'Live and dead': 17th century scholastic philosophers on soul and body

Abstract

The article aims to present the ontological doctrine of the soul and the animation in relation to man as developed throughout 17th century in the scholastic treatises having the common title On the soul. The starting hypothesis was to assume that at the heart of the proto-biological understanding of man there were two basic distinctions: 1) between the living in the first act and the living in the second act, 2) between the living and the mechanical ('dead'). The examination of the theories developed by 17th century scholastic writers is preceded by a brief analysis of the general version of mind-soul problem such as formulated and discussed in medieval scholasticism. The present paper includes two parts, in the first of which the author explores scholastic hypotheses of how a composite being can possibly be formed of the soul and the body, while in the second she offers a more detailed view of various doctrines concerning the living and the dead components of which a fully constituted human individuum consists. A close look at the ontology of the soul and the body as expounded in 17th century writings On the soul allows for a more accurate and complete understanding of the context and conditions in which the germinal phase of the new European science of biology was taking place. On the other hand, it is obvious that the turn taken by science of the soul in 17th century universities was by no means the one towards more perfect experimental methods in studying the living things and man in particular, seeing as it chose to follow the course of philosophical and theological reflection on human reality. The contradiction between the naturalistic science of the soul as it had been originally conceived by Aristotle and the philosophical and theological character it assumed in 17th century contributed to the internal tension that eventually caused it to explode from inside.