The papers collected in this issue of New Blackfriars were delivered at Aquinas Seminar series in Oxford and represent research interests of the Aquinas Institute. This article contextualises them by giving an impression of areas of contemporary research to which they contribute or to which they point. These areas concern animal psychology, the human being as complex rational animal, body-and-soul, and human evolution. Some of the many possible issues are identified, so as to suggest that in all these areas the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition can enter into a real and fruitful conversation with modern discoveries in biology and psychology; it can take them on board and at the same time pose questions and offer perspectives that stand to be illuminating.

Animalism, according to its strongest proponents, is the view that human beings are ‘essentially or most fundamentally animals’. Specifically, ‘we are essentially animals if we couldn't possibly exist without being animals’ (Olson 2008). Although contemporary animalism offers an account superior to its Lockean competitors, Olson's ‘biological approach’ has certain limitations, particularly in its denial of any psychological continuity whatsoever as either necessary or sufficient for individual persistence through time. I propose a number of amendments towards a Thomistic variety of animalism that avoids these difficulties. Although prone to misinterpretation, animalism understood properly is compatible with Aquinas's theory of subsistent intellect. Against recent challenges, I defend the view that Thomistic animalism not only is intelligible, but is indeed crucial for understanding Aquinas's view of human nature and rationality.

Properly interpreted, Aquinas supports a transformative rather than an additive understanding of how the human intellect relates to the capacities human beings share with other animals, an understanding founded in a metaphysics. The soul (‘life-form’) is the substantial form that maintains an organism as a single being throughout life, and Aquinas holds that the human soul is the only substantial form in the human being. He respects the variety of appetitive and apprehensive capacities displayed by different animals, and has a high view of the perceptive (even inductive) powers of the higher animals: they ‘share somewhat in reason’. It is no surprise that we cannot easily identify a rigid boundary between our intellectual powers and the cognitive and conative powers we share with other animals; rather, the powers not only interact, they qualify each other. As Stephen Brock put it, ‘Rationality is a mode of intellect … intrinsically connected to the life of the senses, and therefore to the sense-organs … and to matter itself.’

Owen Flanagan takes his claim that ‘we are animals through and through’ to imply ‘our animal side is our only side’. But ‘Cartesianism’ is not the only alternative available: Aquinas’ view of the human soul as a spiritual reality that is essentially the form of the body means that animality characterizes humans in an especially intimate way.

Aquinas recognizes degrees of unity. Homogeneous inanimate substances have an accidental unity; living organisms are essentially one: the self pervades the whole, and the form is closely related to this particular matter. The human soul communicates to the body the being the soul possesses, hence it is more intimate to the body than any bodily quality, while the body is more intimate to the soul than any of the soul's powers. In isolation from the body the soul cannot exercise its own proper activity, which is to know sensible reality.

This high degree of metaphysical unity is manifest at the level of action and experience. Robert Sokolowski's account of speech as a defining feature of human beings illustrates how bodiliness is needed for the soul's intellectual activity. Syntactical speech is formed by and expressive of intelligence as embodied and temporally conditioned.

The human being's superior ontological unity is not refuted by experiences of disintegration. Our soul, in its simplicity, needs to originate a unique gamut of powers; hence the human being can go wrong in many ways. The tension among our powers is experienced acutely because it is within the one soul. Human death is not really unnatural, but is more violent than in the case of the other animals. However, as a final mortification it allows us to offer our selves in conformity to Christ.

Aquinas's articulation of the eight ‘integral parts’ of prudence can serve as a manageable, practical focus for ongoing human development. Although Aquinas holds that there is an infused Prudence, this does not render acquired prudence redundant, because (1) God moves things in ways that befit their natures, and it is our nature to have dominion over our actions; (2) human beings have free will, characteristically exercised in electio, choice of means; (3) grace perfects nature; (4) some scholars have defended the complementarity of the acquired and infused virtues, and there is widespread agreement that the psychological structures needed by acquired virtue persist in the life of graced virtue.

The ‘integral parts’ of a Cardinal Virtue must concur for its perfect acts. Aquinas examines them in detail, and offers methods of building ‘memory’ through human effort; he leaves to our diligence the discernment of how to build other parts of prudence. He explains how the parts are deployed in the acts of deliberation, judgment and command.

Aquinas's consideration of the vices opposed to prudence and its parts enables him to warn us about what impedes prudence, and to help us distinguish false from legitimate concerns for bodily goods, superfluous from proportionate solicitude, etc.

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas's account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a naïve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas's doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas's ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas's account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas's account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species.