Author: Bill Vallicella

UAP, NHIs, NHEs, AI, and Demons

Too many word slingers these days use abbreviations without explanation. Not me. UAP: unidentified aerial phenomena; NHIs: non-human intelligences; NHEs: non-human extraterrestrials; AI: artificial intelligence.  As for angels and demons, should there be any, they would fall under NHIs.

You already know what UFO stands for. Many of you, however, fail to understand that UFO  does not have the same extension as NHE.  A UFO may or may not be a NHE

On 27 July 2025 I wrote:

You may remember our ‘demonic’ discussion from last summer. [The summer of ’24]  See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., “The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the ‘soul’ or will’) of a person by one or more evil spirits.” (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher’s book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions. 

I now draw your attention to Dreher who in a characteristically prolix recent entry refers us to a film on UAP:

The film’s focus is on science and national security. The only time religion and spirituality come up is briefly, early in the film, when several interviewees say there is a group of “fundamentalists” within the Deep State who try to discourage investigation into the UAP/NHI story, because they believe it’s all demonic, and we shouldn’t be messing with it. The movie gives you the sense that these crazy Christians are trying to inhibit progress.

They’re talking about the Collins Elite, about whom I wrote last year. I read a book about them last December, and wrote about it. From that newsletter:

After reading yesterday’s post here, a friend texted to suggest that the Collins Elite might be opposed to US Government engagement with these demonic entities not so much because they are afraid of the demons (though they are), but because they are more afraid of what we humans will do with the information we learn from them. This insight seems to be vindicated by what Redfern reports. Here Redfern quotes someone with experience of the Collins Elite:

“They came to believe that the NHEs were not extraterrestrial at all; they believed they were some sort of demonic entities. And that regardless of how benevolent or beneficial any of the contact they had with these entities seemed to be, it always ended up being tainted, for lack of a better term, with something that ultimately turned out to be bad. There was ultimately nothing positive from the interaction with the NHE entities. They felt it really fell more under the category of some vast spiritual deception instead of UFOs and aliens. In the course of the whole discussion, it was clear that they really viewed this as having a demonic origin that was there to simply try and confuse the issue in terms of who they were, what they wanted, and what the source of the ultimate truth is. If you extrapolate from their take that these are demons in the biblical sense of the word, then what they would be doing here is trying to create a spiritual deception to fool as many people as possible.”

More:

They were concerned that they had undertaken this initially with the best of intentions, but then as things developed they saw a very negative side to it that wasn’t apparent earlier. So, that’s what leads me to think they had a relatively lengthy involvement.” The story became even more complex when the reasoning behind, and the goals of, the project were revealed to Boeche:

“Most of it was related to psychotronic weaponry and remote viewing, and even deaths by what were supposed to be psychic methods.” Certainly, the NHEs, it was deduced by those attached to the DoD project, possessed extraordinary, and lethal, mental powers. And, as a result, deeper plans were initiated, using nothing less than ancient rites and black rituals, to actually try and contact the NHEs with two specific—some might say utterly crackpot—goals in mind: (1) controlling them and (2) exploiting their extraordinary mental powers in the form of devastating weaponry.”

“Boeche” is Ray Boeche, an Episcopal priest and theologian who had established himself as an investigator in the religious implications of UFOs. Two members of the Collins Elite — Defense Department physicists — approached him and shared with him their concerns:

The conversations [with Boeche] always followed broadly similar ground: namely, that the Human Race was being deceived into believing that it was receiving visitations from aliens, when in reality demonic forces were secretly squaring up for Armageddon and the final countdown. And, the DoD’s overwhelmingly reckless dabbling into occult-driven areas to try and make a bizarre-but-futile pact of some sort with these same forces was inevitably, and only, destined to make things much, much worse for each and every one of us.

