Aquinas on the Materiality of the Human Soul and the Immateriality of the Human Intellect

Contemporary philosophers tend to become interested in Aquinas’s conception of the mind when they perceive it as possibly offering a promising alternative between “the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of dualism”. They tend to become disillusioned, however, when they run into the problem of the apparent inconsistency in Aquinas’s conception. Furthermore, if they manage somehow to get over that apparent inconsistency, they find the support for the necessity of Aquinas’s view rather weak. In this paper I will address both of these problems. I will first argue that with the proper understanding, Aquinas’s conception of the human soul and intellect does offer a consistent alternative to the dilemma of sheer materialism and post-Cartesian dualism. Furthermore, I will also argue that in their own theoretical context, Aquinas’ arguments for the materiality of the human soul and immateriality of the intellect provide a strong justification of his position. However, that theoretical context is rather “alien” to anything we are familiar with in contemporary philosophy. The conclusion of the paper will point in the direction of what can and needs to be done to render Aquinas’s position more palatable to contemporary philosophers.