Talk:Thomas Aquinas

Epistemology (theory of knowledge)
Is this parenthetical in the philosophy section necessary? It feels redundant to have, if a reader doesn't know what epistemology is they're free to look it up. Eschocat (talk) 08:09, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Do animals have souls?
Is it true that St Thomas Aquinas was influential in causing the Catholic Church to teach that animals do not have souls? 2A00:23C7:6E03:A101:ED32:B5FC:41FD:1EB (talk) 11:49, 8 November 2023 (UTC)


 * No - for Thomas, following Aristotle, all living creatures have a soul. Anima, which is 'soul' in English, is the scholastic term for the subtantial form of an embodied living being. Like all material things, animals are composites, on this view, of 'form' and 'matter', though neither of these terms means precisely what it means in modern parlance. What is true about Thomas, but is by no means unique or original to him, is that he believes that animals have material souls, where human beings have immaterial, intellectual souls, which are capable of post-mortem disembodied existence. 2A02:C7C:CB3F:4000:ADDE:6997:AEF1:70B2 (talk) 21:18, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
 * This is not correct. In Aristotle and St. Thomas, all souls, even those of plants, are not material. They are related to the material bodies they inform as act to a potency. If they were material they would be in place and so not exist in all places of the body. In Thomas, what makes a human soul different from an animal or plant soul is not its immateriality but its completely immaterial functions, such as knowing immaterial universal concepts. This alone is the foundation of Thomas's view that the human soul is per se immortal. That does not mean that even the human person per se is immortal. The human person is a body-soul composite and so will only have full existence "immortally" after the bodily resurrection. 138.51.33.22 (talk) 23:45, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Lumen ecclesiae
Not yet mentioned in the WP article. Of don't disable the automatic filter, nobody can contribute to improve the article.

In 1974, 700 years after the Aquinas' death, Paul VI wrote the letter Lumen ecclesiae which invited the Dominicans to return to the source and rediscover the true doctrine of Thomas. 176.200.132.4 (talk) 08:34, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Editing notice
The editing notice When referred to by a single name, he should always be referred to as simply "Thomas" is absurdly prescriptive. It should be removed. Srnec (talk) 03:11, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Many reliable sources call him Aquinas. Srnec (talk) 15:22, 13 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Seems to me that it was implemented so that people wouldn’t confound his purported last name for his real name. Raulois (talk) 17:13, 13 April 2024 (UTC)


 * He is called both 'Thomas' and 'Aquinas' in reliable sources. There's no right or wrong. It's one thing to keep this page consistent, but another to tell people you should never call him 'Aquinas'. That's just not true. It wasn't a last name, but that doesn't matter. The form 'Aquinas' does not represent a standard form for medieval Italians in either Italian or English. It's like "Charlemagne". Srnec (talk) 00:45, 16 April 2024 (UTC)