Philosophical Anthropology

A.  The Soul: Form of a Living Substance
B.  Kinds of souls
C.  Overview of Sensation and Intellection
D.  The Immateriality and Immortality of the Human Soul

A. The Sentient Cognitive Powers of the Human Soul
B. The Sentient Affective Powers of the Human Soul: The Passions of the Soul
C. The Intellective Powers of the Human Soul
D. Theoretical vs. Practical Reason

III.  Catholic Philosophical Anthropology and the Current Philosophical Scene

A. The Alternatives to a Thomistic-Aristotelian Philosophical Anthropology
B. Two Relevant Catholic Doctrines
C. Human Dignity

• Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology is in the first instance simply an extension of Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy of nature to the special case of living substances. That is to say, like other corporeal substances in nature, living corporeal substances are conceived of as composed of form and matter. More precisely, they are conceived of as the actualization of the sort of potentiality for various life-functions that are characteristic of living substances. On Aristotle's view, living substances are the most impressive in nature, mainly because of their simultaneous complexity on the one hand and unity on the other. Because of the uniqueness and preeminence of living things, Aristotle follows custom by using a special Greek word, psuche (Latin: anima; English: soul), for the form of a living substance. But he uses this word in a way which is continuous with his discussion of form in talking about natural substances, both living and non-living, in general. This is important, because it immediately puts his use of the notion of a soul into opposition with the historically important uses of that notion by Plato among his predecessors and by Descartes among his successors. More on this below.
  

• Distinction between two senses of actuality:
  
 
• First actuality (or First Act) = The possession of a power or set of powers
  
 
• Second actuality (or Second Act) = The exercise of a power or set of powers
  
  

• Three (more or less) equivalent accounts of the soul from Aristotle:
  
 
• Soul = The substance qua form (i.e., the substantial form) of a natural body that has life potentially.  ('Body' here is apparently being used here for something non-organic, i.e., some collection of elements as described in physics or inorganic chemistry. Or else the soul is being included in the bodily organism.)
  
 
• Soul = The first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially.  (Same remark about 'body'.)
  
 
• Soul = The first actuality of a natural body that is organized into organs -- i.e., is an organism.  (Here 'body' is being used for an organism.)
  
  

• Salient points (neither dualism nor materialism):
  
 
• The soul is the (substantial)  form of a living thing.  A living body is not a bodily organism without its form (= soul).
  
 
• Each soul has its own proper proximate matter.
  
 
• Of all the souls of living things, only the rational soul is arguably subsistent (i.e., substance-like) and hence immaterial and/or separable.
  
 
• Differences with Plato (and Descartes):
  
 
• The soul is an intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, mover of the body.
   
• The soul is ontologically constitutive of, rather than posterior to, the bodily organism.  That is, the soul is not something that is "added to" what is already a bodily substance.  Rather, the soul is the form or configuration of the matter in virtue of which this bodily substance is a tree, pig, aardvark, etc.
  
  
• Further difference with Descartes:  Plants and animals are ensouled and are not reducible to machines, i.e., not reducible to entities all of whose properties can be fully described in terms of the fundamental forces of physics or of any science below macro-biology. (Descartes himself limited the resulting changes to what Aristotelians call 'local motions', i.e., changes of place.)
  

IB. Kinds of Souls

• Nutritive (Vegetative):
  
 
• Functions:  Nutrition, Reproduction
  
 
• Functions had by:  Plants, Non-rational Animals, Human Beings
  
  

• Sentient:
  
 
• Functions: Sentient Cognition (sensation, memory, imagination), Sentient Appetite (the passions: love, desire, pleasure, hate, aversion, pain or sorrow, hope, fear, audacity, despair, anger), Locomotion
  
 
• Functions had by: Non-rational Animals, Human Beings
  
  

• Rational:
  
 
• Functions: Intellective Cognition (intellect: concepts, propositions, chains of reasoning), Intellective Appetite (will:  intention, consent, choice, joy, etc.).  (Aristotle has the notion of "rational desire," though not a well-developed psychology of will.) Human action, including technology, involves a use of reason in its practical function, but its most sublime function is the acquisition of purely theoretical or speculative knowledge of the sort pursued in the liberal arts and natural sciences.
  
