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1. Introduction
Though not as often among Protestants, there’s a view about the nature of the human soul that sometimes comes up in theological contexts: I’ll refer to it here as Thomistic hylomorphism, or TH for short. In this blog post1, I’m going to explain why I don’t believe in TH. Cards on the table: I’m partial to substance dualism because I think it’s a much more reasonable view. However, I find TH so implausible that if substance dualism were not an option, I’d be a physicalist about human beings instead. No doubt, once I’ve done my best to faithfully summarize TH and offered my reasons for rejecting it, if there are any Thomists who read this, they’ll say that I didn’t understand and/or accurately represent it. I’ve learned that this sort of thing can’t be avoided with certain kinds of thinkers. Thomists, like others who subscribe to grand and elaborate self-contained philosophical systems, seem to believe that understanding their view entails agreeing with it. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what to think.
First, I’m going to explain what the view that I’m criticizing is. Be warned – it is not, by my lights, at all intuitive or amenable to brief explanation. In fact, explaining and understanding what the view is even supposed to be requires a lot of set-up on the front end. This is going to be an unusually long blog post because of that fact. And yes, in my view, that is already a red flag: any initially unintuitive view that requires a bunch of philosophical framing beforehand bears the greater burden of justification. That’s generally the case whenever the thing you’re arguing for only works if you accept it as a conceptual piece of some broader framework. In this case, that broader framework is an all-encompassing Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysical worldview, itself highly controversial; TH is a conceptual piece of that system. If you don’t already view the world that way then it makes no sense for you to accept TH. So, if you’re already bored and also not a Thomist, you can stop reading here. If you think you already totally understand TH2 but still want to hear my reasons for rejecting it, skip to section 3. If you don’t want to be a physicalist but also have worries about substance dualism, skip to the last section.
2. What is Thomistic Hylomorphism?
2.1 Matter, Form, and Substance
TH is essentially the Aristotelian view about the nature of material objects. However, as many may already know, Thomas Aquinas came along in the 13th century and picked up a bunch of Aristotle’s philosophy, attempting to synthesize it with Christian theology. I’m interested here in the doctrine as advanced by Aquinas, specifically as it concerns the nature of human persons. It’s fine for our purposes to think of TH as basically equivalent to Aristotle’s view, except that Aquinas adds the claim that the soul can survive the death of the body - something Aristotle apparently would have denied.
TH holds that material objects are composite substances made up of both matter and form. Matter is the “stuff” that objects are composed of. For example, a statue is made out of bronze or stone, a ship is made out of wood, and so on. Form, in this case, is the way in which the matter that makes up the object is arranged. A statue of Abraham Lincoln is the object that it is because the stone it is made out of is arranged in some determinate way - i.e. in the shape of Lincoln. The stone has to have some principle of arrangement in order to be a statue of Lincoln. Without this form, there is no statue of Lincoln. We get substances whenever form informs matter. What is meant by “form” in the case of the statue is relatively straightforward. However, what “form” is with regard to living beings – particularly human beings – is going to be more complicated and controversial.
Now, there’s an important caveat: I used a statue to demonstrate the notion of a form/matter composite. I did that because it’s easier to understand as a primer. Properly speaking, though, Aquinas would have denied that statues are true substances. This is because Aquinas holds that true substances (if composed of parts) must exhibit a certain sort of unity among their parts such that they inherently tend towards some common function or telos. To see what I mean, take a look at the following clarification from Edward Feser (a Thomist philosopher who’s given the best summary of TH that I’ve ever read):
“…consider a liana vine – the kind of vine Tarzan likes to swing on… A hammock that Tarzan might construct from living liana vines is a kind of artifact, and not a natural object. The parts of the liana vine have an inherent tendency to function together to allow the vine to exhibit the growth patterns it does, to take in water and nutrients, and so forth. By contrast, the parts of the hammock – the liana vines themselves – have no inherent tendency to function together as a hammock. Rather, they must be arranged by Tarzan to do so, and left to their own devices – that is to say, without pruning, occasional rearrangement, and the like – they will tend to grow the way they otherwise would have had Tarzan not interfered with them, including in ways that will impede their performance as a hammock. Their natural tendency is to be liana-like and not hammock-like; the hammock-like function they perform after Tarzan ties them together is extrinsic or imposed from outside, while the liana-like functions are intrinsic to them… A liana vine is, accordingly, a true substance, as Aristotelian philosophers understand substance. A hammock is not a true substance, precisely because it does not qua hammock have a substantial form – an intrinsic principle [form] by which it operates as it characteristically does… In general, true substances are typically natural objects, whereas artifacts are typically not true substances. A dog, a tree, and water would be true substances, because each has a substantial form or intrinsic principle by which it behaves in the characteristic ways it does.”
