Persons, Souls, and Life After Death

§1. Two Rival Versions of Thomistic Hylomorphism: Corruptionism and Survivalism It is evident to each of us that he or she engages in a variety of mental activities. It is also evident to each of us that he or she presently has a body. But what is this entity which thinks, senses, remembers, etc. and presently has a body? Put more simply, what are we? What are human persons? Philosophers both past and present have proposed a variety of different answers to this question. Of the theories defended in our contemporary context, several, including Thomistic Hylomorphism, Animalism, Constitutionalism, and Emergent Individualism, can claim to be “neo-Aristotelian” in one respect or another. This chapter will focus on just one of these contemporary neo-Aristotelian theories: Thomistic Hylomorphism, a theory inspired by Thomas Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of what we are, which in turn was inspired by Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of what we are. Like other hylomorphists, Thomistic Hylomorphists maintain that human persons are enduring individuals “composed of” or “constituted from” (in a to be specified sense of the term) matter (hylē) and a certain kind of substantial form (morphē). Thomistic Hylomorphists add that human persons differ from other material substances in that human persons have substantial forms which can exist without informing a body. Adopting the Aristotelian use of the term “soul,” Thomistic Hylomorphists call the substantial forms of living things “souls” and the substantial forms of human persons “intellective (or rational or human) souls.” For the purposes of this chapter, we can define Thomistic Hylomorphism as the conjunction of the following four theses: