Neuroscience and the Human Soul | Prof. Marie George

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2020

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, on February 29, 2020.

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Marie George has been a member of the Philosophy Department at St. John's University since 1988. Professor George is an Aristotelian-Thomist whose interests lie primarily in the areas of philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. She has received several awards from the John Templeton foundation for her work in science and religion, and in 2007 she received a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) for an interdisciplinary project entitled: “The Evolution of Sympathy and Morality.” Professor George has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books: Christianity and Extraterrestrials? A Catholic Perspective(2005) and Stewardship of Creation (2009). She is currently working on Aquinas’s “Fifth Way,” and also on a variety of questions concerning living things (self-motion, consciousness, evolution, etc). Professor George is a member of ten philosophical societies, including the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and the Society for Aristotelian Studies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you, Father Aquinas. This is really a privilege for me to finally come to the Dominican House of Studies.
0:06.3	I'm a lay Dominican, but I've actually never been here, so I'm very happy to be with you.
0:11.8	All right, so the title of my paper is Neuroscience and the Human Soul.
0:16.3	And you doubtlessly know what neuroscience is, namely that it's the part of biology that studies the nervous system.
0:21.6	The branches of neuroscience that are concerned with understanding the brain and its relationship to cognition and emotion
0:28.6	are the ones that have the most direct bearing on the question of whether humans have souls.
0:33.6	As for understanding what the human soul is, the domestic tradition maintains that one must first talk about what the soul in general is, and then what is distinctive about the human soul, namely that it's the cause of the life activities of thinking abstractly and freely choosing.
0:50.5	Many of those that think that the findings of neuroscience challenge the notion that humans
0:55.4	have souls do not make these distinctions. For example, they often conflate soul and mind.
1:02.6	Since what these people propose in many cases has more immediate bearing on the faculties of the human
1:08.2	soul, intellect, and free will than on the soul itself, I will begin by looking at these faculties of the human soul, intellect, and free will, then on the soul itself,
1:12.5	I will begin by looking at these faculties, and later we'll talk about the soul. When it comes
1:18.5	to the intellect, some claim that neuroscience shows that our thoughts have physical causes,
1:23.7	and so they maintain that scientists are able to read people's minds by identifying the physical causes in question.
1:30.9	When it comes to free will, certain experiments done by neuroscientists appear to show that our free choices are determined by our brains and that free will is an illusion.
1:41.9	I will elaborate further on these claims, but I'm going to begin by explaining
1:46.1	why the to mystic tradition maintains that the intellect is immaterial, from which it follows
1:51.8	that neuroscience can say nothing about the intellect as such. There's any number of different
1:58.9	meanings of the word intelligence, an animal that can learn is in some sense intelligent.
2:04.6	But the word intellect generally names a very specific form of intelligence,
2:08.6	one that is different from the sensory knowledge that makes animals capable of learning.
2:14.6	How exactly does intellectual knowledge differ from Sun's knowledge?
	...

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