Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

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Before I begin, I want to confess something.

Giving a lecture for the Domestic Institute is always a challenge because the

audience tends to vary widely.

So I've had people that kind of stumble in because they see the provocative poster.

It's a very nice poster. And they've never heard of Thomas Aquinas before. And then there's some

people that are like getting a PhD in Thomas Aquinas studies or whatever. So you have to forgive me

if some of this is either elementary or to advanced. I'm really trying not to fall

between two stools on this. But there will be plenty of time in the Q&A for discussion, I hope.

So having said all that, my aim today is to consider and maybe even begin to understand why

someone would ever regard the soul as a biological concept,

which is to say an idea or principle, at least in the first instance, belonging to scientific inquiry concerned with living things.

And only in a secondary and derivative way, belonging to moral, metaphysical, and religious

inquiry. Usually debates about the soul take for granted that it's something spiritual or religious,

and the debate is about whether you should affirm or deny its existence.

But they agree on what they're talking about, and I'm going to call into question that assumption.

But what would it mean for the soul not to be distinctively human?

What I mean by that will become clear, at least I hope, but addressing this question will

...