 
• Functions had by:  Human Beings
  
  

What follows is a philosophical framework into which more specialized scientific information can fit and the main principle of which is that cognition must involve the union of the knower and the known, i.e., of the cognitive power and the object of cognition. In general, the human organism has a general inclination toward intellective cognition of its environs, and this begins with sentient cognition of a sort characteristic of higher animals in general.
 

• Sensation (sentient cognition):
  
 
• Sensation involves the alteration of the sense organs by the objects sensed.
  
 
• The objects sensed are external to the senses and act upon them to configure them in characteristic ways..
  
 
• The sensing faculty becomes like the object sensed (sensible species or likeness), and this underlies the alteration (or configuration) of the sense organ counting also as intentional and as having an interior side, i.e., as being a type of cognition, an act of sensing, as well as a physical state of the organ.  Think of the sensible species or likeness of the object O as a certain configuration of the sense organ by virtue of which the animal senses-in-the-O-way through that organ.
  
 
• Sensing just is an operation of a physical or material organ, and this is why each sense is limited to a fixed range and intensity of object.  In addition, sensings are the foundation for imaginings, rememberings, etc.
  
  
• A corresponding account can be given of feelings (or emotions).  Feelings are the interior aspect, as it were, of certain physiological changes wrought by sensings (or imaginings or rememberings, etc.), and they have the objects of those sensings (or imaginings or rememberings, etc.) as their own objects.
   
  

• Intellection (intellective cognition):
  
 
• Intellection is similar to sensation in that the intellect becomes like the object which is understood. Aristotle conceives of sensation and intellection by analogy with the composition of material substances from form and matter, so that the sensory organs and the intellect are conceived of as the matter or potentiality that becomes actualized when we engage in sensing or intellective thinking:
  
 
• Reality: Object constituted by matter configured by form.
  
 
• Sensation: Matter* (sense organ) is configured by form* (sensible likeness corresponding to object)
  
 
• Intellection: Matter** (intellect as passive or receptive) is configured by form** (intelligible likeness corresponding to object). Here the intellect (as active) empowers the phantasm (or complete image of what is sensed) to act on the intellect (as passive) to produce an intelligible likeness. The latter likeness, unlike the sensible likeness, is general or universal in the sense of being equally applicable to all instances of, say, redness or triangularity or anger or substances of a given sort. This accounts for our cognitive advantage over other animals and makes possible all distinctively human thoughts and actions and artifacts (e.g., small businesses, moral education, the interstate highway system, flush toilets, smart (and flip) phones, pro football, rock music, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
  
 
• So intellection, unlike sensation, is not limited to present singular (as opposed to general) objects, e.g., this aardvark vs. aardvarks in general. In fact, the unlimited nature of intellectual cognition is a sign that even though the higher cognitive operations of the rational soul presuppose the operation of the material powers of sensation, memory, and imagination, these higher cognitive operations are not in themselves the operations of material or bodily powers. As Aristotle envisions it, the process of concept formation involves the intellect as an agent configuring itself as a patient by in some sense 'illuminating' the deliverances of the sensory organs. Hence, the state of the various sensory operations, and of the bodily organs that carry them out, profoundly affects intellective cognition and affection.  See General Note below.
  
 
• The intelligible likeness (or species) is that by which the object is understood in a direct act, not that which is understood (as in representationalism, according to which the direct or immediate objects of sensation and intellection are mental objects or "ideas," to use the term employed by Locke and Descartes). This is very important, since the whole structure of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, is built on representationalism.
  
 
• Acts of the intellect: Once the intelligible species is in place, we make use of our cognition to engage in various intellectual acts, most notably, (a) abstraction of natures (product: concepts); (b) composition and division (product: propositions);and (c) discursive reasoning (product:  knowledge, opinion, suspecting, faith etc.)
  
