REVISITING THE METAPHYSICS OF GENDER.

The article focuses on the metaphysical nature of sexual difference (gender) through the lens of Thomistic philosophy, particularly the thought of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary interpreters John Finley and William Newton. It examines the debate over whether sexual difference ultimately stems from the soul or the body, highlighting that both agree gender is an inseparable accident of the individual human being’s body-soul unity but differ on which principle is the ultimate cause. The author proposes a novel interpretation grounded in Aquinas’s concept of *esse* (the act of being), suggesting that sexual difference arises precisely in the relation between soul and body as a unified substance, neither reducible solely to form (soul) nor matter (body), but as a mode of being fundamental to the person. Drawing on Edith Stein and Ferdinand Ulrich, the article speculates that male and female differ in the mode of soul-body union—male as soul entering the body, female as soul arising from the body—thus offering a metaphysical grounding for gender as a positive contrariety and a principal property of personhood. Finally, it argues that this metaphysical approach challenges traditional substance-accident distinctions, opens new perspectives on the role of culture and history in gender, and invites a broader reconsideration of metaphysics beyond static categories toward a dynamic, relational understanding of being. [Extracted from the article]