Immateriality as Self-Manifestation in Aquinas

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• Dr Therese Cory, University of Notre Dame
• Thursday 31 May 2018, 16:30-18:30
• Faculty of Divinity, Lightfoot Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Daniel De Haan.

There is considerable philosophical and theological interest in the existence of immaterial entities. But what might it mean to be immaterial, in the first place? This paper considers how immateriality is conceptualized in the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas. Contrary to the widespread view that Aquinas considers immaterial being to be a mysterious reality that we can know only by negating the properties of the material beings that we experience, I argue that Aquinas equates immateriality with self-manifestation (following a long tradition originating in the Greek commentators on Aristotle), and I examine what such a view might mean for our experiential access to immaterial being.

This talk is part of the Faculty of Divinity series.

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• Faculty of Divinity
• Faculty of Divinity, Lightfoot Room

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