This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Of human persons and animals Scholastic animalism and the metaphysics of human nature Prestidge, Gillian Katie Mary Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Of Human Persons and Animals Scholastic Animalism and the Metaphysics of Human Nature Gillian Prestidge Doctoral Thesis King’s College London Abstract Background Discussion as to whether the essence of human nature is primarily a matter of biology or of psychology has been going on for over two thousand years. Greek thought was divided between views such as Aristotle’s, who saw a human being like you or me as a single living substance, an animal, and argued for persistence based on biological nature as a member of a species, and those of Plato, who identified a human being with his soul, trapped in his body, as two separable entities. Today, the debate continues between the animalists on one hand, for whom I am identical to my living body, and personalists on the other, who see each human being as a person, a self-conscious, rational entity. As such, animalists, such as van Inwagen and Olson, argue for a human being’s persistence in terms of his biological life, while personalists, most notably, Baker, Shoemaker and Parfit, in sympathy with Locke, require only the presence of mind. However, while these two positions do not look to be incompatible, the accounts are usually set up in such a way that the acceptance of one is the denial of the other. For most animalists, for example, ‘person’ is just a phase sortal term, and human beings cannot be persons essentially, given that personhood requires actually occurrent mental properties. This is anti-personalism. Likewise, most personalists tend to be anti-animalists. Some may allow that a human being could share a decomposition with an animal, but deny that he could be identical to one. In terms of persistence, if one imagines that the cerebrum of a human being A is removed and placed in the cerebrumless body of another human being, B, the animalist will identify the living but cerebrumless human animal with A, while the personalist would say that A has gone with his consciousness, and now resides in the body of B. Furthermore, the personalist will now want to say that human animal B is the same person, and therefore the same human being, as A, while, for the animalist, A is still the same human animal/human being that he was, but he is no longer a person. Nonetheless, neither view really seems to be satisfactory. In the case of animalism, our belief that we are essentially persons, and that therefore that the persistent vegetative state patient in the bed is still a person, is put under fire. On the other hand, for the personalist, a human being is divided into the two things: a human animal and a person, to the end that human being A has become human being B, despite the fact that his body, a living human animal, has not moved from its bed. It is very difficult to deny that among the members of the kingdom animalia, human beings are mentally superior in various ways. However, it is just as doubtful that non-human animals do not have brains capable of thought, and therefore that a person cannot be just the thinking part of a human animal, given that other animals have mental properties too. Alternatively, then, we might regard human beings as essentially both persons and animals, or ‘rational animals’, the preferred term of Aristotelianism. The holistic account sees each human being as a human person, according to its species, just as much as a human animal. There are various ways for which this might be argued, but the version I will defend here I have called scholastic 2 animalism, a bio-psychological account of human nature attributed to St Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, the concept of a human being who is not a person is meaningless, and only a complete living body can be a complete living person, though there is the possibility of a lesser existence between bodily death and final resurrection, in accordance with biblical Scripture. Nonetheless, scholastic animalism, which may be defined as an account of human nature whereby the property of human personhood just is the property of human animality, can be made sense of without appeal to biblical principles, such as the afterlife and final resurrection, given that its main benefit is the sense it makes of questions regarding what kind of being I am now, and when did I first exist. Such matters relate to all kinds of moral questions concerning human rights, both in the womb and out, and so are more than matters of biology. Unlike most personalist theories, scholastic animalism affords each human being intrinsic value just for being human, having a high regard for the body as an essential part of a complete human nature. It is therefore in line with modern medicine, which also sees the mind and body as heavily interconnected. Hylomorphism about Persons To understand the true nature of humanity according to scholastic animalism, one must consider first Aquinas’ metaphysics of form and matter, a theory taken from Aristotle called hylomorphism. This view considers all natural material substances to be compositions of prime matter and substantial form, where the latter gives existence and structure to the former. In the case of human beings, the substantial form is the rational or intellective soul, which brings life to the person as well as making him the kind of being he is. Soul in this sense dates back in writing to Homeric poetry, where the concept is tied to life as a kind of principle, a life-force, without which no living being would have life. The Aristotelian concept of soul differs according to the complexity of the living being. Plants are said to have vegetative souls, giving them the usual life processes of living things, while animals additionally have the powers of soul for sensitivity. Humans and more advanced beings, if they should exist, have a rational soul, which as well as incorporating all the other powers of the lesser souls, has intellect, the power of reason. Due to some confusion regarding the concept of rationality around the time he was writing, Aquinas prefers to speak of the intellective soul of man, which gives him self-consciousness, will and moral reasoning. The intellective soul as the form of the material body is said to be incorporeal, incorruptible and weakly subsistent. To be incorporeal is to be non-material, which causes it to give existence to, but not be mixed with, the physical body. As a result, the soul will leave the body upon bodily death and take on a different mode of existence. In accordance with its incorruptible nature, then, it will continue to exist to be reunited with the body once more at final resurrection. While non-human animal souls are also incorporeal, unlike the human soul, they are disposed to destruction, ceasing to exist following the death of the animal. The human soul can only be destroyed by God, say in hell; it has no internal disposition towards destruction. Another important property of the intellective soul is its subsistence. While not itself a substance, for then man would 3 not be one complete substance (unum simpliciter), the soul is said to be weakly subsistent, giving it the kind of existence akin to an arm or leg; it is not a separate being, but can be seen as ‘this particular thing’, and referenced accordingly. We might compare the soul in man to electricity in a toaster. The electricity is not really a part of the toaster, but without it, the toaster does not function as a toaster; it is homonymously a toaster. Likewise, there is no human being without the soul, but a body and a soul are not two separate beings, but one: a living body. The above explains on one level what it is to be a human animal, but the concept of human person requires a different kind of study. While the discussion on human nature can be found in Aquinas’ Treatise on Man, the concept of personhood is considered much earlier, on the topic of the Trinity. For Aquinas, God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, angels, and human beings are all types of person.