Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity

Book at Lunchtime, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity Thomas Aquinas
on Bodily Identity is a study of the union of matter and the soul
in the human being in the thought of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas.
At first glance this issue might appear arcane, but it was at the
centre of polemic with heresy in the thirteenth century and at the
centre of the development of medieval thought more broadly. The
book argues that theological issues, especially the need for an
identical body to be resurrected at the end of time, but also
considerations about Christ's crucifixion and saints' relics, were
central to Aquinas's account of how human beings are constituted.
The book explores in particular how theological questions and
concerns shaped Aquinas's thought on individuality and personal and
bodily identity over time, his embryology and understanding of
heredity, his work on nutrition and bodily growth, and his
fundamental conception of matter itself. It demonstrates, up-close,
how Aquinas used his peripatetic sources, Aristotle and
(especially) Averroes, to frame and further his own thinking in
these areas. The book also indicates how Aquinas's thought on
bodily identity became pivotal to university debates and relations
between the rival mendicant orders in the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries, and that quarrels surrounding these issues
persisted into the fifteenth century.