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.

My aim in this talk is to defend the ancient thesis that human beings have immortal souls.

The traditional philosophical basis for this claim, going back to Playa, lies in the further

thesis that the human intellect is incorporeal or immaterial,

so that this highest component of human beings can survive the death of the body.

In fact, most of the philosophical argumentation for the claim that the soul is immortal

is really about the immateriality of the mind, the idea that the mind's not a material thing,

not a physical thing.

So in this talk, I'll present what I take to be the most important The idea that the mind is not a material thing, not a physical thing. So in this talk,

I'll present what I take to be the most important argument, not the only argument, but the most important argument in my view, for the thesis of the mind is not material. At the end, I'll return

to the question of how this is relevant to the immortality of the soul. In order to set the stage

for the argument, it will be useful first to say a little bit about what I mean by mind and about what I mean by material.

Contemporary analytic philosophers commonly distinguish between three aspects of the mind which might appear to be inexplicable in materialist terms.

Needless to say, not all philosophers think that any of these features really is at the end of the day inexplicable in materialist terms. Needless to say, not all philosophers think that any of these features

really is at the end of the day inexplicable in materialist terms. The point is just that it is

widely thought that if any mental phenomena pose a problem for materialism, it will be one or

more of these three. The three aspects are rationality, consciousness, and intentionality.

Let me briefly characterize each of them.

Rationality is our capacity to form abstract concepts to put them together into complete thoughts or

...