Where Soul Meets Body
By Edward Feser
Editiones Scholasticae, 2024; 548 pp., 29,90 € (paperback)
A Treatise on Human Nature
From the sexual and identity movements that dominate media and policy to the rising transhumanist enthusiasms in academic and technological circles, contemporary Western culture is saturated with distorted anthropological assumptions. These trends reflect an understanding of the human person as a self-defining consciousness, detached from any given nature or inherent purpose. The body, in turn, is treated as a malleable canvas for self-expression, bearing no intrinsic relation to one’s true nature and identity. It is subjected to surgical or pharmaceutical interventions to bring it into alignment with one’s perceived self.
The contradictions of this outlook are stark: Bodily sex is denied any definitive role in determining identity, yet it is often treated as so essential to selfhood that it must be medically altered to reflect who one believes oneself to be. The anthropology of our time is marked by a strange dualism. It is hyper-spiritual in its identification of personhood with immaterial mental realities, even as it typically claims allegiance to a materialist ontology. The heated discourse surrounding human nature, combined with our growing inability to articulate a coherent account of it, reveals a genuine anthropological crisis—one whose consequences are not merely theoretical but tragically concrete.
Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature addresses this crisis with a bold and learned contribution to contemporary metaphysical anthropology. While modern accounts tend to reduce the human person either to the material body or to an ineffable mental reality, Feser insists that human nature involves an irreducible duality of body and soul. These elements of human nature are distinct in kind but united in the concrete whole of the human person.
The book unfolds in four parts across eleven chapters, beginning with foundational questions about the nature of the mind before advancing through treatments of the body, human nature, and the soul. Feser engages questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, agency, and identity, and concludes with arguments for personal survival after death. As he explains in the preface, the book aims to address “the main philosophical controversies concerning the self, the mind, the will, and personal identity,” all within a Scholastic framework.
Feser characterizes the book as a vindication of Plato and a refutation of David Hume—a formulation that serves as a shorthand for the metaphysical position he develops throughout the book. He affirms, with Plato, the incorporeal reality of the soul and defends, against Hume, the Scholastic doctrines of substantial form and the four causes. These moves converge in his central claim that the soul is the substantial form of the body. Feser embraces this hylomorphic form of dualism, in which the irreducibly distinct principles of body and soul are united in the human person. At the same time, he distances himself from another, in which the human person is identified with a soul that, in turn, stands in a merely accidental relationship to a body.
Part of the difficulty in engaging contemporary debates over dualism is that the term is used equivocally. In contemporary metaphysics, “substance dualism” typically refers to the broad, ontological claim that there exist at least two fundamental kinds of things—material and immaterial—and that some entities, such as minds or souls, are irreducible to any physical or material substrate. In theological contexts, however, “substance dualism” is often used to describe the further anthropological claim, typically ascribed to Descartes and Plato, that a human person is essentially a soul to which the body is only accidentally joined. These divergent uses mean that theologians and materialists alike often speak against “dualism” without clarifying what, exactly, they are rejecting. The result is a misleading impression of agreement, as if both parties were repudiating the same idea. In fact, their ontologies differ profoundly and irreconcilably. From the standpoint of monist materialists, the sort of hylomorphic dualism that Thomas Aquinas and Feser embrace is no less ontologically extravagant and unacceptable than its Platonic or Cartesian counterpart. Indeed, the distinction between these two dualisms is trivial as far as the materialists are concerned. They absolutely reject the existence of soul, so no account of its relationship to the body will be acceptable to them.
As fashionable as it has been among Catholic thinkers to decry “dualism” and its infamous proponents, the basic metaphysical claims made by Plato and Descartes—namely, the existence of immaterial substances—articulate what is, in fact, an essential metaphysical commitment of the Christian tradition. Equally essential is the claim that the human person is a composite of body and spiritual soul, with the soul as a subsistent, immaterial principle.
Feser develops this tradition while avoiding its excesses. He defends what might be called a true anthropological dualism, in which body and soul are irreducibly distinct yet essentially united in a psychophysical whole. Human beings, on this view, are not souls who merely inhabit bodies, but composites of matter and form, where the soul is the substantial form of the body.
Feser’s reading of Thomas Nagel highlights the nuance of his position. He does not invoke Nagel, as many Christian philosophers do, simply as a fellow critic of materialism. Rather, he sees in Nagel’s arguments about the “hard problem of consciousness” evidence of a deeper tension within the mechanistic assumptions that underlie modern philosophy.
Nagel recognizes the explanatory failure of materialism but lacks the metaphysical framework to overcome it. Feser contends that this is because Nagel, like most modern philosophers, remains committed to a mechanistic conception of matter inherited from the early modern period. This view excluded formal and final causes and regarded matter as essentially inert, passive, and devoid of intrinsic intelligibility or teleology. Thus, for Feser, Nagel’s insights reveal not only the inadequacy of materialist theories of mind but also the deeper metaphysical poverty of the mechanistic conception of matter. If Nagel is right that consciousness resists reduction, then the mechanistic picture must be revised from the ground up.
Perhaps surprisingly, Feser does not simply reject physicalism. Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is ultimately physical in nature, and that all phenomena—including mental and moral realities can be explained in physical terms. Rather, Feser suggests that a proper Aristotelian account of matter might itself be called physicalist, but only if one redefines what counts as physical. From Feser, one gets a sense that the intractability of the mind-body problem—the problem of explaining the relationship between these two essentially and qualitatively different kinds of phenomena—might have everything to do with the modern conception of matter. Perhaps our conception of matter has itself made spirit to be something so radically foreign to it that no relationship between the two is conceivable.
At 515 pages of body text, Immortal Souls is not a casual read, and its length underscores its ambitious scope. The prose is lucid and often elegant, but the density of argument demands close engagement. Readers may, at times, wish Feser had pursued particular issues further. One such issue is the question of sexual difference. Feser notes in the preface that he will treat it in a later book, but its absence is felt especially in light of the problems with Aristotle’s account, which famously conceived of woman as a kind of defective or incomplete man.
Yet, in fairness, the opposite complaint is probably the more valid: that the book offers too much detail on too many points. If the research on reading habits is to be trusted, few will make it from cover to cover in this book. Nevertheless, the work stands as perhaps the most sophisticated modern Scholastic treatise on human nature to date. This makes the volume’s material poverty—its lackluster typesetting, materials, and cover design—all the more regrettable. Its achievement lies in its argument, not its packaging, and its contribution to philosophical anthropology is far-reaching.
What sets Immortal Souls apart is the intellectual generosity and rigor with which it engages contemporary philosophy—especially the often-neglected Anglo-American tradition, where the most sophisticated work on the philosophy of mind has taken place. Many Catholic thinkers, particularly in theological circles, overlook this tradition, perhaps, due to its historical ties to Protestantism. But Feser, a convert to Catholicism, brings a refreshing openness to the best of the English-language tradition of thought. This spirit of engagement distinguishes Immortal Souls from many other retrievals of Scholastic thought, which too often lapse into reaction or polemic. Feser’s work is constructive: it draws deeply from the classical tradition while confronting the challenges of modernity head-on. The result is not merely a defense of the soul’s existence but a metaphysical anthropology capable of illuminating the mystery of human nature in our confused and disoriented age.
