Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

As March announced the title of the talk is, do trees have souls?

I think the subtitle is Aquinas on Nature's.

An alternative subtitle would be something like an introduction to Aristotelian biology.

In Richard Powers' 2018 novel The Overstory, one of the characters is a botanist who studies forestry.

The seeds of the fictional Dr. Westerford's career are planted in her childhood by her father, an agriculture extension agent,

who takes her on trips to visit farms. He especially teaches her to observe trees. They're different

types, their behavior, and their role in ecological systems. At one point, he says to her,

we know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how

they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We've learned a little about a few of them

in isolation, but nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.

What trees are and how they do what they do are among the most natural questions for human

beings to ask. They are scientific questions to draw on observation as well as philosophical

questions. And they are philosophical in the obvious academic sense

of inquiring into the nature of knowledge and reality

and into the categories we will use to make sense of the world.

But they are philosophical also in the more general sense

that for practical, emotional, and even existential reasons,

understanding trees seems to get at the heart of understanding who we are at our place in the universe.

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