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Hylomorphism and Human Wholeness:Perspectives on the Mind-Brain ProblemMichael J. Dodds OPPublished online: 14 Apr 2009.

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Hylomorphism and Human Wholeness: Perspectiveson the Mind-Brain Problem

MICHAEL J. DODDS, OP

Abstract The relation between mind and matter has always been a conundrum in Western

philosophy. Now framed as the mind-brain problem, it is often addressed through reductionism or

dualism. As empirical science has become more aware of instances of emergence and top-down

causality, however, it has developed a new appreciation of the wholeness of individuals or systems.

By retrieving some aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy of hylomorphism, we may better understand the

metaphysical grounding of human wholeness and so develop an integrated account of the human

person, including mind and brain.

Key words: Mind; Brain; Wholeness; Hylomorphism; Aristotle; Aquinas; Emergence

The relation of mind to matter has been a puzzler for Western philosophy from its

beginning. Thales (620–550 BC), was the first to search for a single, fundamental

stuff of the universe. What he found was water. Deep down, everything is water.

However, he also referred to ‘‘soul’’ as a principle endowed with the power of

motion.1 Was ‘‘soul’’ identical with matter, or was it somehow above or

independent of matter? Thales does not say, but his successor, Anaximines

(570–500 BC), thought that soul was the same as matter. The fundamental matter

of the universe was air, and the soul was also air: ‘‘As our soul which is

air . . . holds us together, so wind and air encompass the whole world.’’2

Anaxagoras (500–430 BC), however, taught that mind (nous) was other than

matter. The universe was composed of small primordial seeds, but mind was

distinct from these: ‘‘Other things include a portion of everything, but mind is

infinite and self-powerful and mixed with nothing, but it exists alone itself by

itself.’’ In some ways, though, mind sounds like a kind of rarified matter: ‘‘It is the

most rarefied of all things and the purest.’’3 Is mind or soul itself a kind of matter,

though different from the other matter of the universe? Or is it somehow distinct

from, and transcendent of matter? There was no clear answer in early Greek

philosophy, and no universally accepted understanding has been found in the

intervening centuries between that time and our own.

Followers of Plato (427–347 BC) emphasized the division between the mental

and material aspects of the human being, while disciples of Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Theology and Science, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009

ISSN 1474-6700 print/ISSN 1474-6719 online/09/020141-22ª 2009 Center for Theology and the Natural SciencesDOI: 10.1080/14746700902796759

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(including the medieval philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas [1225–

1274]) began with an affirmation of the unity of the human person and then tried

to make appropriate distinctions between material and immaterial aspects. The

discussion was fundamentally rebooted in the seventeenth century by the dualism

of Rene Descartes (1596–1650), who simply defined the human as two substances,

an immaterial ‘‘thinking thing’’ and a material ‘‘extended thing.’’

The debate continues in contemporary philosophy, where it is often framed as

the ‘‘mind-brain problem.’’ The options, however, remain remarkably similar to

those discovered by the early Greeks. The mind is either the same as the brain, or

it is distinct. If distinct, it is either a completely different substance from the brain

or it is somehow united with the brain as distinct parts of a larger whole.

Each of these options presents its own problems. If the mind is one with the

brain, and so one with matter, and if the behavior of matter is determined (at least

statistically), what becomes of human self-determination and freedom? If the

mind is completely other than the brain, what happens to the unity and integrity

of the human person? If mind and brain are parts of a larger whole, what is the

nature of that whole? How can one of its parts affect another? Moreover, what

becomes of these parts when, at death, the whole ceases to exist?

A new understanding of causality that has been gaining favor in cognitive

science and in various physical and biological sciences may provide a tool to

address such questions. This is top-down causality. It explains the behavior of the

part in terms of the whole (unlike reductionism which explains the behavior of the

whole in terms of the part). It is reminiscent of a kind of causality known to Greek

philosophy and the scholastic thought of Thomas Aquinas, but largely neglected

by the scientific community since Galileo. This is the formal causality of Aristotle’s

hylomorphic philosophy. By retrieving this understanding of causality, we may be

able to address some fundamental questions about the mind-brain relationship.

I will give a few examples of top-down causality in contemporary science and

then discuss how it is related to Aristotle’s notion of formal causality. I will then

look at how that notion can help us address three particular questions regarding

the mind-brain relationship: how mind and brain together are united in one

human person, whether the mind survives the death of the brain, and how to

conceive the relationship of mind and brain.

Top-down Causality in Science

Science now finds evidence of top-down causality in brain activity. The ‘‘part’’

(the activity of individual brain neurons) does not explain the ‘‘whole’’ (the

complex matrix of brain activities). On the contrary, the whole seems to be

directing the activity of the part.

Roger Sperry was led to this conclusion through his research on the distinctive

functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Sperry maintains that the

kind of spontaneity exhibited by the right hemisphere of the brain is suggestive of

personal freedom and cannot be explained by the mechanical causality of

physics.4 He describes ‘‘mind’’ as the transcendent unity of the neuronal activities

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of both brain hemispheres. Mind, in his words, is ‘‘an organizational, functional

property of brain processing, constituted of neuronal and physicochemical

activity, and embodied in, and inseparable from the active brain.’’5 The mind

cannot be reduced to neuronal activity, but it also cannot exist apart from such

activity and so does not survive the death of the brain.6

John Eccles also believes that the mind cannot be reduced to the neuronal

activity of the brain.7 He points out that certain experiences (such as the

perception one may have in a crisis situation that everything is happening in

‘‘slow motion’’) cannot be explained by neuronal activity. Quite the opposite, such

experiences suggest that the self-conscious mind is itself controlling the brain’s

neuronal activity.8 The mind also seems to control the brain’s activity when it

retrieves memories stored in the cerebral cortex.9 Eccles, unlike Sperry, does not

consider the mind to be merely an emergent property of brain activity, but an

entity whose existence is independent of the brain and which continues to exist

even when the brain dies.10

Brain surgeon Wilder Penfield was also led through his research to conclude

that the mind cannot be reduced to neuronal activity. He worked with patients

suffering from severe cases of epilepsy. Their treatment required the surgical

removal of parts of the brain where uncontrollable discharges of energy were

causing seizures. Patients were conscious during operations as the doctor

stimulated the exposed brain with an electrode to determine the place where

seizures were originating. As the brain was stimulated, patients reported reliving

previous experiences in exact detail. At the same time, they were also aware that

they were lying on the operating table.11 The patients’ ability to have a single

awareness of two distinct experiences convinced Penfield that the mind somehow

transcends the mechanisms of the brain, since only this hypothesis could account

for the kinds of awareness he witnessed.12 Penfield concludes that the human

being involves two distinct elements, mind and brain:

For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brainaction alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier to belogical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamentalelements.13

Though Sperry, Eccles and Penfield differ in their understanding of the nature

of the mind and its relationship to the brain, all agree that the mind acts in ways

that cannot be explained or reduced to the activity of individual parts of the brain.