-From “Aquinas on the Human Soul” by Edward Feser, p. 90
So, statues aren’t true substances – okay. Nevertheless, the arrangement of the statue is a form and that statue is composed of matter. It’s just that the arrangement in this case isn’t what Thomists would call a substantial form, since it doesn’t arrange the parts in such a way that they intrinsically tend toward a common function (machines and artifacts, on the other hand, have parts that tend towards a common function, but the parts do not so tend intrinsically; rather, the arrangement is externally imposed on the parts by humans). So, forms that intrinsically arrange, organize or account for a substance’s operating as it characteristically does are special – they’re called substantial forms. True substances are the objects “informed” by a substantial form.
Now there’s just one other piece of the puzzle that needs to be in place before we can (try to) understand what TH means for the human soul. It’s this: a thing’s having a particular substantial form means that it has properties and causal powers that are not reducible to properties and causal powers had by its parts or by the mere sum of its parts. For example, consider water: it is made up of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But water has properties and causal powers that hydrogen and oxygen molecules do not have: e.g. drinkability, wetness, the causal power to dissolve things, and so on. A hammer, on the other hand, just seems to exhibit the properties and causal powers of its constituent parts (e.g. the elements that make up wood and/or metal), like mass and solidity. Water is a true substance but a hammer isn’t.
2.2 Human Being and Soul
Now we’re finally ready to talk about human beings and their souls.
First, a human being is a particular kind of substance. What makes her the particular sort of substance that she is – rational animal – is her having the substantial form that she has. That substantial form informs the matter of her body, and because she has that particular substantial form, she also exhibits (in normal circumstances) the properties and causal powers characteristic of rational animals. The human soul, according to the Thomist, just is the substantial form of the human being. Now, that’s a bit more carefully phrased than the usual Thomist one-liner which goes, “the soul is the form of the body”. We must be careful here, though. Feser, our TH representative, denies the following: “The human soul is the substantial form of a substance which is entirely bodily or corporeal.” This mistaken thought, he thinks, underlies a common objection to TH, according to which the form of an entirely material substance cannot survive the destruction of the object it informs (e.g. stones, trees, non-rational animals). In the case of a stone, say, it’s easy to see why this is so: the form of a stone is just its shape, or the arrangement of its constituent parts. Arrangements as such aren’t real things which exist in addition to the things they’re arrangements of. So, when the things that they were arrangements of are destroyed, they do not persist. The human soul, however, as the substantial form of rational animal, is supposed to be different. Or better yet, Feser might say, the substance itself (rational animal) is different: it’s different in virtue of the kind of substance that it is. Namely, as a substance which has both corporeal and incorporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. Thus, says Feser, it is a substance that is neither wholly material or immaterial, and the substantial form (soul) of such a substance is such that it can persist even after the destruction of the component (material body) that allows it to manifest its corporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. Even when this physical component is separated from the substance, the substance (and therefore its form) persists, says Feser, in virtue of its incorporeal operations, causal powers, and properties. It just becomes a reduced/damaged substance in the sense that it is unable to actualize certain (corporeal) potentialities typically characteristic of it under normal, healthy circumstances. The substantial form does not exist on its own even after death, since it does not cease to inform something: there is still a substance – that substance is simply no longer manifesting its corporeal potentialities.
And that is how Edward Feser characterizes TH. However, other Thomists say different things. So before I proceed to my criticism, I’m going to list some of the other ways in which Thomists sometimes characterize the soul, or the form of the body. I’ve seen all of the following:
Soul as:
-Organizational pattern
-The principle of animation
-Structuring principle
-The blueprint
-The unifying center of all vital activities in the body
Maybe those help you understand the view a bit better. As far as I can tell, they don’t add much to what Feser already gave us, though maybe they sound cooler.
