Thursday, May 17, 2018

Aquinas on the human soul


My article “Aquinas on the Human Soul” appears in the anthology The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland and just published by Wiley-Blackwell.  Lots of interesting stuff in this volume.  The table of contents and other information are available here.

14 comments:

  1. How'd E. J. Lowe get in there? This anthology must have been a while in the making.

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  2. It's fun to say "Thomas Acquinas" just to troll all the Thomist nerds.

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  3. Ed, congratulations on what I am sure will be another important article. I am also pleased to note that my Azusa Pacific colleague, Josh Rasmussen, has written the critique of non-reductive physicalism.
    Among other things, Josh has written a book defending the correspondence theory of truth and a highly technical article showing that propositions must be immaterial.

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    1. Was happy to see his inclusion as well, as Josh is one of my favorite writers when it comes to philosophy of religion. Philosophy nerds, take notice. He has some really good articles on cosmological arguments, and his newest book "Necessary Existence" (co-authored with the legend from Baylor) is really good.

      Overall this anthology seems really interesting.

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    1. That's what I said. Maybe if you are a professor and have a departmental budget for getting these things, sure. But personally? No way.

      I will have to drool enviously from a distance and wait for it to come out on Cliff Notes. Or wait for the movie.

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    2. If it makes you feel better, they are almost out of stock

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    3. How to overcome overly priced books:

      1) worldcat.org to find it at a local university library.
      2) Then, print out where it is and bring it to your local library.
      3) Demand [politely] that they obtain it for you via interlibrary loan

      Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

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    4. bmiller, how would one find out that they are almost out of stock? Do they send out a notice, with the last 50 orders, saying "our stocks are running low, so if you want additional copies you better get your order in before the other guy."? Anyway, I can't figure out whether it makes me feel better or not: that they under-estimated the demand, so they under-printed, and thus overpriced it; or that they will soon have to do a second printing, which implies either making a killing (profit-wise) on the second bunch or reducing the price by a considerable amount? No clue.

      John, thanks. I can try that.

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    5. Paperback pricing will come eventually!

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  5. First one must show that something transcends. But the supervisory nature of analysis itself already assumes that. So either thought itself is necessarily transcendent to whatever objects it thinks as the vantage point of judgment supervising or presiding over them, or else there can be no knower (or denier of knowing for that matter). Self-reference is such a nasty business for reductionists.

    An interesting refutation by Hackett of physicalism, which would eliminate any transcendent self or soul is that if an experiencing subject can have a detailed knowledge of the contents of their own mental awareness without any knowledge of physical and biological components, and if a physiologist can have a detailed descriptive knowledge of states and processes of the central nervous system without any knowledge of mental and psychological contents except from the corroborative testimony of the experiencing subject, then the claim that mental ingredients are those physical components is false. (Compare his The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim, page 138-139).

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  6. So many new books - this one, "Necessary Existence", and the one dr Feser announced a few posts earlier... As an non-philosopher, I wish I was retired (or had enough money to live off the interest...)

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