This ‘‘top-down’’ understanding of causality is in stark contrast to the

reductionistic or ‘‘bottom-up’’ approach of Newtonian physics, where the

behavior of the part determines or explains the behavior of the whole. In

reductionistic science, chemistry would ultimately explain all of biology, and

physics would explain all of chemistry. In cognitive science, as James Jones points

out, the case is quite different:

The demonstrated capacity to control one’s brain waves is most philosophicallyinteresting. Reductive physicalism, and perhaps all forms of physicalism, attributeprimary causation to physical factors, that is, brain activity. It is certainly true thatchanges in electrical activity in the brain correlate with and may be said to cause

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mental activity in many circumstances. EEG biofeedback of electrical activity in thebrain implies that under other conditions, understanding a set of instructions orforming a mental image comes first and is reliably followed by changes in patterns ofbrain activity . . . .While reductive physicalists insist that consciousness is but theresult of cerebral functioning, the results of biofeedback, hypnosis, and brain scansof patients treated with active psychological interventions demonstrate thatconsciously choosing to form an image, redirect attention, refocus thoughts, [or]act differently can directly affect basic cerebral activity.’’14

Holmes Rolston III also suggests how the mind may act causally on the brain:

Minds employ and reshape their brains to facilitate their chosen ideologies andlifestyles. Our ideas and practices configure and reconfigure our sponsoring brainstructures . . . . In the vocabulary of neuroscience, we have ‘mutable maps’ in ourcortical representations, formed and re-formed by our deliberated changes inthinking and resulting behaviors. For example with the decision to play a violin welland resolute practice, string musicians alter the structural configuration of theirbrains to facilitate the differential use of left and right arms—fingering the stringswith one and drawing the bow with the other.15

The rejection of reductionism by some neuroscientists reflects a growing

intuition in other sciences as well that the whole cannot be adequately explained

by the part—that the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.16 In

physics, for instance, quantum theory analyzes the activity of an atom as a whole

rather than analyzing the behavior of its constituent parts. The part, such as the

electron, is understood as a state of the whole rather than as an independent

entity. Ian Barbour argues that ‘‘[a]s more complex systems are built up, new

properties appear that were not foreshadowed in the parts alone. New wholes

have distinctive principles of organization as systems and therefore exhibit

properties and activities not found in their components.’’17

Holmes Rolston explains how top-down causality may be at work in living

things, even at the molecular level:

A biological molecule, though it is always physical material, is readily separablefrom merely physical material right down to the molecular level . . . . If we examine aniron poker microscopically, its functional character is entirely gross and not evidentin the microstructures of the iron. But biofunctioning is structurally present down to10 nanometers and below. Nonbiological molecules have only to be; biologicalmolecules have to work in order to be. Otherwise they disintegrate. Indeed, thebehavior of the particular atoms and electrons involved, right down to the level ofquantum indeterminacies, is not understood until it is understood in terms of abiofunctional analysis.’’18

Roger Sperry describes how this notion of top-down causality has changed our

understanding of the natural world:

[I]n the reciprocal interaction of lower and higher levels, the higher laws and forces(once evolved) exert downward causal control over the lower forces . . . . Inscientific theory this means that the trajectories through space and time of most of

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the atoms on our planet are not determined primarily by atomic or subatomic lawsand forces, as quantum physics would have it, but rather are determined by thelaws and forces of classical physics, of chemistry, of biology, of geology, ofmeteorology, of psychology, even sociology, politics, and the like. The molecules ofall higher living things, for example, are not moved around in our biosphere somuch by molecular laws and forces as they are by the living, vital powers of theparticular species in which they are embedded. Such molecules are flown throughthe air, galloped across the planes, propelled through the water, and so on, not bymolecular forces (nor by quantum mechanics) but by the specific holistic vitalproperties possessed by the organisms in question.19

It is not the activity of the part that explains the action of the whole but the

whole that explains the part. However, if the part cannot account for the activity

of the whole, what does? How do we explain the fact that a conglomeration of

molecules acts as an organized whole in ways that go beyond the capabilities of

the individual molecules? At this point, it may be useful to retrieve the notion

of substantial form.

Top-down Causality and Substantial Form

To understand what is meant by ‘‘substantial form,’’ we have to go back to an

insight, present in Greek philosophy since the time of Anaximines, that change

always involves a principle of continuity and a principle of newness. If nothing of

the old remained in the new, we would not say that the old had become the new.

If, for instance, I simply substitute one pen for another while I am writing, I do not

say the original pen has become the new one, since nothing of the original pen is

present in its replacement. Nor would I say my pen has changed, if there is

nothing new about it (no new place, size, weight, color, etc.). Any change requires

both continuity and newness.

Anaximines believed that air was the fundamental principle of continuity in all

change. All things were air, in one form or another. Change occurred when air

attained a new state of rarefaction or condensation. As air was condensed, it

became water, stones, and so forth. As it was rarefied, it became fire.

Aristotle also thought that in any change there must be principles of continuity

and newness. He recognized two fundamentally different kinds of change in the

natural world.20 In one, usually called ‘‘accidental change,’’ a substance is

modified incidentally while remaining the same basic thing (as a pile of logs may

be built into a cabin, while still remaining logs). In the other, usually called

‘‘substantial change,’’ the substance itself becomes a different kind of thing (as

when a dog dies and so is a dog no longer). The principle of continuity in this kind

of change, however, cannot itself be a substance since it is the substance itself that

is undergoing the change. The substance is precisely what does not endure

through the change. Nor can the principle of newness be some mere incidental

factor (such as the rearrangement of the logs when they become a cabin) since it is

not a mere incidental novelty that needs to be explained, but substantial

newness—a new substance, a new being.

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Aristotle concluded that any substance capable of becoming another kind of

substance must involve two principles—one to explain continuity and another to

explain newness. Neither of these principles can itself be a substance. The principle

of continuity is not a substance. It is rather the mere ‘‘possibility’’ of being a

substance. In addition, the principle of newness is not a substance. It is not a

‘‘thing’’ or a ‘‘what.’’ It is rather ‘‘that by which’’ a thing is the sort of thing that it is.

In Aristotelian philosophy, the principle of possibility is commonly called

‘‘primary matter’’ and the principle of newness is known as ‘‘substantial form.’’21

To avoid confusion with other meanings of ‘‘matter,’’ however, I will here refer to

‘‘primary matter’’ simply as ‘‘possibility-of-being.’’ Each changeable substance is

composed of two principles: possibility-of-being (which explains why the

substance can cease to be what it is and become something else) and ‘‘substantial

form’’ (which explains why the ‘‘possibility-of-being’’ is currently actualized as

this particular kind of substance). Neither of these principles is a mere idea or

abstraction. Each is a real, physical principle—a real aspect of the physis or nature

of any material thing.

Since neither principle is in itself a ‘‘what’’ or an actually existing entity, neither

principle can be investigated directly by empirical science which is equipped by its

method to study ‘‘whats’’ but not ‘‘that by whiches.’’ Yet these principles are

consonant with the investigations of science, and there may be, as William Stoeger

suggests, ‘‘scientifically accessible correlates’’ of these principles. Science might see,

for instance, that ‘‘the characteristics of an entity or system are essentially different

from the characteristics of the components which make it up’’—that it ‘‘functions as

a separate whole, and not just an aggregation of parts . . .’’ A free neutron, for

instance, ‘‘decays with a half-life of about ten minutes,’’ but a bound neutron, as a

component part of an element such as sodium, ‘‘is stable against decay.’’22 Why

this difference? Perhaps because in sodium the neutron is not simply a neutron: it is

sodium. Science might observe the different behaviors of the neutron, but could not

directly study the substantial form by which sodium exists as sodium.

This composition of substantial form and primary matter does not imply

dualism, since we are not dealing with two distinct entities or two complete things

somehow joined together. We are concerned with two principles, neither of which

is itself an independent entity. Neither is able to exist by itself, and neither is

complete in itself. The two principles imply a certain complexity in all changeable

things—but such complexity is implied by the very fact of change itself which

always involves both a principle of continuity and a principle of newness. Such

complexity does not imply dualism since each substance, though composed of

these two principles, is one substance—one thing—not a mixture of two things.23

Before applying the notion of substantial form to the human person, it is

important that we first understand the kind of causality substantial form exercises.

Empirical science tends to deal with efficient causes—forces or agents that

produce change. Substantial form does not exercise its causality in that way. It

acts, not as an efficient cause, but as a formal cause in determining possibility-of-

being to exist as one kind of substance or another.