To help me show you why I think Feser gives the best summary of TH, as well as why I think some of the less careful formulations of TH out there (like the kind you may have heard from YouTube or from a priest or something) fail in a much more obvious way, consider the following quotations from a couple of other Thomist philosophers:
First,
“The human soul is not just the ‘form of the body’ as it seems to be for Aristotle, but a form plus, a spirit and a form, a spirit which does indeed operate as a form within the body but also transcends it with higher operations of its own.”
-From Person and Being by Norris Clarke, p. 35
And next,
“The job of an anima (Aquinas’s word for soul) is to animate non-living physical stuff into a living organism. Hence, for Aquinas, trees and squirrels have souls every bit as much as humans do. As far as what plays this sort of animating role, Aquinas had a proposal that biologists continue to find plausible today. What distinguishes an organism from a pile of dead physical bits is its organization. Living things are highly structured entities – structured at many different levels. At each level of organization new properties and abilities emerge. So on Aquinas’s view, a human soul is simply the overarching structure, configuration or organization that arranges our fundamental physical bits at various different levels such that we are able to carry out the characteristically human range of vital activities. It’s sort of like a blueprint for how to assemble a human, except that it’s a blueprint present within each of us.”
-From “My Soul Is Not Me: Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature and the Afterlife” by Adam Wood
You might have noticed that these characterizations seem pretty different from one another, as well as from Feser’s characterization. That is going to be relevant in just a moment.
3. Why I Reject TH
3.1. Worldview Woes
It’s finally time for me to explain why I reject TH. The first reason is something I already touched on in the introduction: I simply do not subscribe to a broadly Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics, and I don’t know of any convincing reasons why I should. TH is just a feature of that sort of worldview, and conceptually depends on it. There are other metaphysical posits consistent with my worldview commitments (including the theological ones) that I find much more plausible. I just find the whole Aristotelian/Thomistic system unnecessarily exotic and arcane.3 The world itself is weird, yes. But that weirdness is much better accounted for by other less wacky metaphysical posits. If I have to choose between two models that account for the same data and both seem to be internally inconsistent, I’m always going with the more commonsensical one.
3.2 Faulty Forms
Now, I summarized above some of the things that Thomists will say about the notion of form. But what is a form, really? I can understand what a form is if forms are just arrangements or ways of being organized. Obviously material objects are arranged in certain ways, and obviously some of those ways of being arranged give rise to very special phenomena, like plant and animal life. And indeed, Thomists agree that all arrangements are forms, though they’ll add that not all forms are arrangements. Some Thomists, like Adam Wood (see quote above), do seem to be saying that the human soul, too, just is the “overarching structure, configuration or organization” of the material body.4 But such Thomists leave themselves open to an easy objection: forms which are merely arrangements of matter cannot survive the destruction of the objects that they inform, since such arrangements cannot exist separately from those objects. Try to imagine the shape of a particular statue existing without the statue5 and you’ll see that this makes no sense: arrangements aren’t something else in addition to the things they’re arrangements of.
Instead then, whatever soul is, and in whatever sense it is a form, it must be other than or more than a mere arrangement. The quote from Norris Clarke (above) suggests he thinks that the soul is not less than an arrangement or principle of organization, but it is also more than that: it is an arrangement and a spirit that “operates” (which involves affecting things?). I find this bewildering. Arrangements are abstract concepts, not things that really exist concretely. A spirit, if not a mere arrangement, or principle, or blueprint, etc., would have to be the sort of thing that really exists concretely.6 But then it is nonsense to say that the same object could be both an abstract principle and a concrete existent. It is like saying that a cat could be a law, or that an angel could be a shape. These belong to totally distinct conceptual categories. Since the soul’s being both concrete and abstract is off the table, maybe what Norris meant is that there’s an immaterial, spiritual concrete object which causes the material of the body to be arranged in a way that allows it to carry out its characteristic function(s), without its being strictly identical to that arrangement. That I could understand. But such a view, notice, is tantamount to substance dualism: we have two distinct concrete entities each with their own properties (incorporeal spirit and corporeal body), and they are in a causal relationship. The body can be destroyed and yet the spirit persist because they are straightforwardly not the same object. Clarke might refuse to call this “substance” dualism, since Thomists are only willing to apply that term if certain pre-specified metaphysical conditions are met, but that’s just semantics. Cartesians will be quite happy to call any concrete existent which bears its own properties and can affect and be affected, a substance. A similar objection will arise later, when we look at Feser’s better account of TH.
