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- Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle. Check out Edward Feser's Aquinas for a beginner-friendly discussion of what they say.
- The word 'soul' is used by Aquinas and Aristotle in a very different way from how modern people (from Descartes onward) use it, and this is the cause of an enormous amount of confusion.
Edward Feser's book Aquinas is a good starting point for understanding it.
- Again, all your objections can be answered, and if I were either rich or childless I would do so myself. But I'm neither, so all I can do is provide you with a book recommendation: check out Edward Feser's work, especially Aquinas and Five Proofs. If you want to see Dawkins refuted in his own tone, see The Last Superstition.
What research have you done up to this point to answer your questions?
- That's an excellent question. My road to philosophy was a long one. It took me a while to realize that the kinds of questions I was asking or preoccupied with—often having to do with basic presuppositions and what reality must be like for the facts as we know or accept them to obtain, questions of identity, etc—were ultimately philosophical in nature.
I would first distinguish between history of philosophy from philosophy itself. Sometimes these two things are confused, much like people will sometimes confuse being a philosophy professor with being a philosopher (these two can coincide, naturally, but the former does not necessarily entail the latter). Some history is edifying, of course, because philosophical arguments and discussion occur in time, and indeed, history will incidentally enter the picture on its own as a way of presenting the dialectical refinement of some position (for example, the typical way Aristotle's theory of act and potency is presented is by beginning with Parmenides, followed by a somewhat idealized version of Heraclitus and then by showing how Aristotle's theory resolves the resulting aporia).
In retrospect, I would recommend something in the Aristotelian vein. It not only serves as a strong and sound foundation, as well as a good base from which to examine other positions, but it will save you a lot of grief later (even here, it took me a long time to overcome ingrained biases and habits of mind that were insinuated by the modern education system). I would highly recommend some of Edward Feser's books. He's well known for writing in a lucid style that dispenses with some of the the needless jargon that some philosophers are known for. On the introductory side, "Aquinas" [0] is probably a good starting point. A follow up, or if you can handle something a bit more substantive to begin with, would be his "Scholastic Metaphysics" [1]. I emphasize metaphysics first because the most basic philosophical questions are metaphysical; everything else benefits greatly from a clear understanding of metaphysical issues. Avoid any philosophical approach that begins with methodological doubt. It will destroy your capacity to know or to reason and may actually succeed in driving you mad (no joke). Groarke [5] wonderfully argues how such doubt is ultimately unresolvable through reason because it isn't a rational doubt—something that arises when we are met with, say, conflicting evidence—but a _willed_ doubt.
I'll leave it at that, partly because I would have to take some time to think about what additional recommendations I should make so that they would be most helpful to you, and partly because I think the recommendations I've made above will occupy you for some time and lead you in a direction of inquiry all on their own.
(Some honorable mentions: David Oderberg's "Real Essentialism" is a nice complement to [1]. Etienne Gilson's "Being and Some philosophers" [2] is also a nice trek through metaphysics. His "Methodical Realism" [3] is also a nice quick read in which he argues against idealism, while "The Unity of Philosophical Experience" [4] is a historical tour of how various major philosophers in history have failed.)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19160503-scholastic-meta...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2479290.Being_and_Some_P...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12409190-methodical-real...
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232542.The_Unity_of_Phil...
[5] https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/an-aristotelian-account-of-inductio...
- Aristotle and Aquinas are indispensible (though you might want to begin with commentaries or approachable introductions, like Feser's). Contrary to the liberal tradition, "freedom" is understood as self-mastery not uninhibited indulgence of the passions which leads to misery (hence the Augustinian observation that man has as many masters as he has vices). Aquinas also distinguishes beatitudo from felicitas. You also have the virtues. Happiness is ultimately teleological.
Look to the ancients and medievals that we so eagerly forget and dismiss because we think we've unquestionably outdone them. Be careful, though, because your fallacious presuppositions may get in the way. They did for me, but with time, those vicious usurpers, that bad metaphysics, that poor substitute for properly understood science, has given way to a sounder picture of things dislodged from the tyrannical grip of error.
All that is to say that you should not be surprised if you find yourself reacting with incredulity until you begin to realize how unfounded and even incoherent it is. Give it time.
- I'm not sure how you justify calling a "revival" of teleology doomed. It may have been discarded by the early moderns, but it was discarded without a genuine rebuttal ("new" metaphysical theories were simply proposed where teleology was dismissed). However, as Aristotelians and Thomists argue, efficient causality cannot be understood without final causality. Without final causality, it cannot be explained why certain causes produce certain effects and not others. Furthermore, biology is saturated with functional accounts of organisms. Dismissing these functional accounts as merely "useful fictions", as it is often done when the challenge is posed, undermines far more than the dismisser seems to realize, and raises more questions than it answers.
In the case of information as it is discussed in the paper, Feser first discusses the technical sense of "information" which is exactly the one Shannon is concerned with, i.e., the syntactic sense. The semantic content is provided by the observer which is to say it is not inherent in the physical states that are being used to represent bits (which itself is observer dependent). Following this line of thought, Searles argues that computational states are assigned to physical states and are thus as artifactual and conventional as chairs. The computationalist naturalists cannot rebut Searle's charge without invoking notions which are broadly Aristotelian in nature.
It's worth getting a hold of a copy of the paper if you can. In lieu of or in addition to the paper, some of his blog posts delve into related subjects that clarify these points. I also recommend Feser's books on related subjects which are known for their lucid prose and clear explanations. Good places to start are "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" and then "Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction". Aquinas was decidedly Aristotelian and the scholastic philosophers broadly speaking were heavily influenced by Aristotle.
