It's like Hegel said, when you want to study philosophy in earnest, you must "wear the vestments of the high priest," and never shy away from confusions or contradictions.
First, I might recommend the Metaphysics before the Physics. Second, I think reading the original Aristotle as a novice and alone is perhaps not the best move. I think it is best to start with a commentary or something more pedagogically suitable. Contemporary expositors like Edward Feser or David Oderberg write lucidly and approachably on the subject (see “Scholastic Metaphysics” and “Real Essentialism”).
That never said, it takes time to understand this stuff, especially when all sorts of bad intellectual habits must be broken.
I can identify with this from analogy: I recently started learning a guitar solo that is probably a couple of steps above my current skill level, and it served to reveal some bad fingering habits I had that never became a problem until I started to push the limits of my playing ability.
He tried to get to the bottom of things and pursued various paths.
I think his mainstream metaphysics (Genus, Species, Difference, ...) is somewhat different from his Hylemorphism and was more successful.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/index.htm...
2. The form and matter split is probably the core, but I'd guess there are lots of subtleties and consequences of accepting or rejecting the various parts of the argument that the article sorta breezes through.
I don't know though. I'm not a historian or philosopher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism_(computer_scien...
https://maartenfokkinga.github.io/utwente/mmf91m.pdf
There is a review of this article, although it is quite readable in and of itself:
https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/recursion-schemes/ind...
(I'm actually kind of surprised ncatlab has this article!)
Sure, most people would agree that an assembled IKEA "LISABO" table is a table.
Okay.. what if one of the legs is removed and it is sideways? What if one leg is removed but it is propped up with a pile of boxes?
What if it's intact as designed, but slightly scuffed? Deeply gouged? Horribly worn to the point of having holes through the top but still able to support plates and cutlery? What if all four legs are also broken, but it's still serviceable as a Japanese-style low table? What if atom-by-atom, we erode its form until nobody alive agrees that it is a table? What if someone then changes their mind?
This is the problem: all forms of matter, unless specified down to individual atoms, are just social conventions -- inconsistent ones at that!
Does it have to be? If a natural rock formation or horizontal tree root with a flat top is used as a table, then it is a table, is it not?
Tables are anything humans use for the purpose of a table.
Their manufacture or lack thereof is immaterial.
Although to be human in Chinese concepts, required more than just having the form of a human, and e.g. looking human, but also the ability to act like a human with concepts of e.g. 仁 (ren).
水火有氣而無生，草木有生而無知，禽獸有知而無義，人有氣、有生、有知，亦且有義，故最為天下貴也。力不若牛，走不若馬，而牛馬為用，何也？曰：人能群，彼不能群也。人何以能群？曰：分。分何以能行？曰：義。故義以分則和，和則一，一則多力，多力則彊，彊則勝物；故宮室可得而居也
Water and fire have qi but lack life. Trees and shrubs have life but lack intelligence. Birds and beasts have intelligence but lack morality. Humans have qi, life, intelligence, and moreover morality, hence are most honored under heaven. Our strength is not like the ox, nor our speed that of the horse, yet we employ them. How is it so? I say, humans work together and they do not. How do we work together? Through social roles. Where do social roles come from? Morality. Thus morality creates social roles, and from social roles comes harmony, from harmony comes unity, from unity comes strength. Strength overcomes obstacles and conquers nature. Thus we have mansions and palaces to reside in.
It’s a very clear distillation of Chinese thought, but no one ever talks about it.
