St. Thomas Aquinas : The Existence and the Nature of the Soul

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In this forum there is an obvious interest in the existence and nature of the human soul. Can it be proven philosophically to exist and what is its nature? This thread will only deal with the views of St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject. If you wish to limit your comments to what Thomas said or commented upon you are welcome. So please limit you comments to that.

If you have tried to find how ST. Thomas proves the existence of the soul and couldn’t find any such proof that is because you first need to look into his commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle.
dhspriory.org/thomas/DeAnima.htm#21

Discussion on the nature and operations of the soul can be found in the Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Ques 75-102.

So you can begin reading in De Anima and proceed to the Questions in the Summa.
Then the question is, do you think Thomas proved the existence of the soul? Did he prove its true nature and its relationship to the human body.? Linus
 
Linusthe2nd said:
In this forum there is an obvious interest in the existence and nature of the human soul. Can it be proven philosophically to exist and what is its nature? This thread will only deal with the views of St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject. If you wish to limit your comments to what Thomas said or commented upon you are welcome. So please limit you comments to that.

If you have tried to find how ST. Thomas proves the existence of the soul and couldn’t find any such proof that is because you first need to look into his commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle.
dhspriory.org/thomas/DeAnima.htm#21

Discussion on the nature and operations of the soul can be found in the Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Ques 75-102.

So you can begin reading in De Anima and proceed to the Questions in the Summa.
Then the question is, do you think Thomas proved the existence of the soul? Did he prove its true nature and its relationship to the human body.? Linus
Click to expand...
I am interested in this too. I find Aristotle hard to understand, and therefore Aquinas too. The only works of St. THomas I’ve read is the Summa Theolgica. I don’t know who authored Theologica Germanica so I’ll leave that alone as per your request to only talk about Thomas. I shall look at your link to De Anima too.
 
Well, I’m down to paragraph 19 of the Commentary and it seems that the exisence of the soul is more or less assumed. Aristotle identified it a the life principle of living things right off. And looking at the Catholic Encyclopedia it appears that belief in an individual soul of some discription has up to modern times been pretty much a universal phenomenon.

I’m having no problems understanding what I’m reading so far. Thomas is easier reading than Aristotle.

Up to this point the factors discussed have been the distinction between living and non living beings, life as the first indicator of the existence of the soul, nutrition, sensation, understanding, imagination, memory, and the relationship between body and soul and whether the soul has any operation independent of the body. So far no fixed definition of the soul has been given.

I would suggest that we check in each day to see what progress has been made. And if you have gone further leave a " reply " indicating where you have gone, if further than the last post. I also suggest not using " quote " except if you have a question on some point you didn’t understand. When we get to the end of this exercise we can start giving definitions for the soul and discuss those conclusions - a month or so from now. Linus
 
I thought I would add this quote from paragraph 19 of the Commentary because I thought it interesting and it might get others interested.

" § 19. Now although Aristotle clears up this problem in Book III, we shall say something about it here. Understanding, then, is in one sense, proper to the soul alone, and in another sense common to both soul and body. For it should be realised that certain activities or modifications of the soul depend on the body both as an instrument and as an object. Sight, for instance, needs a body as object—because its object is colour, which is only found in bodies;—and also as an instrument—because, while the act of seeing involves the soul, it cannot occur except through the instrumentality of a visual organ, the pupil of the eye. Sight then is the act of the organ as well as of the soul. But there is one activity which only depends on the body to provide its object, not its instrument; for understanding is not accomplished with a bodily organ, though it does bear on a bodily object; because, as will be shown later, in Book III, the phantasms in the imagination are to the intellect as colours to sight: as colours provide sight with its object, so do the phantasms serve the intellect. Since then there cannot be phantasms without a body, it seems that understanding presupposes a body-not, however, as its instrument, but simply as its object. "

What I find interesting is that Thomas locates the " phantasms " of the imagination in the bodily organ and furnish the intellect with its " object. " But the body is not an instrument in this case. The body furnishes the data of the phantasm which the imagination produces. Linus
 
Linusthe2nd said:
I thought I would add this quote from paragraph 19 of the Commentary because I thought it interesting and it might get others interested.

