{"title":"Why Aquinas's Metaphysics of Gender Is Fundamentally Correct: A Response to John Finley.","authors":"William Newton","doi":"10.1177/0024363919884795","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In an important article, John Finley suggests a correction to Aquinas's understanding of gender distinction. Disagreeing with Aquinas, Finley proposes that gender distinction (male and female) stems from the soul rather than from the body. In this essay, I will show that this is not a tenable position because it does not fit with either what we know about the physical development of sex differences or the unity of man and woman as a single human species. I will defend Aquinas's fundamental insights into the root of gender distinction without defending his biological understanding of the process itself. I will argue that there is a single generic generative power in the soul that is determined by the matter to which the soul is united, to be expressed as either male or female. This paradigm, I believe, copes better than the one offered by Finley with phenomena such as intersexed persons and sex reassignment surgery. While I do not accept the idea of a feminine or masculine soul, the paradigm offered here does lead to the notion of the soul being feminized or masculinized on account of the matter that it informs.</p>","PeriodicalId":505854,"journal":{"name":"The Linacre Quarterly","volume":"87 2","pages":"198-205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0024363919884795","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Linacre Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0024363919884795","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2019/11/25 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
In an important article, John Finley suggests a correction to Aquinas's understanding of gender distinction. Disagreeing with Aquinas, Finley proposes that gender distinction (male and female) stems from the soul rather than from the body. In this essay, I will show that this is not a tenable position because it does not fit with either what we know about the physical development of sex differences or the unity of man and woman as a single human species. I will defend Aquinas's fundamental insights into the root of gender distinction without defending his biological understanding of the process itself. I will argue that there is a single generic generative power in the soul that is determined by the matter to which the soul is united, to be expressed as either male or female. This paradigm, I believe, copes better than the one offered by Finley with phenomena such as intersexed persons and sex reassignment surgery. While I do not accept the idea of a feminine or masculine soul, the paradigm offered here does lead to the notion of the soul being feminized or masculinized on account of the matter that it informs.