HoP 244 - Everybody Needs Some Body - Aquinas on Soul and Knowledge

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter Adamson

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Society & Culture:philosophy

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2016

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thomas Aquinas makes controversial claims concerning the unity of the soul and the empirical basis of human knowledge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Fennie pray a cost in the news
0:05.0	and there's to all of physical
0:08.0	and bless you all of physical.
0:10.0	He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College
0:24.7	London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www history of philosophy.net.
0:31.9	Today's episode, Everybody Need Some Body, Aquinas on Soul and Knowledge.
0:40.0	I haven't actually checked and I'm not sure how to go about doing so, but I would be willing to bet that there is as much scholarship devoted to Thomas Aquinas as to the rest of medieval philosophy put together.
0:51.0	He's also the only medieval philosopher you're likely to study in a typical undergraduate philosophy degree.
0:57.0	So I was rather surprised at what happened when I sought advice from several colleagues as to what I should cover in these
1:03.5	podcasts on medieval philosophy. I had a sketchy plan already which included quite a
1:08.8	few episodes devoted to various aspects of Aquinas's thought, much as I've done in the past with figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine.
1:17.0	My expert advisors told me that this was unnecessary and even misleading.
1:22.0	The most exciting scholarship is nowadays being was unnecessary and even misleading.
1:22.8	The most exciting scholarship is nowadays being devoted to other thinkers like Skotis and John Burreden.
1:28.8	And it would be a distortion to give so much attention to Aquinas, who was in many ways unrepresentative of medieval philosophy in general
1:36.0	and the late 13th century in particular.
1:39.5	In this podcast series we've come across many important thinkers who are not famous.
1:44.0	With Aquinas, have we now reached a famous thinker who is not important?
1:48.0	Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what the meaning of the word important is.
1:55.6	In the modern day, Aquinas has unparalleled significance for the Catholic Church.
2:00.3	His centrality was recognized in an encyclical in 1879 and reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in 1998.
2:08.0	And philosophers, Catholic and not, have recognized him as a thinker with innovative and fruitful teachings on the relationship between reason and religion,
	...

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