An example of incidental change may be helpful in explaining the nature of

formal causality. Suppose I take a block of clay and gradually shape it into a

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sphere. The clay has the possibility of becoming spherical and becomes actually

spherical when it attains a certain shape. I am causing the clay to become

spherical, and I do this by exercising efficient causality. I push and pull the clay; I

exert some force on it until it is round. At the same time, I realize that—for all my

pushing and pulling—the clay will not actually be round until it has a round

shape. On another level of causality, therefore, it is that round shape that makes

the clay round. The shape does not make the clay round by pushing, pulling, or

exerting any force on it. It does not act as an efficient cause. Rather, it acts as a

formal cause. A formal cause exercises its causality by making something to be the

kind of thing it is.24 In this example we are dealing with an accidental formal

cause—a particular shape. The round shape is the formal cause that makes the

clay to be actually round. The shape is ‘‘that by which’’ the clay is round.

Similarly, a substantial form does not act as an efficient cause when it causes

possibility-of-being to exist as one substance or another. It exerts no force and

supplies no energy. It exercises its causality precisely as a formal cause: it makes

the possibility-of-being to be actually a particular kind of substance, such as

hydrogen, carbon, dog, or cat.25

A dog ovum, for instance, is the kind of substance it is because of its substantial

form, but it can become a different substance because of its primary matter or

‘‘possibility-of-being.’’ The same is true of the dog sperm: it is what it is because of

its substantial form and can become something else because of its possibility-of-

being. With the union of sperm and ovum, the possibility-of-being is actualized by

the substantial form of dog, and you have a new puppy (or at least the beginning

of one).

The substantial form is not a ghost or a spirit. It is a physical principle of each

material substance which makes the substance to be the kind of thing it is—which

actualizes or determines possibility-of-being to be a particular kind of substance.26

If, as contemporary science is discovering, the part does not account for the

activity of the whole, what does? By retrieving the notion of substantial form, we

can answer that question. The substantial form explains the being of the whole as

a whole.27 Since ‘‘action follows upon being,’’ the substantial form is also the

source of the spontaneous activity of the whole as a whole.28 That which makes a

dog to be a dog—or ‘‘that by which’’ a dog is a dog—explains both why the dog is

a dog and why the dog acts like a dog. It explains this not only with respect to the

dog’s outwardly observable activities, but also with respect to its inner activity,

with respect to the activity of its parts, right down to the atomic level.29 By

considering the substantial form, first insofar as it makes a thing to be the kind of

thing it is, and then insofar as it explains the activity of that thing, we may be able

to understand better the unity of the human person, the possibility of human

immortality, and the relation of mind to brain.30

Substantial Form and the Unity of the Human Person

In contemporary discussions of the mind-brain relationship, three basic options

are usually proposed: materialism, emergence, and dualism.31 These correspond

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to three distinct understandings of the unity of the human being. The materialist

option sees the human as made up of one, fundamental kind of stuff (matter/

energy), to which all of its activities and properties may ultimately be reduced.

Emergence sees the human as composed of the same basic stuff, but denies that all

of its properties are simply reducible to that stuff. Dualism sees the human as a

combination of two radically different kinds of things, matter and spirit. Some

human properties are due to the material component and others to the spiritual

component. I will briefly review these three options and then propose a fourth—

Aristotle’s hylomorphism.

Materialism

Materialist thinkers tend to identify the mind with the brain and ultimately reduce

the mind to brain activity. David L. Wilson, for instance, maintains that ‘‘mental

events are brain events.’’32 Timothy Ferris sees the mind as ‘‘the subject of

consciousness—the totality of thoughts, feelings and sensations presented by the

brain to that segment of it that is consciousness.’’33

The materialist option provides only a tenuous understanding of the unity of

the human being. While it avoids matter-spirit dualism, it fails to see the human

being as a substantial unity. Its basic intuition, as Ferris phrases it, is ‘‘that each of

us, like the wider universe, is made of many different entities.’’34 The human

person manifests a kind of unity, but it is the sort of oneness you might find in a

log cabin. As the logs that form the cabin remain logs even after the structure is

completed, so the human being is a conglomeration of many things somehow

joined together, and all reducible to one basic stuff. Though the materialist option

avoids dualism, we might say it falls into a kind of ‘‘multiplism’’ (in its account of

the human person as composed of myriad more basic substances) or monism

(when those substances are in turn reduced to one basic thing).

Emergence

Those who favor emergence see the mind as somehow proceeding from the

activity of the brain, but manifesting properties that cannot be reduced simply to

brain function. Roger Sperry, for instance, considers the mind as ‘‘over and above,

and different from our brain physiology,’’ though always ‘‘an organizational

functional property of brain processing, . . . inseparable from the active brain.’’35

John Searle believes that ‘‘mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological

processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain.’’36 Brain features

can be described on two levels, as mental events or physiological events.37

However, consciousness cannot be ontologically reduced to brain activity the way

that color is reduced to light waves, or heat to the motion of molecules. Such

reductions involve ‘‘carving off’’ the subjective experience of color or heat, by

‘‘redefining’’ such phenomena in terms of their objectively observable and

measurable features. This cannot be done in the study of consciousness, for here

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‘‘the phenomena that interest us most are the subjective experiences themselves,’’

and so there is ‘‘no way to carve anything off.’’38

Ideas of emergence come in various colors and flavors.39 Philip Clayton

distinguishes four understandings of emergence: ‘‘(1) weak and (2) strong

epistemological emergence, and (3) weak and (4) strong ontological emergence.

That is, our inability to reduce higher to lower levels (1) might merely reflect

limitations in our theories and experimental methods or (2) might reveal inherently

unknowable features of the natural world. Likewise, emergent units or wholes such

as organisms (3) might reflect merely more or less stable structures in the natural

world or (4) might be entities that are fully as real as quarks and muons.’’ Clayton

himself advocates ‘‘strong emergence in both cases.’’40 Nancey Murphy sees

emergence as a mode of ontological reductionism, the claim that ‘‘higher level

entities are nothing but the sum of their parts.’’ One type of ontological reductionism,

that she calls reductive materialism, asserts that only the most basic parts of higher

level entities are ‘‘really real.’’ Another type, that she names emergence or ‘‘non-

reductive physicalism,’’ claims that higher level entities (such as human beings) are

‘‘as real as the entities that compose them.’’41 Terrence Deacon proposes three orders

of emergence: first, when properties emerge as a consequence of ‘‘shape interaction’’

(as when water molecules combine to produce the new phenomenon of surface

tension); second, when properties emerge in complex or self-organizing systems ‘‘as

a consequence of shape interactions played out over time’’ (as in the formation of

snowflakes); third, when properties emerge ‘‘as a consequence of shape, time, and

‘remembering how to do it’’’ (as in the emergence of biological traits). A property

such as metabolism may be ‘‘nothing but its constituent parts,’’ and at the same time

‘‘something more, something new and emergent.’’42

There seems to be a constant tension in emergence between the ‘‘nothing but’’

(which sounds like reductionism) and the ‘‘something more’’ (which might sound

like a step toward dualism). There are lingering questions such as how the

‘‘something more’’ can emerge from the ‘‘nothing but,’’ how it maintains its new

ontological status, and what sort of ontological status it actually has when it

emerges (that of a new ontological whole with a distinctive identity or that of a

mere accidental unity, a new pattern of ontologically more fundamental parts).

For Nancey Murphy, emergent properties, though ‘‘nothing but the sum of their

parts,’’ are not reducible to those parts.43 Philip Clayton maintains that emergent

wholes ‘‘are more than the sum of their parts,’’ manifest ‘‘new types of causal

interaction,’’ and ‘‘require new types of explanation adequate to each new level of

phenomena.’’44 This view of emergence is sometimes called ‘‘property dualism.’’

