I do four things in responding to Patrick Toner’s incisive critique of my Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (AST). First, I further motivate Aquinas’s position that Socrates exists in the post-mortem and ante-resurrection state by noting that Socrates’ situation is at least analogous to other states of affairs that would certainly count as atypical (although not impossible). Secondly, I offer a revised Thomistic account of artefact identity through time in light of Toner’s objections to Aquinas’srestrictive view. Unlike the restrictive (...) view, this revised account is compatible with common-sense intuitions. Thirdly, I show how my defense of Aquinas’s substance metaphysic in AST is useful for the purpose of constructing defeators for certain kinds of arguments for reductionism. Fourthly, I defend Aquinas’s views on the unity of substance against Toner’s suggestion that they are implausible on the grounds that they are in conflict with certain so-called “scientifically informed”common-sense beliefs. (shrink)

I do four things in responding to Patrick Toner’s incisive critique of my Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (AST). First, I further motivate Aquinas’s position that Socrates exists in the post-mortem and ante-resurrection state by noting that Socrates’ situation is at least analogous to other states of affairs that would certainly count as atypical (although not impossible). Secondly, I offer a revised Thomistic account of artefact identity through time in light of Toner’s objections to Aquinas’srestrictive view. Unlike the restrictive (...) view, this revised account is compatible with common-sense intuitions. Thirdly, I show how my defense of Aquinas’s substance metaphysic in AST is useful for the purpose of constructing defeators for certain kinds of arguments for reductionism. Fourthly, I defend Aquinas’s views on the unity of substance against Toner’s suggestion that they are implausible on the grounds that they are in conflict with certain so-called “scientifically informed”common-sense beliefs. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest Western philosphers and one of the greatest theologians of the Christian church. In this book we at last have a modern, comprehensive presentation of the total thought of Aquinas. Books on Aquinas invariably deal with either his philosophy or his theology. But Aquinas himself made no arbitrary division between his philosophical and his theological thought, and this book allows readers to see him as a whole. It introduces the full range of Aquinas' thinking; (...) and it relates his thinking to writers both earlier and later than Aquinas himself. (shrink)

Profoundly important ethical and political controversies turn on the question of whether biological life is an essential aspect of a human person, or only an extrinsic instrument. Lee and George argue that human beings are physical, animal organisms - albeit essentially rational and free - and examine the implications of this understanding of human beings for some of the most controversial issues in contemporary ethics and politics. The authors argue that human beings are animal organisms and that their personal identity (...) across time consists in the persistence of the animal organisms they are; they also argue that human beings are essentially rational and free and that there is a radical difference between human beings and other animals; criticize hedonism and hedonistic drug-taking; present detailed defenses of the prolife positions on abortion and euthanasia; and defend the traditional moral position on marriage and sexual acts. (shrink)

Philosophical difficulties with Augustine’s dualism, and with the scholastic “separated souls” account of the gap between personal death and supernatural resurrection, suggest that we consider two other options, each with its own attractions: (i) that the General Resurrection is immediate upon one’s death, despite initial awkwardness with common piety, and (ii) that there is a “natural metamorphosis” of bodily continuity after death and before resurrection.

Hylomorphism offers a third way between animalist approaches to personal identity, which maintain that psychology is irrelevant to our persistence, andneo-Lockean accounts, which deny that humans are animals. This paper provides a Thomistic account that explains the intuitive responses to thought experiments involving brain transplants and the transformation of organic bodies into inorganic ones. This account does not have to follow the animalist in abandoning the claim that it is our identity which matters in survival, or countenance the puzzles of (...) spatially coincident entities that plague the neo-Lockean. The key is to understand the human being as only contingently an animal. This approach to our animality is one that Catholics have additional reason to hold given certain views about purgatory, our uniqueness as free and rational creatures, and our having once existed as zygotes. (shrink)

Few philosophers or theologians exerted as much influence on the shape of medieval thought as Thomas Aquinas. He ranks amongst the most famous of the Western philosophers and was responsible for almost single-handedly bringing the philosophy of Aristotle into harmony with Christianity. He was also one of the first philosophers to argue that philosophy and theology could support each other. The shape of metaphysics, theology, and Aristotelian thought today still bears the imprint of Aquinas' work. In this extensive and deeply (...) researched study, Eleonore Stump examines Aquinas' major works, _Summa Theologiae _and _Summa Contra Gentiles, _and clearly assesses the vast range of Aquinas' thought. Philosophers, theologians, and students of the medieval period alike will find this unrivalled study an indispensable resource in researching and teaching Aquinas. (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

This book shows how the mature writings of Thomas Aquinas though written in the thirteenth century have much to offer the human mind and the relationship between intellect and will, body and soul.

What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can be (...) fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. The Constitution View yields answers to the questions 'What am I most fundamentally?', 'What is a person?', and 'What is the relation between human persons and their bodies'? Baker argues that the complex mental property of first-person perspective enables one to conceive of one's body and mental states as one's own. (shrink)

Philosophical difficulties with Augustine’s dualism, and with the scholastic “separated souls” account of the gap between personal death and supernatural resurrection, suggest that we consider two other options, each with its own attractions: (i) that the General Resurrection is immediate upon one’s death, despite initial awkwardness with common piety, and (ii) that there is a “natural metamorphosis” of bodily continuity after death and before resurrection.

Thomas Aquinas presents an account of human immortality and bodily resurrection intended to be both faithful to Christian Scripture and metaphysically sound as following from the Aristotelian view of human nature. One central question is whether a human person persists between death and resurrection by virtue of her soul, given Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human nature and assertion that a human person is not identical to her soul. Robert Pasnau contends that only a part of a person exists between death (...) and resurrection; whereas Eleonore Stump argues that a person substantially exists, albeit deficiently, during the interim period as composed of, but not identical to her soul. In this essay, I will adjudicate this dispute through textual and metaphysical analysis. (shrink)