What Happens After Death | Prof. Jeffrey Brower

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Jeffrey Brower defends Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human nature, arguing that the soul, as the body’s substantial form, ensures metaphysical unity while allowing for postmortem survival, offering a coherent alternative to materialism and substance dualism

This lecture was given on February 25th, 2025, at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Jeffrey E. Brower is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he serves as the faculty advisor for the Thomistic Institute. He specializes in medieval philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophical theology and especially enjoys working at the intersection of all three areas. He is the author of Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford University Press, 2014) and a contributor to The Oxford Handbook on Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2012). His recent articles include “Aquinas on the Individuation of Substances,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy (2017) and “Aquinas on the Problem of Universals,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016).

This project/publication was made possible through the support of Grant 63391 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

Keywords: Aquinas’s Hylomorphism, Body-Soul Unity, Cartesian Dualism, Immaterial Soul, Interim State, Materialism, Metaphysical Unity, Postmortem Survival, Substantial Form, Thomistic Anthropology

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.6	As you may know, Aquinas is one of the most important and original thinkers of the Middle Ages.
0:29.6	His contributions to virtually every area of medieval philosophy and theology,
0:34.6	and in particular, his success at bringing the philosophy of Aristotle into
0:39.4	harmony with Christian theology made him enormously influential during his own lifetime
0:44.6	and helped to shape the development of much medieval thought after him.
0:50.6	One of the things I'll be trying to convince you of today is that we have a lot to learn from Aquinas about human nature and death,
0:57.0	even though, or maybe even because what he has to say on this topic is so bound up with the details of his specifically Christian theology.
1:05.0	Now, in order to clarify my talk, as well as to bring out its practical significance, it will be helpful
1:12.8	to get before our minds certain obvious truths or truisms. Here's the first. As human beings,
1:20.2	we possess bodies. Indeed, as humans, we possess bodies of a distinctive type, namely
1:26.5	living bodies or organisms, where these are bodies composed of such parts as humans, we possess bodies of a distinctive type, namely living bodies or organisms,
1:29.1	where these are bodies composed of such parts as hands, heads, arms, legs, atoms, molecules,
1:35.0	cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems.
1:40.6	As human beings, we also possess minds or souls. This too is an obvious truth. At least if we take minds or souls broadly enough to include whatever it is that makes us alive and endows us with the capacity for rational thought and volition. The third truism is that as human beings, we are mortal, and hence will someday die.
2:03.0	Immaterial persons, if there are any, such as God and the angels, are traditionally said to be immortal,
2:08.9	and hence incapable of death. In this respect, we differ from all such persons. We're not only capable of
2:16.1	dying, but naturally disposed to die. That's the point of saying, we're mortal.
2:20.3	And just so you know, I'll be following the tradition here in thinking of death intuitively as the separation of the mind or soul from the body.
	...

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