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James South Department of Philosophy Marquette University December 8, 2006 Friday, 3:30pm-5:30pm Nursing, Room 127 In 1500, Pietro Pomponazzi told a classroom full of students that two conditions needed to be met in order to show that the soul is immortal: the soul (or the intellect at any rate) must be 1) free from bodily location and 2) free from the mediating role of bodily powers-in his technical language, the body could be neither a subject nor an object for an immortal intellective soul. It was another sixteen years before Pomponazzi published his work On the Immortality of the Soul in which he argued that neither condition could be defended philosophically. Of course, that was three years after the Fifth Lateran Council in its eighth session declared that there were three most pernicious errors corrupting the minds of the faithful: that the rational soul is mortal, that there is one rational soul for all humans, and teaching one or the other of these errors as true — at least according to philosophy. What I want to do in my talk is connect the later Jesuit thinker, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) to Pomponazzi's challenge. Suárez certainly knew Pomopnazzi's work, although most scholars writing on Suárez situate him in the context of the tradition of scholastic thought rather than the more secular Aristotelianism present in Italian universities. In their defense, Suárez typically situates himself that way. Nonetheless, I want to show that a careful reading of Suárez on immortality shows that his thought on key issues has been decisively shaped by the challenge thrown down by Pomponazzi, and that it is his attempt to meet that challenge that explains why he holds some of his most distinctive views about the intellect and its powers. Indeed, in meeting the challenge, Suárez argues himself into a kind of incipient Cartesian dualism.  |
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Last updated 4/8/08 10:33 PM
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