ONLINE FIRST
published on July 23, 2025
Christopher Tomaszewski
https://doi.org/10.5840/acpaproc2025721181
Thomas Aquinas on Death as Substantial Corruption
The question of whether the human person immediately survives death has been the subject of considerable recent dispute among Thomists, between corruptionists who argue that the human person is indeed destroyed by death (temporarily, until he comes back into existence at the general resurrection) and survivalists who argue that the human person lives on constituted by his soul alone in the interim state between death and the general resurrection. In this paper I give a strengthened version of the standard argument (as given by Toner 2010) for corruptionism from Aquinas¡¯s own principles that examines the full logical space of what could happen to the human person upon death, and show that none of the possibilities that lead to survival are consistent with Aquinas¡¯s substance monism about the human person and his metaphysics of death.