Rafael Nájera

There was no systematic treatment of philosophical issues related to embodiment in the medieval period in the Latin West. But a number of theological and philosophical problems related to the nature of the knowledge of embodied and disembodied human souls and angels forced philosophies such as Scholasticism and thinkers such as Ockham, Suárez, and above all Thomas Aquinas to engage with what it was for a being to have or to assume a body. The one thing that characterized embodied entities when it came to cognition was their having to get that knowledge by themselves through or in conjunction with the corporeal senses. There was no denying that embodiment was the natural state of human beings, and therefore that this was as good as it could get in God’s creation. Still the body was seen as a sort of encumbrance to arriving at a purer kind of intellectual activity.