Why Do We Die? | Prof. Christopher Frey

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2022

⏱️ 77 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was delivered on October 28, 2021 at the University of South Carolina. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Christopher Frey is currently an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Prof. Frey works primarily in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. He is writing a book entitled The Principle of Life: Aristotelian Souls in an Inanimate World. It concerns the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the unity of living organisms, nutrition, birth, death, and, more generally, what one’s metaphysical worldview looks like if one takes life to be central. He also works in contemporary philosophy of perception and mind and has written extensively on the relationship between the intentionality and phenomenality of perceptual experience. In addition to these two main areas of research, he has secondary projects in metaphysics, the philosophy of action, Medieval philosophy, Early Modern philosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.4	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.5	Thank you, Grace, and thank you all for being here, not just because you had to brave the elements to do so.
0:19.1	I can't recall a time when death has been a more prominent fixture in our thoughts and daily conversations than it is currently,
0:26.6	and I could appreciate why many would skip a talk with this title, instead seeking whatever small respite they can from thinking about death altogether.
0:35.6	But rest assured, the sense of the question,
0:38.3	why do we die that concerns me today,
0:41.3	isn't a question that can be answered by a New York Times infographic
0:45.3	or by reading a life insurance agent's actuarial table.
0:49.3	My concern, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a much more general philosophical question.
0:56.0	Now, as far as our understanding is concerned, life and death are united.
1:02.0	According to the two philosophers whose views I'm going to focus on today,
1:06.0	Aristotle and Aquinas, life and death are contraries or opposites. And like all contraries, one acquires the concepts as a pair.
1:14.8	The Aristotle describes death simply as life's limit.
1:18.4	And in the vast majority of cases, life and death are yoked not only in mind but in world.
1:24.4	To live for terrestrial organisms is to possess a soul and to die is to cease being in soul.
1:31.2	But both Aristotle and Aquinas are adamant. They agree that life does not entail death.
1:37.1	Though their conceptions of God and the divine differ radically, Aristotle and Aquinas agreed that
1:42.3	God is both alive and necessarily eternal.
1:47.0	Aristotle claims, there are some quotes on the handout, I won't always point to them when I refer to them,
1:51.8	but Aristotle claims that the actuality of God is immortality, which is everlasting life.
1:58.8	And Aquinas insists that life in the highest degree is properly in God.
	...

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