Feser: What is a Soul?

"What is a soul? Or to be more precise, what is a human soul?  Or to be even more precise, what is a human being?  For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.”  People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway)—ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances.  Even the Aristotelian characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead.  When those unfamiliar with Aristotelian metaphysics hear “form,” they are probably tempted to think in terms of shape or a configuration of parts, which is totally wrong.  Or perhaps they think of it in Platonic terms, as an abstract universal that the individual human being participates in—also totally wrong.  Or they suspect that since it is the form of the living body it cannot coherently be said to subsist apart from that body—totally wrong again. So let us, for the moment, put out of our minds all of these ideas and start instead with the question, what is a human being?"

• Continue reading this article by Dr. Edward Feser at Strange Notions