Friday, August 29, 2008

Feel free to comment on this...

Is Aquinan scholarship dualist or strangely materialist? Alvin Plantinga, now 30 years famous at Notre Dame University, asks the question,

...there is also the important but obscure view of Thomas Aquinas and his followers. Is this a form of dualism? The question is vexed. According to Aquinas, a human person is a material substance with an immaterial part, the soul. Aquinas says, of this immaterial part, that it itself is a substance. Furthermore the soul, this immaterial part, has the property of possibly thinking (believing, desiring, hoping, deciding, etc.), and after death, does think. But Aquinas also says that the soul is the form of the body. A form, however, at least as far as I can see is or is like a property; and a property, presumably, can't think. If the soul is a form, therefore, how can it be capable of thinking?


~Alvin Plantinga's article Materialism and Christianity in Persons: Human and Divine, 2007

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