Thursday, June 16, 2016

Questions Regarding Hylomorphic/Thomistic Souls

Does the hylomorphic soul (as conceived by Aquinas and the Church) contemplate God while subsisting in the intermediate state between death and the resurrection? Would not the activity of contemplation also raise some questions about the post-mortem soul's condition? Finally, I would question whether the soul alone would be enough to preserve a person's numerical identity since the body and soul are believed to be separated at death. Moreover, it still remains a mystery how the body that's reunited with the soul in the resurrection turns out to be numerically identical with the body that existed prior to death. I am aware of Aquinas' explanation for the preservation of numerical identity despite the body's decay (its return to the dust), but his account has been criticized by Kevin Corcoran and other philosophers who interpret gaps in existence as possible grounds for the recreation or reconstitution of something new.

Let's imagine S accidentally makes a whole burnt-offering of his prestigious 2nd-century papyrus fragment from ancient Egypt. Assuming that the fragment is utterly consumed, would we still identify a reconstituted fragment (the same atom for atom) as the numerically identical object which underwent an accidental burning? My point is that dualists and physicalists must take pains to supply a coherent narrative about the resurrected body, whether it's spirit or flesh. Dualists cannot rightly assert that Christian physicalists lack the adequate resources for explaining a bodily resurrection: the former have not supplied a thorough and satisfactory account of the resurrection either.

6 comments:

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  3. Sean,

    The official Catholic doctrine is that it takes body and soul to make a complete person (hylomorphism), and I believe that Pruss accepts this idea as well. I don't think Pruss or other Catholics would normally say that the brain or just a body is enough to preserve one's numerical identity. As you note, the Catholic view is that it takes body and soul (matter and form) to make a whole person. The Catholic Encyclopedia and other church documents explicitly make this statement. I'll comment more on this issue and the spirit question later.

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  4. For a clear articulation of the Thomist soul theory, see http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/09/some-questions-on-soul-part-i.html

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  5. Sean,

    the word "spirit" is highly ambiguous in Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek. Have you read the Insight book on "spirit"? It's worth consulting because "spirit" has different shades of meaning as in "life force," "dominant mental attitude" or "self-consciousness," "wind," etc.

    While it may be old, you might benefit from also reading https://fosterheologicalreflections.blogspot.com/search?q=hauser

    Check out what I've written about ruach there.

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  6. Sean,

    On Eccl. 11:5, you might see https://bible.org/seriespage/14-no-risks-no-rewards-ecclesiastes-111-6#P1068_379694

    and http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ecclesiastes/11-5.htm

    On the subject of natural kinds and the hypostatic union, see https://fosterheologicalreflections.blogspot.com/search?q=goncalves

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