HUMAN BEING AS ‘COMPOUND’: AQUINAS VERSUS DESCARTES ON HUMAN NATURE

• Authors: Cottingham John
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The intuitively right answer to the question ‘What am I?’ is not ‘an incorporeal spirit’, but ‘a human being’. Aquinas reflects this common-sense view when he says that ‘the human is no mere soul, but a compound of soul and body.’ And Descartes, despite his notorious dualistic thesis that I am a substance that does not need anything material in order to exist, insists nevertheless that the human mind-body compound is a genuine unity in its own right, not a mere soul making using of a body. This paper argues for the enduring philosophical importance of this notion of our ‘compound’ nature as human beings, and explores its significance across three principal dimensions – the psychological, the phenomenological, and the moral.

Keywords

EN

SOUL; BODY; HUMAN BEING; AQUINAS; DESCARTES

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filozofia (Philosophy)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 79
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 955 – 969

Contributors

author

Cottingham John

• Department of Philosophy, University of Reading, Whiteknights Reading RG6 6AA, United Kingdom

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5205-0323

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/filozofia.2024.79.9.1