understanding is just one essential function that defines the human person. Digestion and nutrition too are essential. Without the body the human cannot do a lot of its fundamental tasks.
Aquinas says that a particular thing (hoc aliquid) can mean two different things.
Incompletely and completely.
In the incomplete sense a hand count as a particular thing. This is just something that exists in itself.
Each of us exist in our own right, as individuals. But we are also complete in our species. We do human things. In contrast, a chopped hand is incomplete in the species of hand, because there is no such a thing as a concept of hand that subsists and comes out of itself. The soul is like a chopped hand. A human soul without the body is not a human person in the full sense.
The definition of a person must include form and matter. He mentions that there is a signate matter and a common matter. Aristotle, his particular bones etc. constitutes the matter that become Aristotle. But then we have the flesh and bones by definition, in general, and they are required for the human person in general. It belongs to this human person to have this flesh and bones.
Aquinas’ middle way: the intellective soul as a particular thing.
A particular soul = a particular human being.
A thing is identified with that which performs its characteristic operations. A human being = what performs human operations, including both understanding and sensation.
So if both sensation and understanding belong to the soul alone, then the soul alone would be the human being. This position would only if sensation were an operation of the soul without the body.
Human powers all essentially flow from the powers of the human soul. And why? Because human nature prescribes what something must be. Our life is symbolised by our two basic functions, cognition and movement. They are the essential aspects of defining what a human life should be.