  
• General note:  Despite what you might have heard in science classes or other philosophy classes, Aristotelians are neither stupid nor Cartesians.  They understand that brain injuries or diseases result in impaired cognitive functioning in human beings. In fact, they explicitly assert that (in this life, at least) all cognitive functioning depends on various bodily processes, especially those involving sentience (external senses, imagination, sense-memory, comparative judgments with respect to individuals, etc.). So you do not refute Aristotelianism by discovering (if you ever do) that certain areas of the brain support speech, higher cognition, religious belief, etc. To think otherwise is an ignoratio elenchi, i.e., failure to understand your opponent's position. It's intellectually despicable, but widespread among certain cognitive scientists and their sympathizers. (Fanatical philosophy majors who are really "into it" might want to check out "Good News, Your Soul Hasn't Died Quite Yet".)
  
  

• Comments on Summa Theologiae 1, q. 75, aa. 1-3 and 6-7: Articles 1 and 2 are rather difficult, but rewarding. For we begin to see here St. Thomas's via media between dualism (in both its Platonic and Cartesian versions) and materialism, i.e., the denial of the immateriality (and, ultimately, immortality or incorruptibility) of the human soul.
  
  
• q. 75, a. 1:
  
  
• The important thing to see here, right away, is that an argument for the claim that a soul is not a body is not an argument for the immateriality or incorporeality of souls in the usual sense. The reason is that on an St. Thomas's Aristotelian ontology there are two ways of being incorporeal. One is to be a (substantial) form that constitutes a matter with appropriate potentialities as a body, i.e., bodily substance, of a given natural kind. The other is to be a subsistent immaterial entity that (a) can come into being only through creation ex nihilo and not through generation and that (b) has no intrinsic principles of corruption. In article 1 St. Thomas is arguing only that a soul -- any soul -- is incorporeal in sense (a); in this article, he has nothing to say about (b). The form of the argument he uses here could just as easily be amended to show that, say, the shape of a statue is not a body, since not every body is a statue of that shape.  However, it is of course true that St. Thomas is here focusing on living bodies, and so, since a soul is the form of a living bodily substance, his main aim is just to spell out a few truths about souls in general and at the same time to put into question a couple of dominant, though mistaken, ideas about souls.
  
  
• In arguing for the claim that the soul is the form or act or actuality of a living body, St. Thomas first notes that two of the principal activities associated with living things are movement and cognition. Now movement here should be construed broadly as change in general and not just local movement, i.e., movement in space. The soul is often called "the mover of the body," since it is ultimately responsible as a first principle for various 'vital operations' that characterize living bodily substances, e.g., nutrition, growth, reproduction, self-initiated local motion, along with cognition and affection of various sorts.  But on St. Thomas's view it is important to understand this "moving" relation correctly. He will not accomplish this completely in the present article, but he will make a beginning. The same holds for what he has to say here specifically about cognition. In both cases, his main targets are errors committed by some of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Specifically, the philosophers in question held either that (a) only bodies can be movers of bodies and so a soul, because it moves a body as a principle of vital operations, must be a body, or that (b) cognition of bodies takes place only through a union of likeness or similitude, and so an animal soul or human soul, because it is a principle of the cognition of bodies, must itself be a body (or an array of bodies such as water, air, earth and fire) in order to have the required likeness or similitude to the objects of cognition.
  
  
• The main argument for the claim that the soul is not a body, i.e., a bodily substance, is that if we take for granted (a) the definition of a soul as a first principle of life and (b) the fact that not every bodily substance is alive, then a soul is that in virtue of which a bodily substance is alive. It follows that a soul is the act or form of a living body and not itself a body.
  
  
• As for movement, the soul as a first principle of a living thing is the first principle of all the vital movements in it. So it moves the bodily substance of which it is the form. But it obviously does not have quantitative contact with the body of which it is the form. So if we want to insist that a mover must have contact with what it effects movement in, let's just say that the soul has contact of power with the body.  (We would have to say the same thing in cases where immaterial subsistents (God or angels) effected movement in matter. Later we will get more details about the appetitive powers of the soul and their relationship to change.)
  
