Tag: hylomorphism
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The Soul of Education, Part 9: John Amos Comenius and the Soul as a Boundless Abyss
This series on historical views of the soul has demonstrated that every educational philosophy necessarily relies on a pre-existing view of the human person. Anthropology will inevitably inform pedagogy. In our last installment, we reached a dangerous crossroads in the seventeenth century with René Descartes, who performatively severed the human person into two isolated substances:…
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The Soul of Education, Part 7: The Thomistic Synthesis-Soul as Form and Spirit
The Great Conversation regarding the nature of the human person finds a singular climax in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Known as the Doctor Angelicus, Aquinas was a Dominican friar whose life’s work involved reconciling the newly rediscovered Aristotelian corpus with the established Augustinian theological tradition. Born into a noble family in Italy,…