Souls and the Beginning of Life (A Reply to Haldane and Lee)

Philosophy

Volumn 78, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 521-531

  Pasnau, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84940720156     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819103000470     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa theologiae 1a 75–89 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 4.
2. ‘Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion, and the Value of Life,’ Philosophy 78 (2003) 253–276.
3. For an important recent work in this vein, see David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. See, e.g., Aquinas, Sentencia de anima II.2.107-12, where he remarks that ‘an object is said to be something potentially in two ways: in one way when it does not possess the principle of its operation; in a second way when it does possess that principle but is not functioning in accord with it. But a body whose actuality is soul has life in potentiality in the second way, not the first.’
5. Such a view is not unprecedented in the history of philosophy. Descartes, in fact, takes the more extreme view that the mind continuously thinks from the very first moment it is infused into the body (see, e.g., AT III, 423–424). Aquinas, in contrast, needs only an occasional sputtering of mental life to justify the soulʼns infusion.