The details of St. Thomas Aquinas's anthropological view are subject to debate. Some philosophers believe he held that human persons survive their deaths. Other philosophers think he held that human persons cease to exist at their death, but come back into being at the general resurrection. In this paper, I defend the latter view against one of the most significant objections it faces, namely, that it entails that God punishes and rewards separated souls for the sins or merits of something else: the (non-existent) persons to whom those souls once belonged. The objector takes this entailment to be problematic. I argue that it fits in well with St. Thomas's views about punishment and about persons.
Keywords Aquinas โข Soul โข Person โข Death
There is an important debate underway regarding St. Thomas Aquinas's view on whether human persons survive their deaths. Everyone agrees that St. Thomas thinks humans will one day be resurrected from the dead, and hence will exist from that time on. The debate has to do with the interim state-the time in between our deaths and the general resurrection. Do we humans exist then? I will refer to the view that persons cease to exist at their deaths as the corruptionist account, and the view that persons survive their deaths as the survivalist account. The debate I'm concerned with here is over whether the corruptionist or the survivalist account is correct. 1 Because my