Onze eindige geest. De implicaties van de menselijke ziel-lichaamsvereniging voor verschillende denkacten in het denken van Thomas van Aquino

In this dissertation, I identify two changes in the development of Aquinas's thoughts that eventually conflict with each other. Both changes concern the human soul-body union's implication for the human soul's proper operation, which, for Aquinas, is an act of the speculative intellect. The first change is Aquinas's growing emphasis that the human passible body should contribute to the human intellect's natural operation, i.e., the operation that is not divinely elevated. The second change concerns the cognitive contribution of the glorified body to the blessed souls' beatific vision. In an early work of Aquinas (Commentary on Sentences IV, written in 1252-56), he affirms that the glorified body has a positive cognitive contribution to the beatific vision; but in his mature work (Summa Theologiae, a work Aquinas began in 1265), he denies it. I argue that even though both changes were motivated by plausible philosophical desiderata, they end up being in severe, perhaps unresolvable, conflict with one another in Aquinas's mature thought.