It sees the mind as material, but does not consider mental properties reducible to

brain states. David Chalmers’ ‘‘naturalistic dualism’’ resembles this since he thinks

mental properties are not reducible to physical properties and are governed by

‘‘psychophysical laws’’ that specify ‘‘how phenomenal (or protophenomenal)

properties depend on physical properties.’’ Such laws do not ‘‘interfere with

physical laws’’ which ‘‘already form a closed system,’’ but they are able to tell us

‘‘how experience arises from physical processes.’’45

One sign that emergent properties entail a new level of being is that they

exercise (or are said to exercise) new modes of causality, especially top-down

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causality. Nancey Murphy, Philip Clayton and David Chalmers ground such

causal claims in the principle of ‘‘supervenience,’’ the idea that ‘‘one level of

phenomena or type of property (in this case, the mental) is dependent upon

another level (in this case, the biological or neurophysiological), while at the same

time not being reducible to it.’’ Mental properties are recognized ‘‘to be different in

kind from the properties that one observes at lower levels and to exercise a type of

causal influence appropriate to this new emergent level.’’46 Gregory Peterson

argues, however, that ‘‘there is good reason to believe that these [supervenience

arguments] are not going to provide the kind of robust accounts of top-down

causation as had been hoped.’’47 Jaegwon Kim observes: ‘‘No new causal powers

emerge at the higher levels, and this goes against the claim . . . of the nonreductive

physicalist that higher-level properties are novel causal powers irreducible to

lower-level properties’’48 William Kiblinger notes that while Clayton ‘‘refers to

mind as a ‘type of property that emerges from the brain’ . . . he does not

adequately explain how such a property can have causal power or how these

causes relate to other ordinary physical causes.’’49 Top-down causality supposes

the action of the whole, but emergence does not explain what justifies our

considering that whole as one thing instead of a multiplicity or conglomeration of

many things with a kind of incidental unity. In particular, it provides no

ontological ground for the unity of the human person. The mind that emerges

from cerebral processes seems ontologically nothing other than the collectivity of

those processes.

Recognizing the need to ground the being of the whole in accounts of

emergence or top-down causality, a number of thinkers have been led back to the

philosophical notion of form. To Gregory Peterson, the presence of irreducible,

‘‘information-bearing patterns’’ in theories of emergence is generally reminiscent

of Platonic forms, while the specificity of such patterns suggests an Aristotelian

understanding of form. He believes that ‘‘arguments both for and against Platonic

and Aristotelian forms have some relevance here, although this connection has

been poorly explored.’’50 Philip Clayton uses the notion of form to distinguish his

approach to evolution from the reductionist/materialist understanding of Richard

Dawkins: ‘‘I suggest placing renewed emphasis on the ontological significance of

form. In classical philosophy, form meant meaningful structure. For Plato, for

example, it meant ideational content (the idea of a thing); for Aristotle, the

comprehensible nature or essence of a thing.’’51 In his response to a paper by

Philip Clayton, Terrence Deacon also emphasizes the significance of form as a type

of causality that ‘‘takes us back to Aristotle.’’52 Nancey Murphy is also aware of

the nature of formal causality in Aristotle, but seems less eager to exploit this

notion, perhaps because of her conviction that in modern physics ‘‘the concept of

form has no application.’’53

Dualism

Dualist thinkers maintain that the action of the mind is so different from that of the

brain that it can only be explained by viewing the mind as a distinct entity within

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the human being. Wilder Penfield felt obliged by his research to adopt ‘‘the

hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements [mind and

brain].’’54 John Eccles proposes a ‘‘dualist interaction’’ theory in which the ‘‘mind

and brain are independent entities.’’ The brain is in ‘‘World 1’’ (the physical

world) while the mind in ‘‘World 2’’ (the world of consciousness). The two worlds

interact through the ‘‘liaison brain.’’55

This dualist option falls broadly within the philosophical tradition of Descartes,

who maintained that the human being is really two distinct substances, a

‘‘thinking thing’’ and an ‘‘extended thing.’’ Descartes identified the human

essentially with the ‘‘thinking thing.’’56 In the dualist option, there can be no unity

of the human person, unless one chooses to identify the person with only one of

the dual elements.57

Hylomorphism

Is there any way to preserve both the unity of the human person and the reality of

mind and brain as distinct aspects it? I think Aristotle’s philosophy of

hylomorphism—of substantial form and primary matter (or ‘‘possibility-of-

being’’)—can be useful at this point.

The human person, like every changeable substance in the universe, consists of

two principles: possibility-of-being and substantial form. The substantial form

makes the human to be human. It explains why a certain possibility-of-being exists

as a human person. It explains the human as a whole and accounts for the

organization and structure of its parts and the interrelation between them. Unlike

the reductionist approach, where the unity of the person is lost in the multiplicity

of its parts, hylomorphism is able to affirm the diverse parts and structures of

the human being while preserving the integral unity of the person in virtue of the

one substantial form which makes each of those parts to be in fact human. The

principle of possibility-of-being explains why that human substance can cease to

be human and become other substances at death. Since neither principle is

complete in itself, one can affirm this duality of principles without being forced

into a kind of dualism.58 Note that this duality of ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘possibility-of-

being’’ is not to be equated with the distinction between ‘‘mind and body’’ or

‘‘soul and body.’’ The living human body is not mere possibility-of-being. It is a

possibility-of-being already actualized or organized in virtue of its relation to the

human substantial form. Together the human substantial form and possibility-of-

being are the one human person or substance.59

Substantial Form and Human Immortality

As the principle by which the human being is human, the substantial form is also

the source of human action. Since what a thing is determines how a thing acts, the

source of a thing’s being is also the ground of its action. Philosophically, this is the

principle that ‘‘action follows being.’’60 What makes a thing to be what it is also in

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some way explains why the thing does what it does. Conversely, what a thing does

tells us something about what it is.

Like every substance in the universe, the human substance, or human person,

manifests certain activities in virtue of its substantial form. Some of those activities

suggest that the human somehow transcends the limits of other material

substances and so, in certain ways, is unlike any other material substance we

encounter in the cosmos. Materiality implies particularity: this chair, this book,

this flower, this triangle. The human being can transcend the limits of particularity

and know what a triangle is as such, in a way that applies to every triangle. The

human can also know what a chair, a book or a flower is in ways that transcend

any particular chair, book or flower and apply to all. We call this the power of

abstraction. Since particularity is the hallmark of material substances, our ability

to transcend particularity in our act of knowing suggests that we also in some way

transcend materiality in our being. The same sort of transcendence is suggested by

the human activity of self-reflection—our ability to know ourselves as knowing or

to think of our own thinking.61 If we transcend the limits of materiality in actions

(such as the act of knowing), we must also somehow transcend materiality in our

very being, since action follows upon being, and what a thing does flows from what

the thing is.62

If human action transcends materiality, then the human substantial form (which

is the source of that action) must also transcend materiality in some way. If so, the

human substantial form is unlike the substantial form of any other material thing.

To suggest what this difference might imply, we can go back to our earlier

example of the accidental form of roundness in clay that is spherically shaped. The

roundness cannot exist apart from the clay, and the clay cannot exist without

having some shape or other. Neither the formal principle (the shape) nor the

principle of possibility (in this case, the clay) can exist without the other. This is

the case also with the substantial forms of material things. As the circularity of the

clay sphere (its accidental form) does not continue to exist on its own,

independently, when the clay is molded into a cube or some other figure, so the

substantial form of a material substance does not continue to exist on its own,

independently, when that substance ceases to be—when its possibility-of-being is

actualized by some other substantial form (e.g., when the dog dies and so no

longer exists as a dog).

