ABSTRACT
The past century has witnessed a revival of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas across various schools in philosophy. In the latter half of the twentieth century,Aquinas’s metaphysics, ethical theory, and philosophy of religion have been introduced into contemporary debates in analytic philosophy. Concurrently, scholars have utilized Thomism as a basis for addressing certain issues in bioethics. Some, for example, have appealed to Aquinas’s metaphysical account of human nature and human embryogenesis to argue for distinct points at which a developing human embryo may be considered to have a rational soul, and thus to be a person (Donceel, 1970;Ashley, 1976; Ford, 1988; Grisez, 1989; McCormick, 1991; Heaney, 1992; Eberl, 2000a). Others have appealed to Thomistic natural law theory to evaluate issues such as abortion and euthanasia (Grisez and Boyle, 1979; Gómez-Lobo, 2002; Eberl, 2003).