A dilemma of sorts has been proposed: either the soul is a concrete object or it isn’t. The law of excluded middle tells us it must be one or the other: it can’t be both. If it isn’t a concrete object, it must be some sort of abstract thing. Nothing could be both a concrete object and an abstract thing. That’s just a category confusion. So if the soul is not a concrete object, it must be abstract. If it is abstract, then it doesn’t really exist in its own right. At best, it is a mere arrangement, which is not something else that exists in addition to the object that it’s an arrangement of. Thus, if the soul were abstract, there’s no sense in which it could persist after the destruction of the body that it informs. On the other hand, if the soul is a concrete object, then we have a view that ends up only being semantically distinct from a kind of substance dualism.
4. Feser for the Win?
Feser is better on this. His way of formulating form seems to avoid both kinds of error, since he is careful to note that the soul does not exist on its own after the destruction of the body: it is still the form of some existing concrete substance. Nonetheless, it does look like Feser would have to accept one of the two horns of the dilemma. Which? It seems like he wouldn’t want to go with the soul’s being a concrete object, for much the same reasons Clarke wouldn’t: this leaves us with a view only semantically distinct from something much like a Cartesian-style dualism, so long as we think the body is a concrete object in its own right. Note: we should think that, since the body continues to exist on its own after death (that is, the very same physical stuff continues to exist as a corpse, and it doesn’t get replaced with other physical stuff).7 Nor could he say that it’s both concrete and abstract, since that’s a heinous category confusion. It looks like Feser has to say that the soul is in some sense abstract. And he can, in fact, say that without running into the same problem that Wood does: on Wood’s account, it sounds like the soul loses or is separated from the thing that it informs (the body) at death. But then it can’t exist separately from the object that it was a form of. Feser agrees: “Consider first that the soul, being a kind of form, cannot by itself and without qualification either subsist or constitute anything, because a form qua form exists only together with the substance of which it is the form.”8 So, he straightforwardly denies that the soul is separated from the thing it’s a form of at death. Instead, the human being simply becomes a reduced/damaged substance that is no longer capable of manifesting certain of its corporeal operations.
Better, but I still can’t get there, for two reasons.
4.1 “Form” is Uninformative
The first is that we simply still haven’t been given an intelligible story about what the soul is supposed to be. It’s not a mere arrangement of matter, but it’s also more than that without being concrete. It’s a principle of organization, a blueprint, it’s what makes a rational animal the substance it is, and so on. I get it, but this only tells us the conceptual role that the notion of substantial form is supposed to play in the Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics: we haven’t been told anything about what substantial form is, if it isn’t just an arrangement. Now arguably there are other concepts with this feature that I’d accept: causation is a good example. Causation is mainly just a conceptual category.9 Fair enough. Even so, causation has a lot more going for it than substantial form. First, no one needs a lengthy philosophical exposition before they can understand what causation is: it’s intuitively clear, and everyone already believes in it. Indeed, our concept of causation just comes pre-installed. Even those few odd philosophers who claim not to believe in it, still do any time they descend from their ivory towers and inhabit the real world. Cause-and-effect is ubiquitous in pretty much all human affairs: e.g. it underpins science, we appeal to it in understanding moral responsibility, and we invoke it constantly in our ordinary everyday lives (Ouch! I stepped on a Lego and it hurt). The moral of the story here: if we can’t say anything more about causation over and above what its conceptual role is, so be it. We’re wed to it.
Thomistic substantial form, on the other hand… not so much. A little mystery in one’s worldview here and there may be a healthy sign: we are very much finite in our understanding, after all. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t default to mystery unless it’s necessary to vindicate some more deeply-held convictions that we have, like causation or vital theological doctrines.10 Mystery is something that we should seek to minimize when possible in worldview-building.11 Nothing about the notion of Thomistic substantial form – or indeed the whole Aristotelian/Thomistic system – is necessary to vindicate some other, more fundamental convictions (that I have, anyways). As an alternative, I find substance dualism an attractive candidate, since it can explain our deeply held convictions about identity-over-time plus the theological conviction that we survive our deaths. And I think it can do this without leaving as much unexplained as TH.