But if the human substantial form transcends materiality, it may be able to

continue to exist without its co-principle of possibility-of-being. It is evident that

the human substance ceases to be at death. The possibility-of-being which was

actualized as human being is then actualized as human no longer, but it becomes

the multiplicity of substances of the human corpse. The human substantial form,

however, does not cease to exist with the dissolution of the human substance.63

Nevertheless, even if it transcends materiality in this way, the human

substantial form is not, by itself, a complete substance. The human substantial

form which continues to exist is not the entire human person, but only one part of

the person since human wholeness requires both form and matter. Aquinas,

therefore, says it would be improper to call such a soul a ‘‘person.’’64 Only at the

resurrection, when the soul is united again in some way to the human material

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principle, will there once more be a complete human substance which can be

called a person. Even by itself, however, the soul is a continued human existence

in view of which we can affirm human immortality while avoiding dualism.

So long as the principle of human substantial form and the principle of

possibility-of-being exist together as the human person, it is the person who acts.

The form is the source of that action but does not act apart from the entire human

substance which is the union of both principles. Therefore, the mind (here and

now) does not act independently of the brain (even though some of its activities

may transcend the materiality of the brain). A thing acts according to the way that

it is, and the human being (here and now) is not merely the human substantial

form, but the integral union of form and possibility-of-being. This philosophical

conclusion accords with current brain research that every act of knowing or

willing is accompanied with some brain activity.

By the same philosophical principle that action follows being, we have reason to

say that, after death, once the human form has an existence or being apart from its

co-principle of possibility-of-being, it will be able to act (to know and to will)

without its co-principle (however much the form may be an incomplete substance

without that co-principle). Since action follows being, if the form exists without the

co-principle, it will also be able to act without that co-principle.65

This has theological implications for the Christian notions of immortality and

resurrection. If the human form endured through death, but were unable to know

or will, it would be difficult to see how the separated human soul could enjoy the

beatific vision of God.66 If, however, the human form itself were equated with the

human person (following Descartes’ tendency to see the mind or soul as identical

with the human person instead of Aristotle’s insight that the complete human

person is a unity of both substantial form and possibility-of-being), there would be

little philosophical reason for a resurrection involving (in some way) a reuniting of

possibility-of-being and the human substantial form.

Formal Causality and Mind-Brain Relation

Finally, we can take a brief look at formal causality in comparison to today’s basic

options for the mind-brain relation: materialism, emergence, and dualism. In a

purely materialistic account of the human person, the problem of the mind’s

action on the brain does not arise. Since mind and brain are the identical material

reality, there is no question of one acting on the other. Overcoming the mind-brain

problem in this way, however, introduces serious issues for human freedom, as

mentioned above. The theory of emergence describes the mind as somehow

proceeding from the brain and asserts that the whole entity may act on the part,

but it provides no ontological grounding for the whole to account for its being

anything more than a conglomeration of parts.67 In dualism, where mind and

brain are conceived as distinct entities, the problem of how the mind acts on the

brain becomes insuperable. Descartes tried to imagine the soul and body

interacting through a small organ of the brain, the pineal gland.68 Gunter Rager

points out that this ‘‘solution’’ is similar to many of those proposed by modern

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neurobiology.69 We might think, for instance, of Wilder Penfield’s idea of a subtle

and undefined sort of energy transfer occurring between mind and brain.70 John

Eccles tries to find a way to establish an interface between matter and spirit in the

‘‘liaison brain’’ without energy transfer, perhaps through quantum phenomena.71

None of these dualist ‘‘solutions’’ seems adequate. The very assumption that the

human being is composed of two distinct entities seems to rule out the possibility

of mind-brain interaction. As Laurence Wood remarks, ‘‘just how the material

brain and immaterial self interact is in principle inexplicable.’’72

By referring to the causality of the human substantial form, we can suggest a

coherent approach to understanding the mind-brain relation.73 The human

substantial form explains why a certain possibility-of-being exists as a human

person. The whole human person, with all its complex parts, is one being in virtue

of that one substantial form which explains why all the parts (from hands and

toes, to cells, molecules, atoms, and quarks) exist ‘‘as human.’’ One aspect of that

person is its complex physical organization, including the organ we call the

‘‘brain.’’ Another aspect is its faculty for self-reflection and abstract thought,

which we may call ‘‘intellect’’ or, more broadly, ‘‘mind.’’ The human substantial

form itself (like that of any animate creature) may be called a ‘‘soul;’’ and, because

the human form transcends materiality in some way, it may be called a ‘‘spiritual

soul’’ to distinguish it from the souls or substantial forms of other animate things.

To discuss how the mind, as the source of the human power of thought, can act

on the brain, as a human physical organ, we must understand by what mode of

causality the human substantial form (which is the source of all human activity)

acts on its co-principle of possibility-of-being in such a way as to actualize a

human person with functioning brain and active mind.

Earlier we used the example of a round shape acting by mode of formal

causality to make a ball of clay round. One can easily see that it would be a

mistake to try to understand, reduce, or explain the formal causality of the round

shape in terms of efficient causality. If the shape were acting as an efficient cause,

it might be expected to exert some sort of physical force on the clay. If we detect no

such force, can we say that the shape is not causing the clay to be round? No. We

can say only that the shape is exercising its influence by mode of formal causality,

not by mode of the efficient causality of force. As an accidental formal cause, the

shape is making the ball of clay to be what it is: it is making it to be a ball.

On the level of substances, each substantial form also acts by mode of formal

causality, and its influence cannot be explained by reference to efficient causality.

How does the substantial form act? How does the substantial form of sodium, for

instance, so act on some possibility-of-being that sodium exists with its

characteristic structure and chemical properties? How does the substantial form

of the dog so act on some possibility-of-being, that the dog exists and exhibits its

characteristic canine activities? In each case, the answer is that the substantial form

acts according to the mode of formal causality: it makes the thing to be what it is.

The human substantial form also acts by mode of formal causality.

Fundamentally, it makes some possibility-of-being to exist as a human person.

It makes the whole substance to be what it is, and so causes each part (including

mind and brain) to be what it is.

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Since action follows being, in making that part to be what it is, the substantial

form also explains why that part does what it does. Source of the being of the

human person, the substantial form is also the source of all actions of the person,

including those of the mind and the brain.74 As aspects of the single human

person, we might say that mind and brain act on each other from within the unity

of the whole person. Since the substantial form is the ground of that unity, we

might add that they act by way of the form which causes the whole human person

to be what it is and so causes each part to act as it does in interrelationship with all

other parts in the single human whole.

Conclusion

The relation of mind to matter continues to engage the attention of scientists,

philosophers and theologians. While the approaches of materialism and dualism

seem fundamentally inadequate for addressing this question, that of emergence,

especially in its notion of top-down causality or the causality of the whole offers

some promise. Still lacking in emergence, however, is a metaphysics to account for

the being of the whole which alone can ground its causality. The hylomorphic

philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas offers a promising venue for

establishing an understanding of substantial wholeness in general and of human

wholeness in particular.

In this context, mind and brain may be seen as two of the many parts and

faculties of the human person, which is one being in virtue of its one substantial

form. The substantial form and the material principle of possibility-of-being

together compose the integral human being. We could say that the substantial

form is ‘‘in’’ matter or somehow ‘‘in’’ the human person. However, since the form

makes the person to be a person, we might do better to say that the matter is ‘‘in’’

the form. The form, in this sense, ‘‘contains’’ the matter since it ‘‘holds’’ the matter

in being.75 This perichoretic style of language indicates the profound unity of the

human person, and the human substantial form, as the source of that unity,

grounds the parts of the human whole, including both the part we call ‘‘brain’’

and the part we call ‘‘mind.’’

