La condición física del alma espiritual en Tomás de Aquino

Abstract

The vision of man offered by St Thomas Aquinas is sometimes criticized for being too “cosmological” or too “physical” and for failing to do justice to the transcendence of human subjectivity. It is not a new criticism. Already in the 17th century, Malebranche attacked the Scholastics for considering the human soul more as “form of the body” than as image of God and knower of truth. Yet an attentive reading of St Thomas finds that on his view, the human soul’s “physical” status – its nature as the substantial form of the human body – is entirely in function of its specific way of knowing the truth and of representing God. This essay seeks to explain this position, by way of a detailed study of Thomas’s account of the human soul. The general conclusion is that the fundamental issue between Thomas’s philosophy of man and the modern “turn to the subject” is not merely about man. It is about the metaphysics of corporeal reality as a whole.