Aporetic immortality: From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas

Aristotle was the first Western Philosopher to undertake the task of producing a rational, scientific-based theory on the human individual soul. Many have followed him in this enterprise, but several of them tinted his psychology with ideas from other philosophers and schools, mainly Plato and Neoplatonism. Saint Thomas Aquinas stands among those who tried to avoid this. In this article we will show that not only he did not consider platonic or Neoplatonic ideas in his theory about the soul and its immortality but remained in the peripatetic realm and produced a rational, Revelation-free philosophy to argue for it based on certain passages and ideas of the De Anima. Also, we will show that Aristotle considers both a strong form of anthropologic hylomorphism and a soft one, being the latter the one used by Aquinas to structure his theory on the immortality of the soul.