Endnotes

1 On Thales, whose writings do not survive, see Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, 3 (983b 18);On the Soul I, 2 (405a 19), in Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York:Random House, 1941), 694, 541.

2 See Aetii de Placitis Reliquiae, in Milton Nahm, Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (NewYork: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964), 43.

3 Anaxagoras, Fragments, in Nahm, 141–142.4 See Roger Sperry, ‘‘Some Effects of Disconnecting the Central Hemispheres,’’ Science

217:24 (September, 1982): 1225, as discussed in Laurence W. Wood, ‘‘Recent BrainResearch and the Mind-Body Dilemma,’’ The Asbury Theological Journal 41 (1986): 43. cf:Idem, ‘‘Search for Beliefs to Live by Consistent with Science,’’ Zygon 26 (1991): 243.

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5 Roger Sperry, Science and Moral Priority: Merging Mind, Brain, and Human Values (NewYork: Columbia University, 1983), 99.

6 ‘‘Everything in science to date seems to indicate that conscious awareness is a propertyof the living functioning brain and inseparable from it. The conclusion from mind-brainscience seems inescapable that the conscious self, as we ordinarily experience it, does notsurvive brain death’’ (Roger Sperry, ‘‘Changed Concepts of Brain and Consciousness:Some Value Implications,’’ Zygon 20 [1985]: 54). cf: Idem, Science and Moral Priority, 96–97.

7 Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: SpringerInternational, 1977) 361–365.

8 Popper and Eccles, 529–530.9 Popper and Eccles, 378–379.

10 ‘‘[T]he subjective component of each of us in World 2 [the world of consciousness], theconscious self, may be identified as the soul. The component of our existence in World 2is non-material and hence is not subject in death to the disintegration that affects allcomponents of the individual in World 1 [the physical world]’’ including ‘‘both the bodyand the brain’’ (John Eccles, Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures by a Brain Scientist[New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975], 174).

11 Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1975), 22,55–56.

12 ‘‘The patient’s mind, which is considering the situation in such an aloof and criticalmanner, can only be something quite apart from neuronal reflex action. It is noteworthythat two streams of consciousness are flowing, the one driven by input fromenvironment, the other by an electrode delivering sixty pulses per second to the cortex.The fact that there should be no confusion in the conscious state suggests that, althoughthe content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awarenessitself does not . . . . If, to the contrary, the truth is that the highest brain-mechanism isbusy creating the mind by its own action, one might expect mental confusion when theneuronal record is activated by an electrode so that a stream of past consciousness ispresented to the mind along with the presentation of the contemporary stream ofconsciousness’’ (Penfield, 55–56).

13 Penfield, 80.14 James W. Jones, ‘‘Brain, Mind, and Spirit- a Clinician’s Perspective, or Why I Am Not

Afraid of Dualism,’’ in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion andBrain-Mind Science, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 37–38; cf.,idem, ‘‘Can Neuroscience Provide a Complete Account of Human Nature?: a Reply toRoger Sperry,’’ Zygon 27 (1992): 187–202.

15 Holmes Rolston III, ‘‘Genes, Brains, Minds: the Human Complex,’’ in Soul, Psyche, Brain,26–27.

16 Aristotle also shared this insight. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, VIII, c.6, 1045a 8–1045b 24,in McKeon, 818–820.

17 Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 104–105.18 Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: a Critical Survey (New York: Random House,

1987), 84.19 Roger Sperry, ‘‘Changed Concepts of Brain and Consciousness: Some Value Implica-

tions,’’ Zygon 20 (1985): 48.20 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, I, 4 (320a 1–2) in McKeon, 485.21 For a more detailed explanation of this theory of change in relation to empirical science,

see Norbert A. Luyten, O.P., ‘‘Matter as Potency,’’ in The Concept of Matter, ed. ErnanMcMullin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1963), 102–113.

22 William R Stoeger, ‘‘The Mind-Brain Problem, the Laws of Nature, and ConstitutiveRelationships,’’ in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed.Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo Meyering, and Michael Arbib (Vatican CityState: Vatican Observatory, 1999), 142–145, especially footnote 37. Stoeger describes the

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substantial form itself as ‘‘the complete network of constitutive relationships for asystem or an entity as they actually exist and function, which our ‘laws of nature’ onlyimperfectly describe and partially indicate.’’ He includes here not only intrinsicrelationships in the substance, but also ‘‘those which relate the complex whole to otherhigher-level unities in an essential way.’’ I would argue that the substantial form itself isnot the intrinsic or extrinsic relationships characteristic of the substance, but is rather theprinciple by which the substance is a substance of a particular type, which consequentlymanifests characteristic intrinsic and extrinsic relationships.

23 A substance such as the dog is not merely a conglomeration of other substances, but oneunified whole. If substances such as carbon and calcium are somehow present in thedog, they exist there as dog. The very atoms and electrons in the dog exist ‘‘as dog,’’ asparts of a unified, organic whole. Unless one grasps the difference between thesubstantial unity of a substance such as a dog (where each part has the substantialidentity of the whole) and the accidental unity of an artifact (such as a log cabin, whereeach part of the whole (each log) remains substantially just what it was before the wholewas constructed), one will not see in what way substantial form and possibility-of-beingare understood as ontological principles of the material world.

24 Aristotle, Physics Book II, c.7 (198a 15–20) in McKeon, 247–248. cf: Thomas Aquinas,Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. R. Blackwell et al., (New Haven: YaleUniversity, 1963), Book II, lecture 10, no.240, p.110.

25 To avoid dualism, we must be careful to maintain that what the substantial formactualizes or determines is not some existing material thing, but sheer possibility-of-being. In doing so, it accounts (by way of formal causality) for the entire being, structureand activity of the individual substance.

26 Roger Sperry seems to be getting at something like substantial form when he speaks of aprinciple that explains the ‘‘structure’’ or the ‘‘spacing and timing’’ of a substance and sodetermining ‘‘what a thing is:’’ ‘‘When reductionist doctrine tried to tell us that there areno vital forces, just as it also had long taught that there are no mental forces, materialistscience was simply wrong. Biological theory in this case was concentrating on the mass-energy or material components of living things and neglecting to appreciate the role ofthe nonmaterial space-time components which also are critical. In anything living ornonliving, the spacing and timing of the material elements of which it is composedmakes all the difference in determining what a thing is’’ (Roger Sperry, ‘‘ChangedConcepts,’’ 46–47).

27 For a more detailed discussion, see William Wallace, ‘‘Nature as Animating: The Soul inthe Human Sciences,’’ Thomist 49 (1985): 612–648, and idem, The Modeling of Nature(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996).

28 ‘‘For since everything acts insofar as it is actual . . . and since every being is actualthrough form, it is necessary for the operation of a thing to follow its form. Therefore, ifthere are different forms, they must have different operations’’ (Thomas Aquinas, On theTruth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles [SCG], [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,1956], Book 3, chapter 97, no. 4). ‘‘Everything, according as it is in act and is perfect, isthe active principle of something’’ (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [ST] [New York:Benzinger, 1946], Book I, Q.25, a.1, co.). cf: ST I-II, 6, 1, co.; SCG 2, 6, no. 4.

29 See William A. Wallace, O.P., ‘‘Nature as Animating.’’30 Though hylomorphism has much to offer to the current mind-brain discussion, it is (like

any philosophical position) not without criticisms. Though we cannot go into all of suchcriticisms here, the reader may find a good review of them and a constructive (thoughcontroversial) response in Gordon P. Barnes, ‘‘The Paradoxes of Hylomorphism,’’Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003): 501–523. See also David S. Oderberg, ‘‘HylemorphicDualism,’’ in Personal Identity, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., andJeffrey Paul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70–99.

