[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

Haven't had the chance yet to read the next chapter, but I want to go back to this bit here:

Angels, on the other hand, would be:

~ individual (There's only one Raphael, one Michael, one Uriel, etc. If Aquinas believed in Platonic Forms, there would be a Platonic Angel Form that exists "above" each particular angel's existence.)
~ created 
~ having location (an angel can be said to be in a certain place and not in another)

Feser argues that each angel is their own species, since otherwise there's no principle of individuation to differentiate between them. But why couldn't location be that principle of individuation?

I think this depends on Aquinas' commitment to hylomorphism. Every physical thing, according to this, is "informed matter" -- matter which is currently held together according to a particular form. Each member of a species has the same (general) form, but differs from other members because its matter is particular to it.

So my cats Rosa and Sylvie both share the Form of "cat." But Rosa is Rosa and Sylvie is Sylvie because each is made of a different bunch of matter. The (naughty, trouble-making) Form of "cat" is imposed on a different glob of matter to create the two different members of the same species.

With angels (and I agree this is hard to believe) there is said to be form without matter. Lacking matter, therefore, there would be nothing to differentiate them. Therefore if we want to preserve the idea that angels are individual, they have to have different Forms. So their relation to one another isn't like that of Rosa and Sylvie, it's more like that between roses and lilies. 

I think that location isn't sufficient to differentiate them because a particular form doesn't change based on where it is. Forms are universal, and -- if they lacked matter -- would be identical no matter where they instantiated. Again, the analogy may be with numbers. The number 2 exists everywhere the same, but instantiates itself differently when there are two particular books or two particular rocks. Unless it is instantiated in a material object, it is the same universal abstract. So to avoid the idea that each angel is just a carbon copy or exact clone, each has to be its own individual Form.

The article from Aeon that you linked to is over my head, like all that quantum physics stuff, but I'm pretty sure they're using the word "cause" in the modern sense, which is solely what Aristotle would call "efficient cause." Only one of the four. It seems to be pretty widely accepted these days that some quantum events happen without an efficient cause -- a push or a trigger to make it happen. Very often when someone is talking about a First Cause argument, and saying that there has to be a chain of causes, someone else will speak up and say that modern physics denies this -- that quantum events can happen without a cause. But since this objection is limited to only what Aristotle would call efficient cause, it doesn't really harm a First Cause argument. If someone claims that quantum events can occur without efficient cause, and that this knocks down the Thomist First Cause argument, he is only showing that he doesn't know what the argument really says.