One more:

With respect to his own views, as well as those of the two DoD physicists, Boeche added: “As a pastor and someone who’s trained as a theologian, I can’t come to any other conclusion than there is some sort of spiritual deception going on here. In so many of these kinds of alien contacts, the entities involved make a denial of Christianity; anytime the spiritual issues are addressed, there is always some sort of denial of the validity of Christianity and the validity of the Bible. And I find it interesting that these percipients are told that Jesus was a great guy, but you just misunderstood him. They say: he wasn’t really God’s son. You just don’t quite get it. But you never hear them say that about Buddha, or Krishna, or Mohammed. It always seems to come down to some sort of denial of Christianity. The percipients, whether you consider them contactees or abductees are engaged by the NHEs in spiritual discussions—but it’s always one-sided. “I would have a lot less suspicion of the potential of the demonic nature of these things if they were to say: ‘You guys are all screwed up; all of your spiritual leaders had some good ideas, but none of them really got it. It’s a big mess.’ But it seems to be so specifically pointed at the Judeo-Christian tradition. It certainly seems to me like it’s the two genuine forces squaring up against each other.”

Back to Dreher:

See, this is what I believe is probably the case. Someone who doesn’t turn up in the film is Jacques Vallée, who is the grey eminence of UAP studies. Vallée is in his eighties now, and is not a Christian, but has come to believe that whatever this phenomenon is, it is ultimately spiritual/non-material, and that these entities do not mean humanity well. Vallée has written a number of books; one of the most important is Passport To Magonia (1969); here is a link to read the entire text for free online. The book’s basic claim is that UAPs are not extraterrestrial visitors, but are probably interdimensional entities that have always been present among humans, but have manifested themselves in different ways, depending on the age and the culture.

For example, in a scientific-technological culture, these entities appear as creatures from space, because they can be understood within that paradigm. Vallée posits that these are the same entities that have in ages and cultures past have presented themselves as fairies, elves, and other paranormal or supernatural beings. He points out that many of the phenomena associated with so-called alien encounters and alien abductions, like time distortion, have also been reported in folklore across many cultures.

This seems entirely plausible to me. I know, call me crazy, but I think this is probably true. You new readers won’t know this, but I thought the whole UAP/UFO thing was … well, if not exactly nonsense, at least nothing I cared about. This was the case until around 2023, when a journalist friend in Rome, a Catholic, told me that he knows I think all this is fairly silly, but that I should give it a second look, because there’s a lot coming out about it — and there’s very much a religious and spiritual angle to it. I found out that this is actually true.

Gettier Cases and Epistemic Infallibilism

I wrote this a year ago, but never posted it. It is relevant to the preceding post. Epistemic infallibilism (EI) makes short work of Gettier cases.  But is this a compelling reason to accept EI?  You can guess what I will say: here we have another insoluble problem.

…………………………..

In an earlier thread, Elliot writes:

I’m inclined to agree with you and Butchvarov that [propositional] knowledge entails objective certainty. Why? For one thing, the thesis of epistemic infallibilism seems immune to the epistemic luck present in Gettier cases. Or as Socrates might put it, objective certainty tethers true belief so that it doesn’t run away (Meno) at the sight of epistemic luck. For another thing, epistemic infallibilism explains why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

The Gettier problem is old hat, and not just since 1963. The following from SEP:

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTB analysis. Although most agree that each element of the tripartite theory is necessary for knowledge, they do not seem collectively to be sufficient. There seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge. Here is one kind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right there under a rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus 1997: 292)

The above example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE. The 14th-century Italian philosopher Peter of Mantua presented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to be running, but you mistakenly believe that he is Socrates, so that you firmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be so that Socrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this. (from Peter of Mantua’s De scire et dubitare, given in Boh 1985: 95)

A Chisholmian example from IEP:

The sheep in the field (Chisholm 1966/1977/1989). Imagine that you are standing outside a field. You see, within it, what looks exactly like a sheep. What belief instantly occurs to you? Among the many that could have done so, it happens to be the belief that there is a sheep in the field. And in fact you are right, because there is a sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. You cannot see that sheep, though, and you have no direct evidence of its existence. Moreover, what you are seeing is a dog, disguised as a sheep. Hence, you have a well justified true belief that there is a sheep in the field. But is that belief knowledge?

