- Can the soul separated from the body understand?
- Does it understand separate substances?
- Does it understand all natural things?
- Does it understand individuals and singulars?
- Do the habits of knowledge acquired in this life remain?
- Can the soul use the habit of knowledge here acquired?
- Does local distance impede the separated soul's knowledge?
- Do souls separated from the body know what happens here?
"It is because the contemporary alternatives seem so one-sided and are not more evidently solutions to the problems which Thomas faced, and partly solved, that we return to him and to the tradition of theology and philosophy in which his Summa Theologiae appears: theology as the science of the first principle and this as the total knowledge of reality in its unity." -- Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself (Oxford University Press, 1987), p.159.