Aristotle, Aquinas, and AI

What have a Greek philosopher who lived about 2300 years ago, a Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher who died in 1274 A. D., and artificial intelligence (AI) got to do with each other?  Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  What I have to say is no joke, however, because if we don't heed the wisdom of these two parties, which has been almost totally forgotten, we are liable to make some mistakes shortly that will be exceedingly costly in terms of missed opportunities, misdirected hopes, and maybe even lives.

 

The particular wisdom I speak of is known by the technical term of scholastic metaphysics.  It was, and still is, a way of viewing the universe, and it dominated the West for over a thousand years.  The Scientific Revolution vigorously uprooted it and threw it in the trash pile, to oversimplify a very complicated history.  And now it is almost completely forgotten except by a few lucky people such as yourself, if you keep reading.

 

The aspect of scholastic metaphysics I wish to explain concerns the nature of things.  Here's an example, taken from an article by journalist Mary Harrington in the June/July issue of First Things.  Take a dog, any dog.  It may be black, white, spotted, or bald.  But none of those attributes change the fact that it's a dog.  The scholastic metaphysical term for the dogness of a dog is its substantial form, also known as essence.  The aspects of a thing that can change without changing its substantial form are called accidents.  That's a weird use of the word, I know, but I'm not going to argue with Aristotle, who came up with these ideas, and Aquinas, who put them in terms compatible with Christianity.  The substantial form of a thing is its organizing principle.  The accidents are characteristics that can change without altering the substantial form.

 

What about people?  We have an organizing principle called the soul.  No matter what accidental characteristics we have—whether a person is fat, thin, from Teaneck, New Jersey, or in a coma—that substantial form remains. 

 

What about computers, and all the systems that are known by the general term of AI?  AI is, of course, artificial—that is, it is a man-made artifact.  Unlike living things, an artificial object has no substantial form that is prior to what its human makers say it is.  We can cobble together a bunch of transistors, call it a computer, and get it to do certain things for us.  But computers, and the AI systems supported by them, are simply assemblies of accidents.  This makes AI systems fundamentally different in kind from human beings. 

 

What emerges from looking at humans and AI from the viewpoint of scholastic metaphysics is this:  human beings are just a clean different kind of thing from AI systems.  And treating AI systems and humans as though they were basically the same kind of thing, simply piles of atoms arranged differently—which is how modern materialistic science encourages us to think—ignores a vital difference between the two.  Human beings have souls as their organizing principle, and AI systems do not.  No imaginable or unimaginable future progress in AI can change that fact.

 

This viewpoint flies in the face of the transhumanist agenda so popular in Silicon Valley, which looks forward to the day when human beings can transcend their messy, disease-and-death-prone meat-cage origins and live forever in an eternal bit-world of computer-borne bliss that will take over the universe.  (I may have left something out in that description, but I think I got most of it.)  Human beings are the rational animals that result from propagation by other human beings.  Anything you might upload from a human being to a computer is not going to be that human being.  And treating it, or any other AI product, as if it were human is a category error that can lead to heinous consequences.

 

In Harrington's words, trying to teach sand to think is not only futile, but if we start treating the result as though it had a soul, we are in danger of losing our own souls.

 

This may sound like just another anti-technology rant, but it's not.  AI can do truly amazing and useful things, but only if its human users keep in mind what it is and don't try to endow it with quasi-human agency.  A tool should be under the control of its human users at all times.  That control may be loose and barely perceptible sometimes, but it has to be there.  If we begin to bow down to AI entities as though they were thinking humans like us, we will soon regret it.  An automobile provides useful service when under control, but if it gets out of control it becomes a dangerous missile.  The same thing is true of AI.

 

Thinking in terms of scholastic metaphysics seems strange to most people unfamiliar with it, and it takes a while to realize that it's just as useful as it ever was.  I have had a passing acquaintance with it ever since I read a book on Thomistic philosophy in the 1990s.  The thing that drove me to that book was a statement by a former theoretical physicist turned pastor, who said that the Catholic Church's notion of transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ was based on an outmoded theory of matter.  I wanted to know more about this outmoded theory, and it turned out to be scholastic metaphysics. 

 

What modern science did to scholastic metaphysics is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  There was a lot of useless bathwater in Aristotle's physics—rocks having a desire to fall downward and so on—but there was also great wisdom in his metaphysics.  The wisdom of scholastic metaphysics can save us from making lots of mistakes that could be avoided if we just keep in mind that however clever and human-like AI appears, it's really just words written in the sand.  And we wrote the words to start with. 

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's article "Thomophobia" appeared on pp. 19-27 of the June/July 2026 issue of First Things.  For those wanting to know more, she refers to Edward Feser's book Scholastic Metaphysics (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, $34 on Amazon).

 

Two Views of the Universe

 

Imagine two little boys growing up in their father's household.  The older boy enjoys the company of his father.  He runs up to his father and hugs him when he gets home from work.  He listens to his father even when he's getting disciplined, or when his father tells him to do things he doesn't want to do.  He'll complain about things to his father sometimes, and even object to discipline, but the connection is always there.