A common objection to epistemic infallibilism is that it eliminates much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know. For example, I justifiably believe that I am now looking at a lamp with a blue lampshade. But since it’s possible that I’m wrong, I don’t know that I’m looking at a lamp. Some will want to say that I know I’m looking at a lamp. The infallibilist can say that I know I’m having an experience as of looking at a lamp, or that I know I’m being appeared-to-lamp-bluely, but I don’t know (precisely speaking) that I’m looking at a lamp.

One point to discuss further: What is meant by “impossibility of mistake?” What sort of possibility is at work here?

Aquinas and Hylomorphism Again

Over lunch on Sunday, Brian B asked me to explain my disagreement with Ed Feser and others over Aquinas’ hylomorphism.  Here is a pithier statement than the ones I’ve already posted.

I will assume with Aquinas that human beings after death continue to exist as disembodied souls until the general resurrection. The question I and others have posed is how the persistence of individual  souls after death is conceivable on the Aristotelian hylomorphic principles to which Thomas subscribes.  Why should this be a problem?  The problem is that the following propositions, each of which is a doctrinal commitment of Thomas, are collectively logically inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

a) Designated matter in material substances both individuates their forms and accounts for the substances’ numerical difference. Thus Peter and Paul are two and not one because of the difference in their designated matter.  And their forms are individuated by designated matter as well.  This implies that (i) Peter’s substantial form is numerically different from Paul’s, and that (ii) neither form is an individual form without the matter that individuates it.

b) The souls of living things are substantial forms of their bodies: anima forma corporis. Peter and Paul are living things; hence their souls are individual substantial forms of their bodies. To put it more precisely, Peter and Paul are  form-matter composites.  The psychic or soulic component in each is the individual substantial form, and the material component in each is the parcel of designated matter.  Each component needs the other to be what it is: the psychic-formal component needs the material component for its individuation, and the material component needs the psychic component for its animation.  And neither component can exist without the other: each exists only together with the other. Thus the whole of which they are proper parts is not a whole compounded of parts that can exist on their own,  as substances in their own right, but a whole the parts of which are mere ‘principles’ in scholastic jargon and thus not substances in their own right. This implies that the hylomorphic whole, which is a substance in its own right,  is ontologically prior to the morphic and hyletic parts which are not substances in their own right.  Bear in mind that a primary substance, by definition, is a basic entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

c) The souls of humans, unlike those of non-human animals, are subsistent: they are metaphysically capable of independent existence. So the souls of Peter and Paul will continue to exist after their bodily death in a disembodied intermediate state  prior to their re-embodiment in the general resurrection.

The triad is inconsistent because (a) and (b) taken together entail the negation of (c). Indeed any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.

In a nutshell: it cannot be the case that souls depend on material bodies for their existence and individuation but continue to exist as individual souls after bodily death in a bodiless state.

What Thomists want to say is that SOMEHOW a substantial form that achieves individuation ‘here below’ pre-mortem by marriage with a hunk of matter, thereby animating said hunk of matter, continues to exist as a disembodied individual soul  ‘up yonder’ post-mortem AFTER the individuating factor has been removed. That makes no sense. What would make sense is that the individual soul cease to exist after the death of the body. Bear in mind that the soul on an Aristotelian hylomorphic mereological analysis is a mere ‘principle’ of the hylomorphic composite entity and not itself a substance.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that despite the Angelic Doctor’s  noble attempt to stay as close as possible to The Philosopher (philosophus), he is in the end a substance dualist of sorts, though not quite along Platonic, Augustinian, or Cartesian lines.

There was a time when I thought that, with respect to the soul, Thomas was an Aristotelian ‘on earth,’ but a Platonist ‘in heaven.’ (I may have picked up that line from Anthony Kenny.) But then the problem of the SOMEHOW,  the problem of how a human soul can go from a mere non-subsistent ‘principle’ to a  subsistent upon the removal of the soul’s individuating factor, becomes insoluble.  I now think that it would be better to say that, with respect to the soul, the doctor angelicus was a Platonist in both the sublunary and superlunary spheres, both ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven,’ and this in consequence of his Christian theological commitments which exercise ‘veto power’ over his philosophical assertions.

Disagreement in Philosophy

Substack latest.

That philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge. Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs says it doesn’t. I say it does.

Had I never been born, would I have missed out on anything?

Suppose all who are born will receive an utterly blissful, unending, afterlife.  That’s quite a supposition, but just suppose. Add to this the reasonable assumption that one first comes to be at birth, or rather at conception: one does not pre-exist one’s conception either as an actual  Platonic soul awaiting embodiment, or as a merely possible individual awaiting actualization.  Two assumptions, then. The second assumption amounts to the claim that before one is conceived one is nothing at all.

Given the truth of both assumptions, had I never been born, I could not have missed out on any good things, in this life or the next, and this for the reason that one cannot be the recipient of any good if one does not exist. Call that the underlying principle.

To state the underlying principle in general form: Nothing can give, receive, have, lack, enjoy, or suffer any thing, action, property, or state unless it exists.

And so, although I am alive, and the good in my life preponderates and will (let us assume)  continue to preponderate over the bad as long as I am alive, and I will receive eternal bliss from the moment of death on,  I would not and could not have missed out on anything had I never been born (or rather conceived).

Is the underlying principle more reasonably accepted or more reasonably rejected?

Assume you agree that it is the former.  Now consider someone whose life in this world is on balance very bad, but its badness will be more than compensated for by an eternity of heavenly bliss. Even so, it seems to me that it would have been better had this poor schmuck never been born, and this for the reason that, first, had he never been born, he would never have suffered the terrible things he suffered in this life, and second, had he never been born, he would not and could not miss out on anything good including transcendent goods that would have more than compensated him for his earthly suffering.

An Augustinian Argument against Suicide

Examined and rejected. Top o’ the Stack.

Facebook advertisement: “Mercifully brief, perfectly rigorous, and indisputably sound.”   I wouldn’t promote it that way here, of course.

Contemplating suicide?  Look before you leap.

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, p. 230:

The yearning to leave the world is so strong at times that I don’t know how to resist it, but am nearly sure that this is the great temptation that must at all costs be warded off.

Hyperreality and the Fraudulence of Fuentes

Christopher Rufo may have come up with the best analysis of the Fuentes phenomenon. He is, says Rufo,

. . . an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain.

He has incited division on the Right. Some conservatives think that the kid should be ignored lest his views be legitimized. Others think his views should be debated and refuted. This conservative contretemps can be side-stepped once it is realized that what I called “his views” are not authentically his and put forth in good faith. So his false and contradictory statements, interspersed with some reasonable ones to add to the confusion, ought not be taken at face value. The guy is operating in

. . . what postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality”: a system in which the simulation of reality comes to replace reality itself. Under conditions of hyperreality, symbols of past phenomena lose their original meaning. Emptied out, they then circulate through digital media, where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement. In this way, the hyperreal becomes “more real than real,” masking the true nature of reality. [. . .]

The tone of his discourse is not authentic, serious, or reflective. It is ironic, cynical, and provocative. When Fuentes lauds Hitler and, in another interview, praises Stalin—irreconcilable ideological enemies—he is not expressing a comprehensible ideology that can be scrutinized in debate. He is engaging in a performance, which only becomes coherent when read as a demand for attention.

I would call it performative bullshit of the sort engaged in by Gavin Newsom with his “hand jive,” Kamala Harris, with her hyena-like risibility,  “Tampon Tim” Walz, Swalwell, Cory Booker with his baseball bat,  and other Democrat clowns.  Nancy “The Shredder” Pelosi recently got into the act by tearing apart a fake crown in line with the mindless Faux-King meme.  Trump has them completely under his control so much so that all they can do is flail about reactively with silly memes, endlessly repeated dealings of the race and Hitler cards, all the while saying nothing of substance and proposing nothing positive.

So the best response to Fuentes the political performance artist may well be no response at all.   This too shall pass.

I’ll add one nuance to Rufo’s take:  Fuentes is probably not fully self-transparent in his fraudulence. He knows not fully what he does. He is a confused kid who craves and receives attention, attention that has gone to his head; a kid  mesmerized by the high tech that permits him to propagate his performances and baseless asseverations, but is also — let’s be fair — truly troubled by what troubles a lot of the Zoomers. They’ve been cheated by the abdication of authority on the part of parents, teachers, and clergy.

