Immortality and Immateriality – Prof. Thomas Osborne

The Thomistic Institute

Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Thomas Osborne clarifies how, for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the distinctive immateriality of human intellectual knowledge grounds a philosophical case for the soul’s immortality, going beyond today’s narrower “problem of consciousness.”

This lecture was given on October 16th, 2025, at University of Connecticut.

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About the Speakers:

Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D, Duke University, 2001) is the Frank A. Rudman Endowed Chair in Philosophy and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. He has published widely on Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, and medieval and late scholastic philosophy. His interests cover moral psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics. His latest book is Thomas Aquinas on Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Keywords: Aristotle's De Anima, Immaterial Intellect, Immortality of the Soul, Intentional Presence, Philosophy of Mind, Soul, Subsistent Form, Universals and Knowledge

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic 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 Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	to mystic institute.org. So it will be on immortality and immateriality.
0:28.6	Today's talk. It's important to think about and distinguish between the two.
0:41.9	If you take philosophy courses now often,
0:44.8	you'll come up against the problem of consciousness.
0:48.9	The problem of consciousness is something like scientific facts, third person, objective,
0:56.7	whereas consciousness is subjective and first person,
1:00.9	and how on earth could you explain consciousness in terms of science,
1:08.6	or at least contemporary science?
1:13.7	So that's a problem in the philosophy of mind,
1:20.5	the contemporary problem. Thomas Aquinas and people before him didn't quite deal with the problem that way. I think they dealt with it in a more interesting way. They talked about
1:27.4	different kinds of immateriality,
1:30.3	and consciousness to them was interesting, but it wasn't necessarily connected to anything
1:38.3	immaterial. And so what you have with Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and many others before him, he's part of a long tradition, is this concern with different levels, right? Kind of the levels of inanimate things or plants, which don't know anything at all, different levels of inanimate things or plants which don't know anything at all different levels of
2:04.1	animals with different kinds of sense knowledge and then human beings and what's distinctive
2:10.9	about humans and human knowledge it's not immaterial the way an angel's knowledge would be. Angel's not having bodies,
2:20.3	but it's also not quite the same as a dog's knowledge or horses. And so that's what we're going to think about today.
2:30.3	People are interested in the immortality of the soul, they're interested in materiality,
2:35.0	but I just wanted to give a general structure, a framework in which to think about it.
2:42.0	Right. So first I'll just make some remarks about what we mean about immortality and immateriality.
2:49.0	And then we'll go through the different levels of sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge.
2:56.4	And then at last we'll look at some kind of arguments or suggestive arguments
	...

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