Philosophy

I had a thought, that it might be amusing to let my small audience of readers get a taste of what I'm studying right now - philosophy of human nature.  So here, without any explanation of terms, are a few of the basic topics that will comprise my final tomorrow!

How does man come to know?

-agent intellect abstracts from phantasm

-abstraction produces intelligible species

-possible intellect receives intelligible species

-“once the possible intellect receives the intelligible species it is said to be the subject of knowledge, i.e., what performs the act of knowledge”

-“the act of knowledge is an action of forming a concept”

-“the possible intellect ‘speaks a word to itself’; the concept is this interior word”

The proper object of the human intellect is a corporeal nature existing in an individual.

The human soul is immaterial/incorporeal.

1. The human intellect can know any body


2. Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature, because that which is in it naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else in that genus


3. Therefore the intellectual principle, i.e. the human soul, cannot have a material nature


4. Thus the intellectual soul is neither a body nor simply the act of a body, since what is simply the act of a body has a material nature

The human soul is subsistent.

1. A thing operates as it is (action follows upon being)


2. Thus only what exists through itself can operate through itself


3. The human soul operates through itself in intellection


4. Therefore the human soul exists through itself which is to subsist

Is the soul man?

1. What performs the actions of a man is a man


2. The body and the soul perform the actions of a man


3. Therefore the body and soul together is a man

-the soul separated from the body is not complete in nature

-man the composite subsists because his soul subsists

-there is just one existence but it belongs first in the order of being to the soul

-not a temporal firstness

-the non-rational soul does not subsist because all of its actions are actions of the body

-subsistence belongs to the composite, not to the soul

Yes, Mommy and Daddy, I am learning things!  Isn't this fun?  Don't you think a liberal arts education is easy?