  
• As for cognition, the soul does not need to be actually composed of fire, air, earth, and water in order to have cognition of bodily things. It does need to have the capacity or potentiality to "become" in some sense the things it has cognition of. We have already touched on this above.
  
  
• q. 75, a. 2:
  
  
• What was said above does not entail that any soul is itself a subsistent being with operations or activities that are in themselves "not shared with" the body that the soul constitutes as a living thing. That would require a special argument, and St. Thomas thinks that an argument of this sort is available only for the human soul with respect to its intellective operations, viz., intellective understanding of the natures of substances and accidents (and whatever other forms of abstract thought come along with this) and intellective appetite or willing. Notice right away that this separates St. Thomas from both Plato and Descartes, each of whom in his own way attributed sensings and feelings to an incorporeal and subsistent being. He is fully aware of this in the case of Plato, as becomes clear in a. 3: "Now Plato did distinguish intellective understanding from sensation, but he attributed both of them to an incorporeal principle, arguing that just as intellective understanding belongs to the soul in its own right, so too does sensing. And from this it followed that even the souls of brute animals are subsistent." Descartes, by contrast, accepted the view that only subsistent incorporeal beings have sensings and feelings, but then, unlike Plato, simply claimed that brute animals are merely complex machines without any sensings or feelings at all! [Sidenote: Plato thus believes that brute animals survive death. St. Thomas denies this (see a. 3 below), but he does attribute to your dog all the sensings and feelings you think she has. Descartes, by contrast, denies that your dog has sensings and feelings at all. Always remember the refrain, "DESCARTES: NO ANIMAL PAIN!!"]
  
  
• In any case, St. Thomas's brief argument is that if the human soul were not subsistent and hence not incorporeal or immaterial in a stronger sense than that established in a. 1, then it would not be able to have intellective understanding of the natures of all bodies.  The idea is that the very makeup of the soul or of any corporeal instrument would impede an intellective cognition of the natures of material substances, where an intellective cognition is characterized by its independence of the "material conditions" of the here and now.
  
  
• Before we look at the argument more closely, let's remind ourselves -- if we need reminding -- about the vast gulf that separates human cognition from the sort of cognition had by non-rational animals:
  
  
• First of all, there's a difference in generality. That is, I can think and talk about, say, black holes or aardvarks or red oak trees or triangles or deacon aspirants in general, without having any particular individuals in mind.
  
  
• Again, I am able to perceive this thing that I sense not just as a collection of a certain set of colors and shapes and smells and sounds, say, but as an aardvark; in other words, intellective understanding surpasses in insight anything that a non-rational animal can have by way of cognition of material substances. (Empiricists like Hume in effect deny this, but why think they're right about this? We perceive plants and animals and computers, etc., in such a way as to be able to taxonimize them for further study. And notice that Kant would never have ended up where he did if he had not accepted Hume's impoverished views about the nature of human sensation in the first place.)
  
  
• Not only can we grasp the natures of things, we can affirm or deny claims about them and their characteristics, and reason discursively (whether deductively or inductively or abductively) about them.  That's how we get through ordinary life and how we do science to boot.
  
  
• We can do mathematics!  That's pretty amazing all on its own.
  
  
• We can plan ahead. Who else but human beings could get themselves worried to a frazzle about how, say, their kids are going to turn out, or about global warming, etc.
  
  
• We do science, give lectures about how we're not much different from the apes, build universities, engage in commerce, make stuff in factories, commit mass murder for political causes, play baseball, make statues and portraits of important human beings of the past, etc. -- none of which, as far as I know, apes do, even though they seem to have been at it longer than we have.
  