31 ‘‘It is noteworthy that three Nobel laureates look at the evidence and each draws adifferent conclusion [on the nature of the soul]: John Eccles maintains a dualist account,

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Francis Crick argues for a reductive materialist account, and Roger Sperry advances anon-reductive physicalist account’’ (Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Non-reductive Physicalism:Philosophical Issues,’’ in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraitsof Human Nature, edited by Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony[Philadelphia: Fortress, 1999], (127–128).

32 David L. Wilson, ‘‘Brain Mechanisms, Consciousness and Introspection,’’ inExpanding Dimensions of Consciousness, ed. A. Sugerman and R. Tarter (New York:Springer, 1978), 21.

33 Timothy Ferris, The Mind’s Sky (New York: Bantam, 1993), 74. cf: David Papineau, ‘‘TheCase for Materialism,’’ in Arguing about the Mind, ed. Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro(New York: Routledge, 2007), 125–132.

34 Ferris, 74.35 R. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University, 1983), 99, 102.

‘‘The special vital forces that distinguish living things from the nonliving are emergent,holistic properties of the living entities themselves. They are not properties of theirphysico-chemical components nor can they be fully explained merely in terms of physicsand chemistry. This does not mean they are in any way supernatural, mystical, ordualistic’’ (R. Sperry, ‘‘Changed Concepts,’’ 46). A similar view of emergence can befound in Arthur Peacocke: ‘‘Thus consciousness, mental activity and function in general,is an activity which emerges when certain complex structures have evolved– an activitywhich is not epistemologically reducible to lower-level descriptions. The newness of theactivity and function are real enough, but these are not an activity and function of somenew thing or entity, the ‘mind,’ but are a new activity and function of the all-pervasivephysico-chemical units that emerges when these units have evolved a particular kind oforganized complexity. According to this view, mental activity does not necessarily haveto be predicated of some new entity, the ‘mind’, which is, a it were, added as a new kindof order of being to the neurological network of physico-chemical structures andprocesses which constitute the brain. To say it is would, on this view, be to makeprecisely the same error as the vitalists when they wished to add some vital essence(elan vital, entelechy or life force) to physico-chemical structures to endow them withlife, which we now see as a special kind of organized activity. As with vitalism, one canbe anti-reductionist about mental processes and events and ‘anti-mentalist’, in the senseof not postulating an entity called the ‘mind’’’ (A. R. Peacocke, Creation and the World ofScience [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979], 121).

36 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992), 1.37 ‘‘Now, because mental states are feature of the brain, they have two levels of

description—a higher level in mental terms, and a lower level in physiologicalterms. The very same causal powers of the system can be described at eitherlevel’’ (John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,1984], 26).

38 John Searle, Rediscovery, 115–117. Searle thinks that the mind is ‘‘causally emergent’’from the brain ‘‘in the same way solidity and liquidity are emergent features of systemsof molecules.’’ He does not think, however, that, once the mind emerges, it then hascausal powers or can produce any effects that cannot be explained by ‘‘by the causalbehavior of the neurons’’ Ibid., 112. cf: Idem, Mind: a Brief Introduction (Oxford: OxfordUniversity, 2004), 118–123.

39 For a brief history and critique of various understandings of emergence, see Gregory R.Peterson, ‘‘Species of Emergence,’’ Zygon 41 (2006): 689–712.

40 Philip Clayton, ‘‘Emergence from Physics to Theology: Towards a Panoramic View,’’Zygon 41 (2006): 677.

41 Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Non-reductive Physicalism,’’ 129–130.42 Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon, ‘‘From Biology to Consciousness to

Morality,’’ Zygon 38 (2003): 802–803.43 Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Non-reductive Physicalism,’’ 129.

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44 Philip Clayton, ‘‘The Emergence of Spirit: From Complexity to Anthropology toTheology,’’ Theology and Science 4 (2006): 294. ‘‘[N]ew things emerge in natural history,not just new properties of some fundamental things or stuff; and . . . these emergentthings exercise their own types of causal power’’ (idem, 295).

45 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York:Oxford University Press, 1996), 127. See also David S. Oderberg, ‘‘HylemorphicDualism,’’ 71; Kirsten Birkett, ‘‘Conscientious Objections: God and the ConsciousnessDebates,’’ Zygon 41 (2006): 249–266.

46 Philip Clayton, ‘‘The Emergence of Spirit,’’ CTNS Bulletein 20, no. 4 (Fall, 2000): 7–8. Seeidem, Mind and Emergence: from Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004); David Chalmers, 32–89; Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Supervenience and theDownward Efficacy of the Mental: a Nonreductive Physicalist Account of HumanAction,’’ in Neuroscience the the Person (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1999),147–164; ‘‘Physicalism without Reductionism: Towards a Scientifically, Philosophically,and Theologically Sound Portrait of Human Nature,’’ Zygon 34 (1999): 551–571.

47 Gregory R. Peterson, ‘‘Species,’’ 703. Therefore, the causality of emergence seems unableto bridge the gap, for instance, between a physiological description of brain activity anda psychological account of mental activity. See Leslie Brothers, Mistaken Identity: theMind-Brain Problem Reconsidered (New York: State University of New York, 2001), 7–58.

48 Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998), 232, as quoted in Dennis Bielfeldt, ‘‘NanceyMurphy’s Nonreductive Physicalism,’’ Zygon 34 (1999): 623–624.

49 William Kiblinger, ‘‘Review Article: Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantumto Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), in Journal of Religion 87(2007): 330.

50 Gregory Peterson, ‘‘Species,’’ 702–703.51 Philip Clayton, ‘‘The Emergence of Spirit,’’ CTNS Bulletein 20, no.4 (Fall, 2000), 12.52 Terrence Deacon, ‘‘Response,’’ CTNS Bulletein 20, no. 4 (Fall, 2000), 27.53 Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Human Nature: Historical, Scientific and Religious Issues,’’ in Whatever

Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by WarrenS. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1999), 4, 7–8;idem, ‘‘Physicalism without Reductionism: Towards a Scientifically, Philosophically, andTheologically Sound Portrait of Human Nature,’’ Zygon 34 (1999): 552.

54 Penfield, 80.55 John Eccles, The Human Psyche (New York: Springer, 1980), 7, 18–21. ‘‘One can surmise

from the extreme complexity and refinement of its organization that there must be anunimaginable richness of properties in the active cerebral cortex, giving it the propertyof being a ‘detector’ in liaison with dispositional intentions in the world of consciousexperience’’ (Idem, Facing Reality, 163).

56 ‘‘It follows that this mind (soul), by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from thebody . . . and that even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be all that itnow is’’ (Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 4, in Discourse on Method andMeditations, trans. L. Lafleur (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1977), 25.

57 According to John Haldane, dualism is making a comeback in contemporary philosophyand appears in several varieties. See John Haldane, ‘‘A Return to Form in the Philosophyof Mind,’’ in Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics, ed. David S.Oderberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 44. See also E. J. Lowe, ‘‘Non-Cartesian SubstanceDualism and the Problem of Mental Causation,’’ Erkenntnis: An International Journal ofAnalytic Philosophy 65 (2006): 5–23.

58 On how hylomorphism avoids Cartesian dualism, see Eleonore Stump, ‘‘Non-CartesianSubstance Dualism and Materialism without Reductionism,’’ Faith and Philosophy12 (1995): 505–531.