Which brings me to my last point: the Zoomers do have legitimate grievances, some of which have been mentioned in the previous comment thread.

Related:  The Bonfire of the New Right’s Vanities

Soriano Summarizes Dreher’s Take on the ‘Groyper’ Phenomenon

The following is by James Soriano who does an excellent job of summarizing important points made by Dreher who, though prolix, is turning out good content on this and related topics.

………………………………

I link below a rambling essay by Rod Dreher on his visit to Washington, where he had a long conversation with VP Vance in the company of Hungary’s Viktor Orban on the future of Christianity in Europe and other things.

It is a nightmare about the state of American conservatism.  Despite Trump’s victory, conservatives are being subverted by radical Generation Z newcomers.  Many are so-called Christians conservatives and impoverished policy activists.  As a group, they have clustered around a white-supremacist ideology in which anti-Semitism is in the foreground.  They look to Tucker and this gent, Nick Fuentes, for inspiration.  They’re called “Groypers.”

The essay goes into a long digression about the prevalence of Jews in certain walks of life, but at the end Dreher recapitulates the main points of his findings during his Washington visit. 

I’ve shortened them and I would like to pass them along because they summarize the state of the civil war now raging in the ranks of conservatives.  There is much to be pessimistic about.

1.  The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement.  It really has infiltrated young conservative networks.

2.  Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it.  

3.  It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down.

4.  The gatekeepers of the Right can’t make it go away.  They have less power than ever.  Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.

5.  This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances.  It is primed to believe totalitarian things.

6.  The Left got there first.  Left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies.   You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.

7.  Conservatives hoped Trump’s anti-woke pushback would restore the meritocratic status quo.  The Zoomercons don’t want that.  They want revenge.

8.  This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. 

9.  It poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance. 

10.  Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation.  They’re getting it through online influencers.  Their pastors and parents are not fighting back; they have lost authority.  Some Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it.  The same phenomenon exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants.  This is spiritual poison.

11. The liberal media is going to have a field day with this to distract from the fact that antisemitism is triumphant among progressives.  The new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani.

12.  Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed.  Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. 

13.  The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it.

What I Saw And Heard In Washington

Related:

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

Burnout or viso mystica? A Substack article.

Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life makes it difficult to take religion seriously and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. It therefore comes as no surprise that someone would point to ‘burnout’ as the explanation of Aquinas’ failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:

The Proselytic Mentality

On occasion we encounter morally good people who are sincerely interested in our spiritual welfare, so much so that they fear that we will be lost if we differ from the views they cherish, even if our views are not so very different from theirs.  Julian Green in his Diary 1928-1957, entry of 10 April 1929, p. 6, said to André Gide:

With the best will in the world, they never see you without a lurking idea of proselytism. They are worried about our salvation.  They visibly have it on their minds., even when you talk to them of quite different matters. . . .  “Yes indeed!” cries Gide. “They will use every means to draw you to them. When you are with them you find yourself in the situation of a woman faced with a man who would harbor intentions!”

I’d guess the alacrity and enthusiasm of Gide’s response to Green had its origin in Gide’s relation to Paul Claudel, a committed Roman Catholic who never ceased trying to bring Gide around to the true faith. The Claudel-Gide correspondence 1899-1926 makes for fascinating reading.

What I find objectionable about the proselytic mentality is the cocksurety with which the proselytes hold their views.  They dogmatically affirm this and they dogmatically deny that, and are not in the least troubled by the fact that people as intellectually and morally virtuous as they are disagree. They ‘know’ what salvation is and the way to it.  The critical attitude is foreign to them. The fervor of their beliefs boils over into something they wrongly consider knowledge.

Their attitude is mostly harmless, but there are toxic forms of it, as history has taught us. The Founders of our great republic were well aware of the religious wars and of the blood shed by the dogmatists. These days it is the spikes of the Islamic trident that are a clear and present threat: conversion, dhimmitude, the sword. The ascension of a madman to the mayoralty in our greatest city is a troubling sign.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms have the Same Reference?