διότι δὲ πολιτικὸν ὁ ἄνθρωπος ζῷον πάσης μελίττης καὶ παντὸς ἀγελαίου ζῴου μᾶλλον, δῆλον. οὐθὲν γάρ, ὡς φαμέν, μάτην ἡ φύσις ποιεῖ: λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων: ἡ μὲν οὖν φωνὴ τοῦ λυπηροῦ καὶ ἡδέος ἐστὶ σημεῖον, διὸ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ὑπάρχει ζῴοις （μέχρι γὰρ τούτου ἡ φύσις αὐτῶν ἐλήλυθε, τοῦ ἔχειν αἴσθησιν λυπηροῦ καὶ ἡδέος καὶ ταῦτα σημαίνειν ἀλλήλοις）, ὁ δὲ λόγος ἐπὶ τῷ δηλοῦν ἐστι τὸ συμφέρον καὶ [15] τὸ βλαβερόν, ὥστε καὶ τὸ δίκαιον καὶ τὸ ἄδικον: τοῦτο γὰρ πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἴδιον, τὸ μόνον ἀγαθοῦ καὶ κακοῦ καὶ δικαίου καὶ ἀδίκου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων αἴσθησιν ἔχειν: ἡ δὲ τούτων κοινωνία ποιεῖ οἰκίαν καὶ πόλιν.
And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well （for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another）, but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.
[0]http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg...
If I do produce something new when I assemble the contents of the box, then the table is something more than just those contents. The table is not only its material parts, but also the formal organization of those parts.
And that is the fundamental claim of hylomorphism: that there is some kind of formal part, component, or aspect to any table, chair, rock, tree, rabbit, planet, or human being, something beyond its matter which accounts for its existence and nature."
Yes, and this is what Kant called 'the conditions of the possibility of knowledge', namely space and time in our reason. The form exists neither on the object nor in a Platonic heaven, but only in our minds because it is 'imposed' on the table by our reason and intellectual categories.
This. I was looking for this in the original article. Thanks for following up.
I really prefer learning these aspects of philosophy rather than more ethics oriented topics but it’s really such a rich subject.
The interesting thing is null, because here the distinction sort of breaks down.
Kind of like zero, represents "nothing" but also "something", at the same time.
RENE THOM: THE HYLEMORPHIC SCHEMA IN MATHEMATICS
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-5690-5_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics,_Form_and_Function
Psychologically speaking it is not helpful to think of forms as anything but convenient signs. Yeah they exist for practical purposes, but they actually don’t. Psychologically speaking (again) we need to get away from thinking that there is ever a split between “things” and “process”. Ultimately it’s all relativistic. The one Absolute Truth is that everything is relativistic... of course most people (philosophers?) reject that as a trivial contradiction, but Mahayana does some tricks (apparently—who am I, Wittgenstein?) which makes this seeming contradiction just work.
At the end of the day our natural intuitions are wrong. They were more towards Aristotle’s view. So we have to actively do things like analyze or meditate in order to see reality for what it truly is. In order to rid ourselves of clinging.
The renewed interest in hylomorphism (or hylomorphic dualism) is it seems related to the perhaps relatively modest, but certainly discernible resurgence of interest in Aristotlean metaphysics in the last decade or two. Speaking from experience, it is not easy to break mechanistic habits of mind, but it is possible. One way out, I find, is to begin with the realization that even if we accept a naive atomism, the atom itself is a thing, and to be a thing is to be an instantiated form. For if you truly have many atoms, as an atomist believes, then you have a plurality of things that are of like kind (the “matter” in hylomorphism is, first and foremost, prime matter, not something determinate as a kind of stuff, which itself requires form to be a kind of stuff; form is what causes a thing to be what it is). And if you happen to fall into the reductive mechanistic trap, you should recall that the further you go down that road, the more you undermine the very capacity of reason to know reality, the less you can explain the very possibility of reason, and the less your position holds weight as a result. We do not begin with atoms, but the world we experience everyday, and it is within that world that we perform scientific investigations and reason philosophically. Get something wrong, draw the wrong conclusion, and you can face a retorsion argument, a paradox of the sort skepticism generally faces (“there is no truth!” type of stuff).
I recommend some of Edward Feser’s books on the subject. “The Last Superstition” is a light read in that respect, but “Scholastic Metaphysics” is more of a proper manual.
