So today what I wanted to talk about is a question that often doesn't get raised in connection with thinking about immaterial beings.

So we do a lot of philosophical thinking about whether there is such a thing as an immaterial entity, God or the human soul or an angel.

There's also plenty of arguing about whether minds or consciousness

are immaterial or whether they're reducible to physical structures. But for all of that

investigation of whether specific entities are immaterial or non-physical, there's not a lot of thinking

about what exactly the concept of immateriality itself-physical, there's not a lot of thinking about what exactly the concept of

immateriality itself amounts to, and therefore what it would even mean in the first place to

claim that something is immaterial. So what I want to do in this talk is step back from the

usual question, is some X immaterial, and ask instead the question, what is immateriality?

And what are our unstated expectations for what it would even mean to answer such a question?

So I'm going to focus, of course, on Thomas Aquinas.

And in the first section, I'm going to give what I think is a common assumption about immaterial being,

common associations that people have popularly and even in the philosophical literature,

and I'm going to call that the spooky body concept of immateriality.

That's going to be section one.

And then in the second section of the paper, I'm going to talk about what I think is a

competing view of immateriality that we can find in Thomas Aquinas, which I'm going to call

the self-manifesting view of immaterial being. And this is related to a book project that I'm

working on right now on Aquinas and his Greek and Arabic sources.

So in this paper, it is not my goal to convince you that anything immaterial exists, but simply to set up some different concepts of immateriality and show that in Aquinas, we have

something that's actually an interesting alternative to common assumptions about what

immateriality is.

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