On October 23 the Dominican House of Studies was pleased to host the first of its "Thomistic Circles" events of the academic year 2010-2011. The event consisted of a day long conference entitled, "Aquinas on the Soul," featuring three speakers. Dr. Alfred J. Freddoso of the department of philosophy of Notre Dame presented a paper on Aquinas's conception of the human person as a rational animal, whose spiritual soul is the form of the body. Dr. John O'Callaghan, also from the philosophy department of Notre Dame, examined some of Aquinas's central arguments for the immateriality of the human intellect (and therefore the incorruptibility of the spiritual soul). Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., from the Dominican College in Ottawa, Canada, presented an essay on the relation of faith and reason as pertains to the soul. How does faith in the reality of the soul aid and support Christian philosophical reasoning? The event was well attended by students and professors in the area. Below are introductory comments on the day's activities that were given by the event's organizer, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.:

"The human soul as a philosophical and theological topic is understudied in our culture. This is true on the one hand in the larger world of contemporary disciplines more generally (where the spiritual soul of the person is often ignored or even disavowed). There are a variety of historical reasons for this state of affairs that could easily be mentioned: The advent of positivism which wishes to reduce all forms of genuine knowledge to those procured by the modern sciences, the progressive secularization of society, the rise of philosophical skepticism concerning metaphysical arguments, arising from modern philosophers such as David Hume or Immanuel Kant. Yet on the other hand the soul is spoken about less frequently also among Catholic intellectuals: because of a decreased interest in the classical philosophical heritage of the Church, sometimes accompanied by a doubt about the usefulness in theology of recourse to philosophical resources.

"However, because the soul is real, the problem of understanding what the human person is remains, and philosophical study of the soul is rightly considered an ordinary part of the seminary curriculum of the Catholic ratio studiorum. This is not a mere legalism, but is indicative of the fact that the stakes in this domain are high. For knowledge of the soul affects issues as diverse as: the nature of human beings, ethical dignity for the unborn human being, respect for persons in a persistent vegetative state, the immortality of the self and life after death, mysteries of purgatory, heaven and hell, the human nature of Christ, the distinct graces of the Virgin Mary, the life of grace in ordinary Christians, and on and on.

"Our contemporaries seem often to have relegated the intellectual consideration of the soul to an esoteric corner of the culture: symbolized by that section of Barnes and Nobles infelicitously entitled the "metaphysics" section. New Age literature speaks about the soul in a kind of fantastical way. A Benedictine monk once told me about a book he found in a New Age section called, 'how to become an angel in 9 simple steps.' But meanwhile in the concrete day to day workings of our seemingly soulless world, the soul goes on working. Human beings continue to make life long commitments, they pray, they pace the room trying to make difficult moral decisions. They seek the truth; they agonize over the good they aspire to do and evil they have done, and they discover the grace of Christ. And so we should, if we wish to be at the intellectual service of the concrete life of human persons, even today, especially today, continue to reflect philosophically, with St. Thomas, upon the nature of the soul."