Could Frege’s sense-reference distinction be put to work? I think not.

Top o’ the Stack.

I made the point a while back that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, ‘This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.’ To which a Vietnam veteran, altering the example, replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuroscientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain…, he isn’t claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality. And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states. Well, I doubt it. In fact, I deny it.

Klima on Intellective Soul and Living Body in Aquinas and the Immortality of the Human Soul

Gyula Klima:

The composition from intellective soul and living body, and the natural immortality of the human soul (a section of a long paper)
. . . given the immateriality of the intellect, which I will not attempt to prove now, but let us just assume for the sake of the argument, the activity of the intellect cannot have as its subject the composite of body and soul, or as Aquinas would put it, this activity does not communicate with matter. What this means is that its acts are not acts of any parts of the body, in the way in which, say, my acts of sight are obviously the acts of my visual apparatus enformed [informed] by my sensitive soul.
BV:  The first sentence above strikes me as obviously true. For example, when I contemplate the theorem of Pythagoras, what in me thinks that thought?  No part of my living body, not even my brain or any part of my brain.  Nor is it the soul-body composite that thinks the thought. In the schema ego-cogito-cogitatum, where the cogitatum is the theorem in question, the ego cannot be any material thing, and thus no proper or improper part of my material body.  As for the act of thinking, the cogitatio, it cannot be any state of, or process in, any part of my material body.  In particular, it cannot be a brain state or process. So far, I agree with Klima and Thomas.  But suppose  I am having a coherent, ongoing, visual experience as of a tree. Is it obvious that this act of visual experiencing requires eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex, etc. , which is what I take Klima to be referring to with “visual apparatus”? No, it is not obvious, but to explain why would take us too far afield.
The point of agreement so far is that intellective acts do not “communicate with matter.” But if sensory acts do so communicate, then are there two souls involved in my cognitive life, an intellective soul and a sensitive soul?  Or is there only one soul? Only one according to Klima.
But the same sensitive soul also has intellective acts, which Aquinas argues cannot be the acts of any bodily organ, or to put it simply, I am not thinking with my brain (or any other organ for that matter): my brain merely provides, so to speak, “food for my thought”, in the form of phantasms, the singular representations of sensible singulars, which then my intellect further processes in its own acts of abstraction, concept formation, judgment formation and reasoning, all of which are acts of the intellect alone, which therefore cannot have the body and soul composite as their subject, but the soul alone.
BV: Right, we don’t think with our brains.  But we live in a world of concrete material particulars or singulars many of which are also sensible, i.e., able to be sensed.   My knowledge that the tree is green is sensory not intellective.  Phantasms are singular representations of singular sensibles. But it is quite unclear to me how the brain can “provide” or  “serve up” these representations for the intellect to “feast on” and intellectively process.  Are  the phantasms  located in the brain where the intellect gets hold of them for “processing”?  A representation is a representation of something (genitivus obiectivus) and it is is difficult to understand how any part of a hunk of meat can represent anything.  What gives bits of brain matter representational power?  But I won’t pursue this question further here. I pursue it elsewhere. We now come to the gravamen of my complaint against the hylomorphic attempt to explain personal survival of bodily death.
We are told that the soul-body composite cannot be the subject of sensory knowledge any more than it can be the subject of intellective knowledge. This, however, has the consequence that the intellective soul is not only a form, enforming [informing] the body, but is also a subject of its own power, the intellect, and its acts. But then, it exists not only as that by which the living body is, but also as that which is the underlying subject of its own acts which it does not communicate with the body. Therefore, upon the death of a human person, when the soul gets separated from the body, the soul ceases to be the form of the body, but that does not mean that it also has to cease to be. Since its own operations are not acts of the body, they can continue without its union with the body. But to operate, it must exist; so, it can naturally go on existing, as the underlying subject of its own intellectual operations. So, when a person dies, the person ceases to exist, but the person’s soul merely ceases to be a form of their body, which can persist in its being, naturally continuing the life that used to be the life of the person, as a separate soul, until the same person will be miraculously restituted in the resurrection, resuming the same life, now as a whole person again.