4.2 A Material Dilemma
Now I’ll explain my other reason. It starts with another fun dilemma.
Feser holds that even after the substantial form becomes separated from the material component of the human being, it continues to inform some substance that persists. The dilemma presents itself: after death, and prior to being united again to some matter, either the soul is the substantial form of something entirely immaterial or it isn’t. Feser wants to say that it’s the form of a substance with both corporeal and incorporeal operations, etc.; but let’s leave that to the side for a moment. Either the substance itself is entirely immaterial once separated from the physical component, or it isn’t. It can’t be partially material – it is no longer united to any matter. Being material requires being at least partly12 constituted by matter. So, it must be entirely immaterial. Thus, after death, the substantial form becomes the form of a concrete immaterial object with no material component(s). Feser is on board too: “…the material side of this substance is completely gone, so that we do have a form without matter, even if it is not exactly a form existing apart from any substance.”13
Now, here’s an extremely plausible principle to follow up with: Immaterial objects cannot have material properties. Unextended objects can’t have mass, height, velocity, etc. Thoughts can’t be hard or soft (literally speaking). But notice, whatever we want to say about the whole human substance, this immaterial concrete object which persists after death cannot be identical to the corporeal body. We must have at least two distinct concrete objects, since the material properties that the substance manifested before death couldn’t have inhered in the immaterial concrete object that goes on existing after death. And thus, the human being, even if we want to call it one substance, must have at least two metaphysically distinct parts, each with their own set of properties that inhere in one and not the other, and which plausibly causally interact with one another. This sounds a lot like substance dualism to me, even if the Thomist would refuse to call it that.14 In fact, here’s a characterization of substance that Feser himself gives us, early on in his essay: “Substances, in general, just are the sorts of things which exist in themselves rather than inhering in anything else, and which are the subjects of those attributes which do of their nature inhere in something else.”15 If we accept that characterization – and why shouldn’t we? – then our two distinct concrete objects even get to count as substances in this case. Substance dualists will certainly be happy to refer to them as such, anyways. So it seems Feser is either wrong or just a confused substance dualist.
This looks bad for TH, unless Thomists are okay with TH basically being a version of substance dualism. Still, here’s a difference that holds even if my argument goes through: there’s a substantial form which we can refer to as the “soul” on TH, whereas substance dualism proper lacks this. The “soul”, for a substance dualist, just is the immaterial concrete component of a human being; the notion of form isn’t invoked at all. My take on this difference is that there’s no reason to retain the notion of substantial form here unless we’re already committed to it on separate metaphysical grounds. The immaterial concrete component can do all the theoretical work we want it to do without the superfluous appeal to substantial form. It can persist after death, account for personal identity over time, and much more! Just be a substance dualist.
And that does it. I’ve explained why I think Aquinas gets the soul wrong.
A brief comment on the semantics here, as I wrap up: It seems to me that if anything deserves to be called the soul on the account I’m saying Feser is committed to, it would be this immaterial concrete object. It is much closer to what ordinary people have in mind when they use that word. Let’s allow ourselves to call it that for a moment. Why not? Now even if we retain the notion of substantial form and call that the “soul”, after death it turns out that the “soul” becomes the form of the soul. The soul is then the substantial form of the soul. So, we’d have two souls on this view, or one soul (substantial form) and one spirit (concrete immaterial object) and sometimes a body as well! I say it isn’t worth it – just be a substance dualist.16
5. Debunking Bad Arguments Against Substance Dualism
I’ve noticed a growing resistance to substance dualism among some Christians in recent years. I’m not really sure about the source, though it’s been suggested to me that it may have started with the over-interpreted ideas of a few public intellectual preacher types. Perhaps the new Christian materialists – who are definitely not Thomists – are also making cultural waves. Whatever the source, I want to address a couple of the worries I’ve been hearing about substance dualism. All such worries amount to, as far as I can tell, are just misunderstandings of the view. This suggests that those who have them haven’t thought very carefully.
First of all, substance dualism isn’t Gnosticism. There’s no Dogmatics of Substance Dualism book out there which claims that the body is a filthy, dirty, disgusting animalistic prison from which we should desire liberation. Substance dualists can, and do, think that embodiment is a good thing. Indeed, they obviously can, and do, insist that embodiment is a constitutive condition of our flourishing; we are not complete without it. Oh, and Christian substance dualists don’t have any problem affirming the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body.17 In sum, being separated from your body is a real drag.