  
• Now let's start thinking about material things or processes that might putatively serve as the medium of intellective thought. They all seem to be such that they have to be endowed with meaning by something outside themselves. This is certainly the case with spoken and written language, as well as with mathematical notation. But doesn't the same thing hold for brain states and processes as well? (It doesn't seem that the same holds for sensory cognition -- whether exterior (seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.) or interior (remembering, imagining) as such.) Take the following example: I add 2 + 8 and come up with 10. My thought is the actualization of a function that I myself can distinguish from closely related functions, even some that will never in the history of the world give different results. Take, for instance, a function that for any two natural numbers, yields exactly the same results as addition for the first 25,000,000,000 years of the universe's existence, but yields x + y + 8 after that. Call this function 'quaddition'. Every mere material representation of any actual instance of genuine adding is at present indistinguishable from a corresponding material representation of an instance of quadding. Yet I can know that when I now take 8 and 2 as arguments and get 10 as an answer that I am adding and not quadding. A material process (say, in an adding machine or in the calculator program on my computer) might simulate addition, but it is also at the same time simulating quaddition. Not me, though. I'm adding and not quadding. Therefore, whatever I am doing is not a material process, even if my doing it depends in part on material processes; therefore, it is non-material or immaterial. Something similar holds for my grasp of a nature, whether it be a material nature such as aardvarkiness or some quantitative nature (say, triangularity) abstracted from all matter except for its purely quantitative properties. For instance, let us coin the term 'quaardvark', which applies to aardvards for the first 25,000,000,000 years of the universe's existence and to armadillos after that. Any material representation of an aardvark that I make use of right now is also a material representation of a quaardvark. Yet, so I say, I now know that I am thinking about an aardvark and not a quaardvark -- even though I sometimes even now confuse aardvarks with armadillos.
   
  
• In the meantime, let me try a defensive tactic here. People enthusiastic about the ability of neuroscience to undermine the claim to immateriality (see Tom Wolfe's essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died") need to tell us in general what their "success" would look like. Suppose they identified certain species or patterns of neuro-processes that correlated with, say, thinking scientifically about aardvarks or triangles. (Perhaps identifying just those correlations with speaking about aardvarks or triangles wouldn't do it, for reasons like those given above.) Would it then be reasonable to identify those processes with thinking about aardvarks (triangles)? Only, it seems, if they wore their meaning on their sleeves. But they don't, or at least it's hard to see how they would.
  
  
• Note the replies to the objections in a. 2:  The soul is a 'this-something' because it is subsistent, but it is not a 'this-something' in the sense of being a subsistent thing that is complete in a species, since it is only a 'part' (albeit the most important part) of a human being, viz., the substantial form. Again, strictly speaking, it is better to say that a man thinks by means of his soul rather than to say that the soul thinks. (Later we will worry about the status of the separated soul.) Finally, we have to distinguish (a) the sort of dependence that the soul has on the body in its intellective operations, viz., it depends on the body for the main objects of its thought, from (b) the sort of dependence it would have if its operations were, like sensings and feelings, the acts of a corporeal organ. It is the latter sort of dependence that St. Thomas denies in the case of intellectual operations.
  
  
• So these first two articles have been aimed at showing that the human soul is (a) the form of a human body, (b) incorporeal, and (c) subsistent with its own proper operations that are independent of matter. It follows that, like other subsistent forms (i.e., angels), it can come into existence only through direct creation ex nihilo, and that, as a simple subsistent form, it cannot be corrupted because of its internal constituion. The only way in which it can cease to exist is through annihilation in nihilum, and this can happen only if God ceases to conserve it in being. (Thus the Church teaches that each human soul is created directly by God (Catechism, #366).)
  
  
• q. 75, a. 3:
  
  
• There is no need to spend much time on the third article, but it does help to make the point that not every form of a living thing, i.e., every soul, is subsistent and immaterial and incorruptible and immortal. In particular, as noted above, St. Thomas agrees with Aristotle in thinking that sentient animals other than human beings are both (a) such that they have rich inner lives (sensation, imagination, memory, passions, etc.) and yet (b) such that they are wholly decomposable without remainder into the four elements and so cease to exist in toto at death. (See above.)
  
  
• q. 75, aa. 6-7:
  
  
• In a. 6 St. Thomas brings out the implications of the soul's subsistence, viz., that it is incorruptible. That is, the soul does not contain within itself a passive potentiality for non-existence, even though, from the outside, God has the active potentiality to withhold esse from it. Note that angels are like this, too: no intrinsic potentiality for non-existence, even though at every moment they depend entirely on God's creative power for their existence. See the next article.
  