" § 19. Now although Aristotle clears up this problem in Book III, we shall say something about it here. Understanding, then, is in one sense, proper to the soul alone, and in another sense common to both soul and body. For it should be realised that certain activities or modifications of the soul depend on the body both as an instrument and as an object. Sight, for instance, needs a body as object—because its object is colour, which is only found in bodies;—and also as an instrument—because, while the act of seeing involves the soul, it cannot occur except through the instrumentality of a visual organ, the pupil of the eye. Sight then is the act of the organ as well as of the soul. But there is one activity which only depends on the body to provide its object, not its instrument; for understanding is not accomplished with a bodily organ, though it does bear on a bodily object; because, as will be shown later, in Book III, the phantasms in the imagination are to the intellect as colours to sight: as colours provide sight with its object, so do the phantasms serve the intellect. Since then there cannot be phantasms without a body, it seems that understanding presupposes a body-not, however, as its instrument, but simply as its object. "
Click to expand...
What I find interesting is that Thomas locates the " phantasms " of the imagination in the bodily organ and furnish the intellect with its " object. " But the body is not an instrument in this case. The body furnishes the data of the phantasm which the imagination produces. Linus
Click to expand...
This last paragraph is an immature conclusion. Thomas is simply saying that the bodily organ is the instrument by means of which the phantasm of the imagination is able to provide an object for the intellect to act upon. In other words the bodily organ provides the raw data. Much later here or in another work I think Thomas will locate the imagination in the mind, which he locates in the soul. Linus
 
Just a reiminder. We are reading St. Thomas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. You may link to it by going to my first post - and read the rules while you are there.

Today I finished pargraph 46. From my last post to this Thomas has been basically giving us a kind of retranslation of De Anima. He sticks pretty close to the actual work. I have been reading both side by side. I think what Thomas is doing is not a verbatim translation but a kind of tightening up and slimming. He has only departed from Aristotle’s own ideas once or twice.

Between my post yesterday and today he has been summing up the idea of " soul " found in the pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophers. I found this quite interesting. They were much deeper thinkers than I had supposed. All of them were hitting around the right idea.

I found one paragraph of particular interest which contains matter which you will fine in much of Thomas’ own writings and is very important to his own rendering of philosophy. It follows.

" § 43. Having shown how some have approached a knowledge of soul through movement, the Philosopher now turns to those who came to it by way of sensation or knowledge. He does this in. two stages. First he shows where the latter were in agreement; and secondly, at ‘Empedocles, for instance,’ where they disagreed.

He begins then by saying that all who studied the soul in or through its knowing and sensing agreed in holding that the soul was composed of the principles of things; but some ‘made’, i. e. posited, many such principles, while others posited only one. Even the earliest philosophers assumed these principles to be in the soul, as though compelled by the force of truth itself; they dreamed, as it were, of the truth. The truth, in fact, is that knowledge is caused by the knower containing a likeness of the thing known; for the latter must be in the knower somehow. The early philosophers, however, thought that it existed in the knower in its own natural being, i.e. with the being that it has in itself. Like, they said, must be known by like. If then the soul is to know all things it must contain a likeness of all things according to their natural mode of being. They could not distinguish between the mode of existence that a thing has in the mind or the eye or the imagination from that which it has in itself. Therefore, since whatever is of a thing’s essence is a constituent principle of the thing, and to know its constituent principles is to know the thing itself, these philosophers maintained that the reason why the soul can know all things is that it is made up of the principles of all things. This theory was common to them all. "

The underlined sentence is very important to Thomas’ theory of knowledge. For the intellect knows only " universals " which it abstracts from the phantasms, which in turn are " images " converted from the data given by the beings outside the mind. This particular paragraph has been totally converted in its terminology and sentence structure. I don’t know if that is Thomas or the translatro !! But the idea is to make it easier to understand for modern readers. One does not get the same sense from reading Aristotle himself.
 
Some of the imortant points raised by the ancients so far which Thomas will take up himself at some point are as follows. 1. Three characteristics of life ( soul ) to this point seem to be Self-Movement, Sensation, Knowledge. 2. Certain actions of living creatures seem to involve both body and mind - fear, ager, hate, etc and at least one seem to involve the mind only. So the question becomes whether or not the soul has any actions reserved to itself alone. It would seem that it does. Does this mean that the soul is an independent substance. 3. Is the soul immaterial or material?

One thing to keep in mind is that all the ancients accepted that there was enough difference between beings which did not move themselves and those which did move themselves that beings having self movement came to be regarded as living. This attribute indicated to them an inner essence to these beings which they called life or soul. That appears to be the origin of the notion of the soul as the " nature " or essential inner, organizing principle of such beings.

At this point Thomas is letting Aristotle speak on his own and he is just passing on in a clear manner what he is saying.

Linus
 
Linusthe2nd said:
In this forum there is an obvious interest in the existence and nature of the human soul. Can it be proven philosophically to exist and what is its nature? This thread will only deal with the views of St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject. If you wish to limit your comments to what Thomas said or commented upon you are welcome. So please limit you comments to that.

If you have tried to find how ST. Thomas proves the existence of the soul and couldn’t find any such proof that is because you first need to look into his commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle.
dhspriory.org/thomas/DeAnima.htm#21

Discussion on the nature and operations of the soul can be found in the Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Ques 75-102.

So you can begin reading in De Anima and proceed to the Questions in the Summa.
Then the question is, do you think Thomas proved the existence of the soul? Did he prove its true nature and its relationship to the human body.? Linus
Click to expand...
 
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