I agree with the first three sentences up to ‘therefore’ the bolding of which I have added.  Klima appreciates that the human soul for Aquinas has a dual function. It not only animates the body of which it is the soul, thereby making it a living body, but it is also that which thinks when a human being engages in intellective acts. The human soul is not only that by which the living body is alive; it is also “the underlying subject of its own [intellective] acts,” acts which do not “communicate with matter” and are therefore not the acts of the soul-body composite, the unitary psychophysical complex. So it is not Socrates qua soul-body composite who ponders whether virtue is teachable or whether there is more to knowledge than true belief; it is the intellect alone in Socrates that is the subject of these acts. That sounds right to me.
But we are then told, in the sentences  after therefore, that this individual (not universal) intellective soul will survive the death of its body.  But this is very hard to make sense of for several reasons.  Indeed, it smacks of a blatant non sequitur.  I will present only one reason in this entry. “Brevity is the soul of blog,” as some wit once observed.
 It is in virtue of forms that things are intelligible. If what thinks in a human being post-mortem is a form, however, then that form is not only intelligible but also intelligent.  It is not only intelligible, but intelligible to itself, which is to say that it is at once both intelligible and intelligent.  I find it hard to understand how a pure immaterial form, a form that does not inform anything, a form that is not a form of anything, can be both intelligible and intelligent. I find it hard to understand how  the subject and the object of acts of intellection could be one and the same.  I don’t intend this as a merely autobiographical comment. I am suggesting that anyone ought to find it hard to understand, indeed impossible to understand, and therefore intrinsically  unintelligible.  But in philosophy we are not allowed to make bare or gratuitous assertions. Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur. So I need to argue this out. I will begin by giving two examples of intrinsically unintelligible notions.
a) The first example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of a thing that causes its own existence. Since nothing can exercise causality unless it exists, nothing can cause its own existence. Not even God in his omnipotence could cause his own existence. For there cannot be an exercise of (efficient) causality unless there exists something or someone that/who exercises it. Necessarily, no action without an agent. But more than that: no action without an agent the being of which is not exhausted in its acting on a given occasion. What that means is that the agent cannot be identical to his action.  If Guido makes a meatball, there has to be more to Guido than that particular act of making that particular meatball, which is to say: no agent is identical to any of its actions, or the sum of them.   Suppose, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, that agent S performs action A. Even in a case like this the agent is not identical to any of his actions or the sum of them.
b) A second example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of an open sentence that has a truth value. ‘___ is wise’ is an example of an open sentence. It can also be depicted using the free variable ‘x’ thusly: ‘x is wise.’ This open sentence, which picks out what Russell calls a propositional function, is neither true nor false: it lacks a truth value. A (closed) sentence results if we either substitute a name for the variable ‘x’ or bind the variable with a quantifier. Both ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘For all x, x is wise’ are closed sentences which attract a truth value. That is a philosopher’s way of saying that they can be evaluated as either true or false. The first is true, the second false. The claim that ‘x is wise’ has a truth value, however, is intrinsically unintelligible: it makes no sense and cannot be understood, by me or anyone.
A pure immaterial form that is both intelligible and intelligent is like an open sentence that has a truth value.  Why? Well, consider the sentences ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is human.’  The first predicates an accidental form of a substance, the second a substantial form of a substance. Those sentences are both meaningful and true. What makes them meaningful is that they express complete thoughts or propositions: each has a subject-term, a copula, and a predicate-term. What makes them true is the inherence of the forms picked out by the predicates in what the subject-terms name,  something that is not a form.   Socrates is not a form.  He is a composite entity, a hylomorphic compound.  Just as it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be an action that was not the action of an agent distinct from the action, it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be a form that was not the form of something (genitivus subiectivus) that was not itself a form.
More  tomorrow.

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

Substack latest.

This entry continues the line of thought in Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God’s creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God’s free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite yet autonomous free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source himself even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. He creates Lucifer who became the father of all perversity. The “Father of lights” (James 1:17) creates the father of lies.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?