St. Thomas Aquinas Research Paper

St. Thomas Aquinas’s View of the Self What is a self? For the last fifteen weeks, that’s the very question we’ve been analyzing in various ways. Originally, I would’ve said that a self is something along the lines of a being with the capacity to think and feel. After learning twenty different perspectives on the definition of a self, I’ve come to the conclusion that mine is, in some ways, similar to that of St. Thomas Aquinas. In this paper, I will explain what Aquinas believes a self to be, and I will discuss ways in which I entirely connect to his ideas, and ways in which I completely disagree. I’ll start with what I do agree with. Aquinas believed that we, human beings, are not our souls. Upon first reading this, I was skeptical. As long as I’ve been a human mature enough to analyze

God is an example of a rational being. He is a soul that exists without a body. Another point brought up by Conn is that Aquinas believes that after death, the soul exists without the body until General Resurrection, which Christians believe to be a time when the dead and living unite in bodily form. During the interim period between death and the General Resurrection, the dead do not exist, but their souls do. Conn points out that Aquinas contradicts himself by saying in some of his works that the dead do exist. However, he said it when referring to a specific person. Although they were dead when he was speaking of them, he said that they did exist. This leaves us confused. Does Aquinas think that people exist between their death and the resurrection or not? Conn offers two proposals: 1) Perhaps when Aquinas referred to a dead person as existing, he was referring to their soul, but calling it by their name. 2) Perhaps people exist as souls during the interim period. Overall, Conn thinks Aquinas believes that we are soul/body composites who exist without bodies between the time of our death and the time of the General Resurrection. Personally, I don’t