St Thomas Aquinas

Plato held that the body and the soul were separate and of a very different constitution, while Aristotle saw the soul as form of the body, a view accepted by St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was a Christian thinker and accepted the immortality of the soul, but he had to answer the question of whether this made sense given that the closeness of the union of body and soul might mean that the possible subsistence of the soul apart from the body could be ruled out. For Thomas, the soul informed the body but was not exhausted by the process. The soul, he argues, must be a spiritual and subsistent form because it is capable of knowing the nature of all bodies. It cannot be itself the body or it could not reflect on itself. The human soul, says Thomas, must be immaterial, incorruptible, and naturally immortal. Another argument offered

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ng having if itself its own necessity," and which can impart being to all other things, and "this all men speak of as God" (Pegis 23). When Aquinas speaks of God as a necessary being, he is not saying that God's existence is a logical necessity. He rather uses contingency to mean transiency and necessity to mean eternal immutability and the impossibility of not existing, characteristics he repeatedly attributes to God (Wierenga 4). Thus, God, for Aquinas, is a factually or ontologically rather than logically necessary being since His necessity derives from the circumstances of his existence rather than an ex post factor analysis. This definition harks back to Aristotle's definition of necessity as that which cannot be otherwise (Kenney 48). Thomistic philosophy is basically Aristotelian in methodology and point of view. It is empirical and realist. Thomas preferred an order of study that presupposed the liberal arts and mathematics, and he began with Aristotelian logic, principally On Interpretation and the Posterior Analytics; moved through natural philosophy involving all the natural sciences, including psychology; treated moral philosophy, including political science; and concluded with metaphysics, or first philosophy,
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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