"Remoto rationali, remanet vivum". Tommaso d’Aquino, il "Liber de causis" e la fine della vita umana

The present article discusses a text from Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Liber de causis that seems to give evidence to the distinction between end of human life and biological death of the living organism in Thomas. This text establishes a parallelism between substantial generation and corruption, so introducing an apparent exception to the ‘functionalism’ that inspires the whole anthropological teaching of Thomas. After discussing different interpretations, our conclusion is that it is possible to reconcile the causal and essentially neo-Platonic doctrine behind this text with the functionalist principle, Aristotelian in essence, of the homonymy between what is alive and what is dead. For Thomas, the end of human life coincides with the biological death of the living organism. The removal of forms in the process of substantial corruption begins after and not before the detachment of the soul from the body.