G. Stephen BLAKEMORE,   Recovering the Soul: Aquinas’s and Spinoza.s Surprising and Helpful Affinity on the  Nature of Mind-Body Unity. Wipf and Stock: Pickwick Papers, 2023: Eugene, OR 94701 2022). Paperback, xi, 247 pages. $23.49. Reviewed by Joseph A. BRACKEN, S.J., Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH 45207.

Stephen Blakemore, Professor of Christian Thought at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Mississippi, has written an unusual book, discussing the contemporary problem of mind-body unity from the perspective of the philosophy of Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas.  His book is quite detailed and divided into nine complex chapters: Comparing the Doctrines of Spinoza and Aquinas on the soul; the notion of hylomorphism; Aquinas’s version of hylomorphism; Mind-Body Identity in Aquinas; Persons in Aquinas’s Metaphysics; Thomistic Hylomorphism and Spinoza’s Conatus; Hylomorphism, Conatic Essence and Immortality in Spinoza and Aquinas; Recovering the Soul: Insights and Implications for Contemporary Philosophy of Mind.

While too much to explain in detail, I will summarize a few key points and then indicate how Alfred North Whitehead captured the same insight about the relation between the One and the Many but lost sight of it again in his resolute affirmation of philosophical atomism (actual entities). According to Spinoza and Aquinas, the human being is unified through its substantial form, Yet, what is still needed is a life-giving principle of individuation called the anima.  For otherwise, all human beings would look alike, speak alike and act alike.  According to Spinoza, there is only one substance, God, or some other transcendent reality.  It has two essential “Modes” and two relative “Attributes:” Thought is immaterial and thus outside of space and time. Extension is a material reality and thus non-living.  Yet they both need one another to be themselves.  Neither can exist without the other.

 Aquinas appeals to the doctrine of hylomorphism; Spinoza to the notion of ever-evolving conatus or Life-Spirit.  So, each finite entity is a person individuated by its own life-history.  The only problem for both of them is that Aquinas must employ substantial form to be both a part and the whole of any individual entity at the same time.  Likewise, Spinoza uses the notion of conatus or anima in the same way, namely the same principle is both a part and the whole of the same material entity at the same time. 

 On the contrary, Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality uses the term “actual entity” to be both an activity and unchanging actuality at the same time within the lifespan of an actual entity. But, if that lifespan is too brief to make a satisfactory “decision” about the details of its own self-constitution, then the Many remains and the One is never really achieved.  As a result, Blakemore justifies the priority of the One over the Many via efficient causality from the top-down (a higher energy-source).  But Whitehead favors the priority of the Many over the One through ongoing efficient causality of the constituent parts or members with one another from the bottom-up. What both approaches to the One and the Many implicitly favor, however, is a new emphasis on process and system rather than on predetermined relations between individual entities as the vital source for ongoing change and evolution.
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