Second, what about the worry that substance dualism makes us somehow too distinct from our body, even though it really seems like we’re really vitally linked to these bodies that we have, to that face we see in the mirror? Yes, substance dualism says that we have an immaterial component with which we are more fundamentally identified with. That, we think, must be the case if we are to survive death. However, there are a couple of things I want to say which I think show this isn’t a problem at all. First, I can say – taking a page from the Thomist’s book – that our souls cause our bodies to be arranged in the characteristic ways that they are. If God had united my soul to a different material body in early infancy, say, then it may still have ended up looking and feeling just like this body I have now, because it was at least partly my soul that caused this body to grow in the characteristic ways that it did. That constitutes a really tight, intimate connection between body and soul, it seems to me. Next, I just want to point out something that’s sad but true. You may feel intimately identified with the reflection you see in the mirror (and in some sense, of course, you are). But we know that there are people out there who get into accidents and lose parts of their bodies, or who end up unrecognizably disfigured. In such cases, they are still exactly the same people that they were before, despite radical alterations in the reflections they see staring back at them.
Maybe it really is what’s on the inside that counts the most.
Resources/References
Scholarly
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Available here: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/
Edward Feser. “Aquinas on the Human Soul”. In The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism. Print ISBN:9781119375265 | Online ISBN:9781119468004.
Norris Clarke. Person and Being. ISBN 9780874621600.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl1.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/#HyloGene
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-018-1792-x#Sec2
Popular-level (from scholars aimed at laypeople)
William Lane Craig’s Defenders series on Christian Anthropology – https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-3/s3-doctrine-of-man
This is just a blog post for now, but I’ll probably try and turn it into a published paper sometime in the near future. So, please don’t steal my ideas and publish them first.
This is unlikely if you haven’t done much more than just watching a few YouTube videos about Aquinas on the soul, or something like that. It’s quite a complex view.
Don’t just take my word for it. If you want to look into it yourself, I would suggest Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.
In charity: maybe Wood would tell us he isn’t saying that and is saying instead what Feser’s saying. In any case, assume this is what he’s saying for present purposes so that we can see why such a view wouldn’t work.
Without being a Platonist about abstract objects, at least.
I am invoking a fairly straightforward metaphysical category here: concrete objects are non-abstract “really existing” things which can both causally affect and be causally affected. Abstracta, even if they exist in some Platonic sense (Thomists deny that, by the way!) don’t exist concretely, nor can they enter into causal relations. Some things we call “arrangements” are in fact concrete (e.g. Edible Arrangements) but that’s another, more colloquial use of the word.
In fact, this consideration poses a more general threat to Aristotelian metaphysics. For more on that, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl1.html
P. 98
Though accounts about the nature of causation have been given which seem to me much more informative than what the Thomists tell us about substantial form.
Perhaps Thomism is a vital theological doctrine if you’re Catholic. There’s one reason not to be Catholic.
Think about all the absurd views we could justify if we made mystery a desirable feature of our philosophical theories (e.g. all religions are somehow true. When they seem to contradict one another, they really don’t, even though it’s just a mystery how not).
I think being material just is being constituted by matter. But I’m hemming my claims in a bit here.
P. 98
Notice that the Thomist will still have to contend with the old “interaction problem” that substance dualism faces, since they seem to have an immaterial concrete object causally interacting with matter.
P. 89
I’d like to thank a couple of friends who I discussed these ideas with before writing everything down: Hannah Akin, Kolten Ellis and Matthew DaMore. Especially Matthew DaMore, though, who got me onto Feser.
About Scriptural warrant for philosophical doctrines in general: as with so many other philosophical problems that are relevant for Christians, I think that the data of Bible frequently underdetermines the answer(s). It is a mistake to think that Scripture contains every answer to every question we care about or to think that it is a philosophical treatise. When it does require definite philosophical commitments of us (e.g. God exists, selfishness is bad, there’s life after death), that’s the exception, not the rule. Don’t get me wrong – those matters it does require such definite commitment on are of first-rate centrality to our lives. All this said, See WLC’s Defenders series on Christian anthropology under references for a case that if Scripture weighs in favor of any particular view of the soul, it weighs in favor of substance dualism.
