What is Immateriality? | Prof. Therese Cory

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on 12 September 2019 at Cornell University.

Therese Scarpelli Cory is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his Arabic sources. She loves discussing philosophy with her students, and is especially interested in problems relating to the human person, the mind / soul, and how to live well.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So this talk is on the problem of immateriality and the concept of materiality that we use.
0:08.0	Philosophers spent a lot of time talking about whether there are immaterial things and whether the mind is immaterial.
0:16.0	This is one of the big problems in philosophy of mind or whether consciousness is immaterial.
0:21.6	And I think one of the problems with the discussion and the way it's developed is that we haven't actually spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly we mean by immateriality.
0:31.6	So the talk is not really going to be about making a case for whether the mind is immaterial or material.
0:39.3	It's not going to be really entering into that debate, but it's going to be focusing on the
0:45.3	question of what exactly we are asking about when we ask the question, is the mind immaterial?
0:53.3	What do we think immateriality is?
0:55.0	And what are the implications for claiming that something is immaterial?
0:59.0	So we're going to be looking at the hidden assumptions behind the more familiar debates rather
1:05.0	than getting into the debate itself.
1:08.0	So in the first section of the talk, I'm going to be talking about what I think is the
1:13.0	unconscious kind of concept of immateriality that motivates our debates. I'm going to call
1:18.4	it the spooky body view of immateriality. I think that's the view that people have in mind
1:25.0	when they're asking the question of whether things are immaterial,
1:28.2	and this view has had considerable philosophical influence.
1:32.0	It really deserves to be investigated.
1:34.8	In the second section, I'm going to sketch an alternative view, which I take to be
1:39.2	maybe have its own problems in a very different way, but I think is not problematic in the specific ways that the
1:47.0	spooky body view of immateriality is problematic. And that view is going to be represented by the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas,
1:56.0	after whom the Thomistic Institute is named. And so this paper, it's not going to be my goal to convince you that mine is immaterial,
2:04.0	but merely to show how impoverished the concept of immateriality is that we just instinctively bring to the table,
	...

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