Ok, onward to new content! We didn't cover this in class at all (unfortunately) but part of our assigned reading dealt with the Mind/Body problem, which everyone taking Modern next semester is going to see come up again right off the bat.
Aquinas' position is (unsurprisingly) dualistic: The soul is immaterial, yet substance, acts as the understanding part of the body, and requires the body so that it may carry out it's task of understanding.
Bleh, that's the uninteresting part.
Things that interest me:
He posits that universals exist (abstract universals, or so it seems in Q76:ReObj3), but the knowledge of universals is impeded by the senses, since the senses are material but universals are abstract. This is an interesting point because in q75, Aquinas argues that the soul cannot know material things if it is itself a material thing. Yet, in q76, the soul can know universals, which are (as Aristotle posited) immaterial fact abstracted from material. Apparently the soul can only learn the material through abstracting it to an immaterial level.
Aristotle never answers the question Descartes later tries, that is how does the immaterial soul influence the material body? What is the point of connection? I know it seems basic, most of us grew up with the notion of God, as immaterial(ish?) influencing the physical world, but how? What is the connection point?
Sadly our little printout ends just before Aquinas declares himself for rationalism or empiricism. I think I'm gonna need to go read the rest of that question.