  
• In a. 7 St. Thomas makes clear the difference between the subsistence of the pure spirits known as angels and the subsistence of the human soul. For one thing, the angels are complete natures in their own right, whereas a human soul is not, since by nature it is the substantial form of a composite being that includes matter. Second, an angel's intelligence is much greater than a human being's, since angels do not depend on matter in any way for their cognition. All their knowledge of the material world, for instance, is born with them and does not depend on any sort of contact with material substances. All the stuff we go to school to learn, they already know from the beginning of their existence. Remember those math and physics tests?
  
  
• q. 89, a. 1:
  
  
• Even though the mode of understanding of a separated soul is similar to that of angels, in that it is (in part) by means of innate intelligible species that are natural to the soul in its separated state, the depth of our cognition falls short of that of the angels because of the relative weakness of our intellectual power. The angels likewise differ among themselves with respect to intellectual power. So we become like the angels in a certain way between the time of our death and the time of the resurrection of our bodies, but we're still not very smart compared to them -- at least naturally speaking. This applies to all separated human souls. For those who have the beatific vision, this intellectual power is enhanced by the so-called light of glory, just as in this life our intellectual power is enhanced by the light of grace.
  

• The external senses are affected by extramental substances and accidents and are configured by them. So sensations are physiological states of a unique sort that have both an exterior, measurable, side and an interior side, viz., the experience of sensing. Think of a visit to the optometrist. She makes some changes to the object, which in turn alters the physiological state of the optical aparatus and then tells you that the object should now look clearer to you. And, behold, it does! (This sort of scenario troubles a thorough-going materialist, but not normal people.) "This is going to hurt" is common enough when someone is about to make a physiological change in your body. That is, we go back and forth between talking physiological talk and talking sensory-experience talk.
  
  
• The five external senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch)
  
  
• The interior sentient cognitive powers (common sensory power, power of imagining, natural estimative power (or, in human beings, the cogitative power (aka particular reason)), the power of remembering (plus, in human beings, the power of reminiscing).
  
  

IIB. The Sentient Affective Powers of the Human Soul: The Passions of the Soul

• Again, the passions or emotions that we feel are the interior side, as it were, of certain physiological changes that are affected both by outside influences and by our own interior cognitions. In human beings they become more complicated for a number of reasons: (a) the possibility of habituation; (b) the possibility of being instigated by higher intellective cognition; (c) the possibility of either enhancing or interfering with higher intellective cognitive acts.
  
  
• The eleven basic passions (or emotions or feelings) of the soul -- others being variations on these:
  
  
• Concupiscible passions: love, desire, pleasure (or enjoyment or joy); hate, aversion, pain (or sorrow or sadness)
  
  
• Irascible passions (these kick in when the desired good is difficult to attain or the averse evil is difficult to avoid): fear, audacity, hope, despair, anger
  
  
• It is important here to distinguish the passions from associated deliberate acts. For instance, I can feel envious of someone (e.g., sad because of some good he or she possesses) without thereby sinning, i.e., without thereby consenting to a deliberate act that is propmpted by that feeling. Still, it would be better to be the sort of person who does not feel envy in the first place. On the other hand, it would not be good to be the sort of person who does not feel any indignation (sadness at a perceived injustice against oneself or another) at all in the face of a grave injustice. As we will see, a big part of moral education is teaching children which sorts of feelings, and which degrees thereof, are appropriate or inappropriate in given situations.
  
  
• Even though angels have no bodies and thus no feelings properly speaking, there are various acts of will that mirror the passions, e.g., joy, peace, intellective desire, sorrow of various sorts.
  
  
• Such intellective affections likewise play an important role in human action, since such intellective acts are also available to us and important in our lives. For instance, it is often good for an intellective affection (e.g., supernatural love of God and neighbor) to override a strongly felt passion (e.g., anger at one of the kiddos). By the same token, it would be bad to allow a bad intellective affection such as envy or hatred to override a strongly felt and appropriate affection (e.g., sorrow over the suffering of another).
  
