What is a Soul? | Prof. Marie George

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given at Cornell University on September 14, 2022. For more information on upcoming events, visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Marie George has been a member of the St. John’s University Philosophy Department 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.0	For more talks like this, visit us at Tamistic Institute.org.
0:11.0	It's always been a passion of mine. In fact, it's really what decided me to become a philosopher.
0:16.0	In order to talk about the soul, the first thing we have to talk about, though, is life, what it means to live.
0:23.6	It's not like coincidence that the ancient Greek word for soul, psyche, and the Latin word for soul, anima, both first meant breath.
0:35.6	So if you want to check to see if a person who's been hit by a car is alive, we check to see if they're breathing, right?
0:41.3	So, but there are other signs that things are alive. So how do you know your dog's alive? Well, you know your dog's alive because it's eating out of its dish, it's barking, it's waving its tail, and so forth, right?
0:52.3	How do you know your plants alive? Well, your plants putting out new leaves, it's growing, it's waving its tail and so forth, right? How do you know your plants alive? Well, your plant's putting
0:56.2	out new leaves, it's growing, it's getting bigger, might put out some flowers, something like this.
1:02.3	So we might ask then more generally what it means to live. And I think that you can define a living
1:07.8	thing as a being that has the capacity for a self-motion. being that has the capacity for self-motion.
1:11.4	The reason I say capacity for self-motion and not just self-motion is that there's some things
1:16.9	that are alive that aren't doing anything. So think about frozen embryos. They're not carrying
1:23.5	on any type of life activity, but we know that some of them are alive because if you implant them in a woman,
1:29.3	they'll start to develop and grow and so forth. If you leave them in the deep freeze, too long that isn't going to happen.
1:35.3	So when I talk about motion, you shouldn't have just a narrow idea of motion, like moving this pencil from here to here.
1:43.3	Okay, but motion
1:44.8	take it in a very broad sense so any kind of activities is in the broad sense
1:50.3	of motion so like seeing is emotion nutrition is emotion and so forth all right
1:57.6	now how do we then first realize that there's such a thing as the soul?
2:02.6	Well, there are two ways of knowing there's such a thing as a soul.
2:06.6	So one is through your own internal experience of yourself.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.