 

The other little boy likes to play by himself in his room.  What he wants is to be in complete control of things.  His father has given him lots of toys, but the toys are all that he's interested in.  He's gotten very good at a number of games that he plays with the toys, but they're all play-by-yourself games, and don't involve either his brother or his father.  When his father tries to get his attention by bringing him a new toy, the kid just grabs it and slams the door closed. 

 

This image came to my mind while I was reading Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction.  Assuming you know nothing about this topic, let me explain it briefly.

 

In the Middle Ages, say 1000 to 1400 A. D., the Roman Catholic Church developed not only theological doctrines, but an entire philosophy that explained to the best of their knowledge what the world was about.  They started with ancient Greek philosophers, primarily Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), and modified his thought to be compatible with Christianity.  Although this work was done by many scholars over centuries, it is generally conceded that it reached its epitome with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A. D.).  Broadly speaking, the philosophy (as opposed to theology) was known as scholasticism.

 

Metaphysics (from the Greek "beyond physics") is the study of being, the most fundamental aspects of reality.  Scholastic metaphysics is therefore what Aquinas and his cohort thought about the fundamentals of reality. 

 

This topic is virtually unknown today except by specialists, and not many of those, either, which is why I've gone to the trouble to explain it to you.  The reason is that, with the advent of modern thought, people like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), David Hume (1711-1776) and others intentionally discarded scholasticism in favor of other ways of thinking about reality, most of which favor the powerful methods of quantitative science, which reduce everything to mathematical models. 

 

Everybody agrees that the scientific and industrial revolutions have made huge differences in our ability to feed, clothe, and care for ourselves—by and large, positive differences.  If tomorrow, all physical signs of scientific advancements since 1700 vanished, the vast majority of people on earth would die within weeks, leaving only a few survivalists and primitive hunter-gatherers. 

 

Modern thought is sometimes summarized under the title of the Enlightenment.  In this view, the West suffered under the repressive domination of the Church, which stifled intellectual progress, until a few brave souls (e. g. Bacon, Hume, etc.) threw off the chains of darkness and led us into the light of knowledge that we didn't have to concern ourselves with God, and that our own intellects can take us wherever we want to go.  C. S. Lewis satirized the arguments sometimes made in favor of the Enlightenment in a book about his intellectual conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress.  His pilgrim, who refers to God as "the Landlord," encounters a Mr. Enlightenment, and asks him, "But how do you know there is no Landlord?"

 

Mr. Enlightenment replies, "Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!"

 

When John asks how this non sequitur applies to his question, Mr. Enlightenment answers "Your people . . . believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training."

 

Whether or not you realize it, everyone growing up in the U. S. has had a "scientific training" simply by existing in the modern world and unconsciously absorbing its assumptions that surround us like the air we breathe.  One of these assumptions concerns what is "real," and I won't stop to define that further, because it means just what common sense means by it. 

 

One commonplace notion in which the scientific worldview diverges from scholastic metaphysics is the question of which is more real:  your body, or the atoms from which it is made?  The modern tendency is to think that atoms, or ultimately quarks, are what physical reality consists of, and everything else is, if not illusion, at the most secondary and not as important somehow. 

 

Feser shows that scholastic metaphysics is not in conflict with scientific knowledge, because modern science is highly limited in the things it can explain using its methods.  Essentially, modern science has no metaphysics, so although it is practically useful, it's no good in discovering the ultimate foundations of reality. 

 

On the other hand, scholastic metaphysics says that once the atoms are in your body, you, as a substantial being, are more real than the atoms, which now have only a virtual existence in you.  To quote Feser, "The level of basic particles is in no way privileged.  The particles are not somehow 'more real' than the substances of which they are parts.  On the contrary, it is the substances that are more real insofar [as] the particles, like every other part, exist only virtually rather than actually in the whole."

 

That little fragment uses scholastic vocabulary that may seem mysterious.  But if you read the rest of the book, you can appreciate the grand intellectual structure that scholastic metaphysics is. 

 

What good is it today, though?  In a word, sanity.  I learned about Feser's book from an online talk by Mary Harrington, who found it invaluable in understanding why modern thought has led to situations such as the transgender movement that previous generations would have considered simply crazy.  Such things are the final workings-out of perverse logic set in motion by the abandonment of the (formerly!) common-sense notions about reality that scholastic metaphysics upholds.

 

You can now guess which little boy is which.  Clearly, the one playing alone in his room should at least talk with his brother—and maybe his Father as well.

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's First Things lecture "Our Crisis is Metaphysical" is available among other locations at https://firstthings.com/our-crisis-is-metaphysical-2026-d-c-lecture/.  Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction (2014) is published by editiones scholasticae and distributed in the U. S. by Rutgers University.  The quotation from The Pilgrim's Regress is from pp. 24-25 of the Wade Annotated Edition (ed. D. C. Downing), published by Eerdmans in 2014.