  

• Formation of concepts and propositions and chains of reasoning:
  
  
• Concept Formation (sometimes called, a bit misleadingly, abstraction): The so-called active intellect gives the phantasm the power to produce an immaterial intelligible species as a form of the so-called possible or potential intellect. This provides the person with universal concepts that are not tied down to this individual here and now. This includes natural kind concepts as well as concepts of accidents. These concepts are then honed down with experience, scientific inquiry, plausible theories, into more exact characterizations of the various natural and artificial kinds.
  
  
• Proposition Formation: The concepts thus formed are combined, through the processes of composition and division, to form affirmative and negative propositions that are true or false. (Also, proposition formation includes the use of other grammatical 'modes' such as the imperative, the hortatory, etc.
  
  
• Discursive Reasoning: The arrangement of propositions to produce conclusions that become evident when reasoned to validly from initially more evident principles and premises.
  

• Acts with respect to propositions:
  

• Understanding of first principles (intelligentia in the case of theoretical reason and synderisis in the case of practical reason)
  
  
• Reasoning (ratio) -- this is called discursive reasoning in the case of theoretical reason and deliberating in the case of practical reason
  
  
• Judging (iudicium) -- in the case of theoretical reason, assessments of truth and falsity; in the case of practical reason, decision to consent to and/or choose a given action.
  
  
• Knowing (scientia) -- assent to true conclusion of a valid theoretical line of reasoning.
  
  
• Hesitation (dubitatio) -- an absence of judgment because of a lack of evidence or counterbalance of positive and negative evidence.
  
  
• Suspicion (suspicio) -- an inclination toward one side on the basis of favorable, but less than compelling, evidence.
  
  
• Probable Opinion (opinio) -- judgment, i.e., assent, freely made in favor of one side on the basis of favorable, but less than compelling, evidence.
  
  
• Faith (fides) -- judgment, i.e., assent, freely made in favor of one side not on the basis of evidence, but out of trust in a source or sources deemed trustworthy, and for the sake of some goal that the agent is pursuing.
  
  

• Theoretical reason and practical reason are not two separate powers, but two uses of one and the same power. Both are concerned with truth, but in different ways. Theoretical reason has truth as its main goal, whereas practical reason aims to discern the truth and make use of it in producing acts or things that contribute to the good of the individual and the good of the community. The two must work together in a flourishing human life. For instance, in order to act consistently in ways that contribute to my flourishing, I will have a better chance to succeed only if I have a broadly correct theoretical understanding of the world, of God, and of who and what I am as a human being. Given this vision, I try to fashion a plan of life that will lead me to what theoretical reason has determined to be the best sort of life, given who I am and what the world is like. The notion that I can just autonomously decide by my own will what the theoretical truth is and, in effect, what reality is seems to be a sure road to self-destruction rather than to flourishing.
  
  
• As we will see in more detail in the next section of the course, in any given instance practical reason operates in a way that takes more remote ends as a given and thinks out ways in which to best realize those ends. (In each case, of course, one might in the end bring these more remote ends into question in light of still more remote ends.) This process involves entertaining an end as at least a wish (voluntas), adopting it as something to be pursued (intentio), formulating plans, i.e. chains of reasoning, (deliberatio) that one then judges to be acceptable (consensus) or choiceworthy (electio). Finally, by commanding (imperare), one executes the action at the appropriate time. More on this when we discuss the virtue of prudence.
  

• Dualism: The position according to which a human being consists of two independently constituted substances, a body and a soul, the latter of which is identified with the genuine person. There are two main types of dualism in the history of philosophy:
  
  
• Platonic dualism:  A complete human being is several living substances, with a corporeal form, a vegetative soul, a sentient soul, and a rational soul (aka the person). Strictly speaking, the "I" is distinct from the substance that eats and digests food, that reproduces, that walks around, that weighs such-and-such a number of pounds, etc. According to St. Thomas, Plato claimed that the sentient soul is immaterial because higher animals have a rich interior life, complete with sensations, images, passions, etc. So on this view a separated soul would really be two closely linked souls, one with sentience and the other with rationality and higher thought.
  
