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Neuroscience is one of the most propulsive of all sciences and very often, directly or not, it tries to answer the question: What is man? However, neuroscientific research does not acknowledge the concept of man as a unity of body and soul. The modern scientific research paradigm therefore rests on physicalism, while theologians are turning towards non-reductive physicalism. In this paper, we will highlight a few key points of the theory of philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy, which is based on the deconstruction of Aquinas's thought about the human soul and its reduction to the physical. We aim to show that she neglected the full scope of Aquinas teachings. In the second part of this paper, for the scientific paradigm of humans we shall propose new-old hylomorphism, and try to complement certain points of such a system with modern neuroscientific views. The aim of this work is to offer advice for the interdisciplinary cooperation between neuroscience, philosophy and theology alongside the guidelines of Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism.

My purpose in this paper is to illustrate how we can understand that what the Christian tradition calls the peccatum naturae neither consists in a mere privation nor in the total corruption of nature. There is a widespread understanding that for Catholics the sin of nature consists in the privation of the gift of original justice –the complete order of the natural tendencies and their subjection to reason as a result of the elevation of our first parents to a state of grace–, whereas Protestant denominations would in general terms understand that after the fall human nature was abandoned to a complete corruption. The two stances are sometimes seen as an either-or dichotomy. My intention is not theological, since I do not want to discuss or decide what Christians should believe in this matter, but I try to dig into the conceptual conditions under which we can coherently understand that our present condition is characterized by a twisted inclination of the will, which without destroying or totally corrupting human nature, still runs contrary to its proper good and cannot be considered as belonging or being inherent to it. I first present Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the peccatum naturae as a moral defect. Then, I take recourse mostly to Rosmini’s work in order to better understand how there could be a moral weakness, which could be rightly called corruption, without implying that our moral condition is completely irrecoverable.

Alasdair MacIntyre: narrative introduction to his workIn the wake of the publication of the last book of the British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, this work proposes a way to understand his bibliographical production in the context of the narrative of his life and his intellectual career. It is elaborated a periodization of the itinerary of MacIntyre, based on the references that the author himself has made of his academic life and in the proposals of several scholars of his thought. It is concluded that the narrative examination of MacIntyre’s work reveals that his philosophical project is basically marked by Aristotle and Aquinas, whose thought helped our author a solid proposal on the main issues of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. This work is conceived as introductory because it focuses only on MacIntyre’s books, but it’s expected to serve as a solid basis for a thorough critical study —especially from a chronological perspective— of his entire work, which includes chapters of books, papers, interviews, among others.