59 Aristotle explains that the natural unity of matter and form does not require any othercause as a kind of glue to hold them together, as is the case when two distinct substances

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are incidentally joined together: ‘‘In the case of all things which have several parts andin which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besidesthe parts, there is a cause . . . . What then is it that makes man one; why is he one and notmany? . . . [I]f, as we say, one element is matter and another is form, and one ispotentially and the other actually, the question will no longer be thought adifficulty . . . . The difficulty disappears, because the one is matter, the other form.What, then, causes this—that which was potentially to be actually—except, in the case ofthings which are generated, the agent? . . . [T]he proximate matter and the form are oneand the same thing, the one potentially, and the other actually. Therefore it is like askingwhat in general is the cause of unity and of a thing’s being one; for each thing is a unity,and the potential and the actual are somehow one. Therefore there is no other causehere, unless there is something which caused the movement from potency intoactuality’’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics, VIII, c.6, 1045a 8–1045b 24).

60 SCG III, 97, no. 4.61 Aristotle, On the Soul, Book III, chaps. 4–8, in W.D. Ross, ed., The Works of Aristotle

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), Vol. III. cf: SCG, II, c.49; ST I, Q.75, a.2.62 For a review of such arguments, see Leo Elders, The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas

Aquinas: Nature, the Universe, Man (New York: Peter Lang, 1977), 282–284; John Haldane,‘‘Sentiments of Reason and Aspirations of the Soul,’’ Logos 7, no. 3 (2004): 41–46; idem,‘‘The Breakdown of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind,’’ in Mind, Metaphysics, andValue in the Thomistic and Analytical Tradition, ed., John Haldane (Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 72–73; Peter Geach, God and the Soul (SouthBend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 30–41; David S. Oderberg, ‘‘HylemorphicDualism,’’ 88–98.

63 Thomas Aquinas explains what becomes of the human substantial form or soul and itsco-principle of prime matter or possibility-of-being at death: ‘‘After the form’sdeparture, prime matter does not remain in act, except in relation to the act of anotherform, but the human soul remains in the same act; for the human soul is a form and anact, while prime matter is a being only potentially’’ (SCG II, 80–81, no.10). This view ofthe human substantial form is an exception, as Nancey Murphy rightly observes, to thesubstantial forms of all other substances in the cosmos. It is not certain, however, thatthe admitted exceptionality of the case invalidates Aquinas’ argument. See NanceyMurphy, ‘‘Non-reductive Physicalism,’’ 6.

64 ‘‘Not every particular substance is a hypostasis or a person, but that which has thecomplete nature of its species. Hence a hand, or a foot, is not called a hypostasis, or aperson; nor, likewise, is the soul alone so called, since it is a part of the human species’’(ST I, 75, 4, ad 2). The soul by itself is incapable of such human activities as sensation orimagination which require a bodily organ and has but ‘‘a confused knowledge’’ of somethings (ST I, 89, 4, co.).

65 ‘‘It must be borne in mind that the soul understands in a different manner whenseparated from the body and when united to it, even as it exists diversely in those cases;for a thing acts according as it is . . . . It follows that, so long as the soul is in the body, itcannot perform that act without a phantasm; . . . The separated soul, however, exists byitself, apart from the body. Consequently its operation, which is understanding, will notbe fulfilled in relation to those objects existing in bodily organs which the phantasmsare; on the contrary, it will understand through itself, in the manner of substances whichin their being are totally separate from bodies’’ (SCG II, 80–81, no. 12). cf: ST I, 77, 8.Aquinas is here employing his epistemology, according to which a human in this lifecannot have a concept in the intellect without simultaneously having a phantasm orimage in the imagination, which Aquinas understands as a power located in somephysical organ (ST I, 84, 7). If we think of that physical organ as the brain, then we havea philosophical reason for saying (with contemporary science) that there cannot beintellectual activity without brain activity, while still maintaining the immateriality ofthe intellect.

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66 Here I am speaking specifically from the Roman Catholic tradition: ‘‘Each man receiveshis eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in aparticular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness ofheaven—through a purification or immediately,—or immediate and everlastingdamnation’’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church [Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana,1997] no. 1022, p. 266–267). The notion of immediate reward and punishment after deathis, of course, not unknown in other Christian denominations.

67 For an extended study of this ontological liability of emergence, see Derek Jeffreys, ‘‘TheSoul is Alive and Well: Non-reductive Physicalism and Emergent Mental Properties,’’Theology and Science 2 (2004): 205–225.

68 ‘‘[A]lthough the soul is joined to the whole body, there is yet in that a certain part inwhich it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others; and it isusually believed that this part is the brain, or possibly the heart: the brain, because itis with it that the organs of sense are connected, and the heart because it is apparentlyin it that we experience the passions. But, in examining the matter with care, it seemsas though I had clearly ascertained that the part of the body in which the soulexercises its functions immediately is in nowise the heart, nor the whole of the brain,but merely the most inward of all its parts, to wit, a certain very small gland which issituated in the middle of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby theanimal spirits in its anterior cavities have communication with those in the posterior,that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter very greatly the courseof these spirits; and reciprocally that the smallest changes which occur in the course ofthe spirits may do much to change the movements of this gland’’ (Descartes, ThePassions of the Soul, Part First, Article 31, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans.and ed. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1969]),1:345–346).

69 Gunter Rager, ‘‘Das Leib-Seele-Problem: Begegnung von Hirnforschung und Philosophie,’’Freiburger Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Theologie 29 (1982): 445.

70 W. Penfield, 79, 81–82, 83.71 John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (New York: Routledge, 1989),

195–200. Idem, How the Self Controls its Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994), 55–86. Idem, ‘‘The Effect of Silent Thinking on the Cerebral Cortex,’’ in The Mind-BrainProblem: Philosophical and Neruophysiological Approaches. Edited by Balazs Gulyas.(Leuven: Leuven University, 1987), 31–60. Eccles tries to distance himself fromDescartes by a difference in terminology: ‘‘[I]t must not be concluded that the use ofthis substantive term [self-consciousness] implies the recognition of mind as asubstance in the Cartesian manner. Rather we can refer to the mind as an entity’’(Human Psyche, 3). Elsewhere, however, he asserts that ‘‘the subjective component ofeach of us in World 2, the conscious self, may be identified as the soul’’ (FacingReality, 174).

72 Wood, ‘‘Recent,’’ 63.73 On the advantages of hylomorphism over Cartesian dualism and physicalism in

accounting for mental causation, see John Haldane, ‘‘Return,’’ 40–64.74 Michael Frede points out the unified picture of human activity that arises from

Aristotle’s understanding of the soul as a substantial form: ‘‘Aristotle thinks that there isno reason to treat the so-called mental functions, things like desiring, thinking, andbelieving, any differently than the ordinary living functions. To put the matterdifferently: because Aristotle takes the position that the organism, in virtue of its form, isable to do all the things which a living thing of its kind can do, he also refuses to dividethe things animate objects can do into two classes, namely into those things which thebody is made to do by the soul and those things which the soul does by itself’’ (MichaelFrede, ‘‘On Aristotle’s Conception of the Soul,’’ in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed.Martha C. Nussbaum and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty [Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992], 96).

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75 ‘‘Although corporeal things are said to be in another as in that which contains them,nevertheless spiritual things contain those things in which they are; as the soul containsthe body’’ (ST, I, 8, 1, ad 2). ‘‘Actuality and form, though in one sense interior tothings . . . , in another sense contain them or hold them together’’ (Timothy McDermott,footnote ‘‘C’’ in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, 8, 1, ad 2, [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964], 2:113).

Biographical Notes

Michael J. Dodds, O.P. is professor of philosophy and theology at the Dominican

School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in

Berkeley, California. He is author of The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas

and Contemporary Theology on Divine Immutability (The Catholic University of

America Press, 2009) and is coauthor of The Seeker’s Guide to Seven Life-Changing

Virtues (Loyola Press, 1999).

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