  
• Cartesian dualism: Descartes has a much simpler conception of matter. (In fact, in its essentials it is the same conception of matter had by most contemporary philosophers. That is why sensation and sentient affection, especially, pose a real problem for them.) A complete human being is composed of just two substances, (a) a corporeal substance (the body) that is an aggregation of mindless corpuscles and (b) an immaterial substance (the soul), which has a rich interior life consisting of what Thomistic-Aristotelians call sentient and intellective acts, both cognitive and affective. By contrast, other 'animals' are just aggregations of corpuscles that have no interior life at all!! (Repeat once again: "DESCARTES: NO ANIMAL PAIN!!")
  
  
• Materialism: Materialism is the position according to which human beings are material substances with no formal constituent that is immaterial. Some materialists attempt to accommodate a special sort of property that is 'psychological' and not 'physical'. But most materialists advocate either the reducibility of the 'mental' to the 'physical' or the sheer falsity of our ordinary conception of ourselves. Here are three varieties of materialism:
  
  
• Property Dualism: Mental states, events, and properties are correlated "in the right way" with neurological states, events, and processes, but they are not identical with their neurological counterparts. To hard-nosed materialists, this theory seems suspicious. In particular, what exactly is the relation between mental properties and their neurological counterparts, and how is it that mental events cause physical events, as they clearly do?
  
  
• Functionalism: On this view, mental states are no more than the functions played by various neurological states. So, for instance, in the case of a sensation of the color red, a certain neurophysiological state plays a role (e.g, inducing someone to stop at a red light) that we normally attribute to seeing red. But, notice, this explanation does not make any reference to our interior experience of seeing red. So our interior experiences are window dressing, as it were, whatever else they might be, since they are bypassed, as it were, in the 'scientific', i.e., neurological, explanation of why I stop the car when I see a red light. It's just neurophysiology all the way down that does the explanatory work. Cool, eh? But, more importantly, weird, eh? Unfortunately, there is a fairly devastating objection to this theory, besides the fact that it pretty much destroys our conception of ourselves and others.
  
  
• Eliminative materialism: Enter the last and boldest theory that we will consider. It actually aims to destroy our conception of ourselves and others, since it considers this conception to be, in effect, a false scientific theory that should be replaced in the future by some complete neurophysiological theory. Ideally, we will then train ourselves to use neurophysiological language to replace our ordinary language about ourselves, our mental processes, and our actions and interactions. Perhaps "I love you" will be replaced by something like "C-fibers and D-fibers are simultaneously firing at (place, time)," spoken by me, so to speak, when I, so to speak, am standing close to you, so to speak. (For, presumably, this scientific language will have no use for personal pronouns like 'I', 'me', and 'you', etc.) From here you can use your imagination and speculate about what the Bible or Shakespeare will sound like in neurophysiological-ese.
  
  

• Special creation of the human soul ex nihilo: Given the doctrine of the immateriality of the human soul, it follows that the human soul can come into existence as the form of a human being only by being directly created ex nihilo by God. Hence, the existence of each single human being requires a special act of creation on God's part. This is a very comforting part of Catholic doctrine, since it implies that God specifically wills the existence of every human being who comes into existence -- even you ... and me!
  
  
• Monogenism: This is the doctrine according to which all human beings descend from a common set of parents. This doctrine is intimately linked to the doctrine of Original Sin and its transmission, as well as to the doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption. For the Son of God shares the nature common to all of us and reconciles human nature to the Father. In recent years there have been some interesting attempts to defend monogenism. My favorite one is contained in an article by my former student Kenneth Kemp, in case you are interested in pursuing the matter at more length.
  

• The special creation of the human soul, along with its rational powers, including free choice, is cited by the Catechism as the foundation for the special dignity had by human beings among all material creatures. In one way of looking at things, this dignity serves as a foundation for the idea that as a human being one has, in various situations, a 'due' that needs to be rendered to one. This will figure prominently in the discussion of the virtue of justice in the next part of the course.