Metaphysics
Aristotelian essentialism, hylomorphism, the most elaborate model of essentialism.
What is a piece of music? It’s not a substance apparently.
Suitability is the only criterion for an artefact to be a substance maybe? I don’t know exactly what he is saying.
He said it is impossible to not be an essentialist though.
Somehow the unity of matter and form in the case of an artefact are accidental. They come together by force. Violently even. It is the violence of production that brings matter into form, and collects heterogenous materials and forces together. Artefacts are not substances according to Aristotle.
He says that art imitates nature. In the 18th century this was misinterpreted as a claim about fine art and a plea for realism. Aristotle has something completely different in mind. He means everything from tool-making to technology → technè. That arts imitate nature is because they resemble natural substances, but have rather been brought together. If you have a text, which is a form, a string of words, you can print it in many ways without the content of the text changing – only the representation of the text.
If you read Heidegger, he famously claims that aristotle has the model of production, the entirety of nature is conceived of as being made by a maker. Aristotle is actually trying to say that natural substances are special and should not be modelled to the idea of accidental formation – the violence of production.
Book 7 and 8 have the core doctrine of his conception of substance. It discusses certain views and tries to reach a conclusion from those. First he speaks of matter and form. So the question is whether substance is a compound of matter and form – maybe there can be immaterial substances, but Aristotle thinks it isn’t settled. We should not think of those as platonic universals anyways. If they exist they are particulars. If there are angels and demons, they are particulars. They would exist as matterless forms. They would retain causal power. In boob 12 the answer is that there are immaterial substances. And God/gods are probably immaterial. Thomas Aquinas wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle’s metaphysics. If there are immaterial substances we don’t have definitions of them. The definitions of things refer to their matter and form. This is an aristotelian justification of negative theology – we don’t know God’s essence.
Is there a more primitive piece of matter, with less form?
Aristotle suggests that we should compare with form. Let’s imagine that if we remove matter, do we retain form? No that’s impossible. You cannot have material without the form that it takes. Thus, it seems that matter is the Hypokeimenon because it may be able to survive the deprivation of form. If we remove the form and the properties that it has acquired in virtue of being formed. At some point Aristotle considers it that we are brought to the notion of the elements. Empedocles thought there were 4 elements, and that all materials are somehow mixtures and compounds of these elements. Elements are still different, and they are different in virtue of having different forms – they differ in terms of atomic structure. Ultimately they differ in form and therefore have different properties. The elements are as such not pure matter since there is difference. If we remove the difference, the simple forms of the elements we end up with a notion of pure matter – prime matter. This is something you cannot encounter and experience. Prime matter is formless so of course you can not encounter it, but it is a necessary assumption. Aristotle points out that the only thing we can say about prime matter is that it is pure potency, it has the power to receive any form. It is potentially everything material. It is not actual, but it is not nothing. In Plato there is the identification with matter with nothingness. If the forms are everything and everything real is real because it has a form, then a thing with no form is nothing. Aristotle says that of course nothing is not the potency for everything. Prime matter is not an object at all, we can only grasp it in the negative.
Aquinas has a smart discussion of this in his account of creation. Did God create prime matter? The usual doubt is that that seems impossible. To create means to create something determinate, but prime matter is completely indeterminate. Aquinas says of course God created prime matter, at the same time as he created material things generally.
We call a chair wooden. We have a clear distinction between the form of the thing and its distinction. The most important thing is the form, whilst the material adds additional information about its constitution. Its being wooden is not a predicative quality but is rather the definitive matter part of the substance.
Many thomists say that you have a form which is contracted into matter. This is not an aristotelian doctrine but a neoplatonic one. Ultimately there is no such magic thing as something that contracts a universal into a particular. One could have known this by reading aristotle carefully, like De anima, the soul of the living being is its form.
Aristotle has a clear account of metabolism, the exchange within living bodies and between living bodies. If this does not happen specifically due to the material which it is made out of, it must be because of the particular form the material takes.
Form brings indeterminateness but it also brings actuality. It also opens up new potencies. A living being has potencies for example that mere organic piece of matter doesn’t have.
Form plays a crucial role, because determines what is, but it could not determine that without matter.
We have genus and species. The genus is always the broader term, and the species the more specific one. Animal is the genus in humans, and rational is the differentiae. Genus and species are relative terms. What is a species of one level of consideration can be a genus on another level of consideration.
Aristotle WOKE???? THERE ARE NO RACES??? MY GOAT WASHED??? race is just an accidental??
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Essensce_
A definition tells us what something is. It tells us what falls under a concept and what doesn’t. Ultimately there are 2 types of definitions. There is a distinction between a merely nominal and an essential definition.
Suppose we just group things according to arbitrary criteria, we give a nominal criteria of a group we aspouse to form. All we have is a nominal definition. In other instances, when we have to do with real aristotelian species – we may not know the species at which point we need to figure out the essence. Aristotle says we could define human beings as animals with ear lobes because we are probably the only ones who have that. This could be a fairly handy nominal definition. But are earlobes the defining part of humanity? We should probably look for something else, what distinguishes humanity essentially. This simply means what constitutes a certain kind of substance in its being. The aristotelian way is to say that this is an empircal search for definitions.
Homo est animale rationale. Anthropos logon eis on. Living beings that have logos.
Humans are animals because we resemble all other animals – we are living beings like them. We live, we have procreations, we have animal desires and needs. We are also vulnerable in the way animals are vulnerable. But then we also have something distinct, which is rationality. It is the thing of our form that is different configurably from other animals. There are many social animals that live in groups, that have families, and that hunt in packs and which communicate because social animals must do this – but they have as it were only a system of signals. They emit noises or smells or movements. But only human beings have actual language – a propositional structure, which can relay statements about how things are, what is good and what is bad, what is and isn’t the case.
Particular properties we don’t have terms, we only have universal property terms. No harms is done however, when we call me white it is usually my whiteness people are referring to and not the pure whiteness.
Chimpanzees have humour. So they probably have protorationality probably.
If you look at classical biology, pre-darwinian, like Linnaeus – the task is basically aristotelian in the sense of finding the right criteria to tell what species exist. Somehow essentialist became suspicious in the darwinian tradition. But this seems mainly to come from a general confusion. Now a days taxonomy is seen as being about lineage, about how recent species came from more remote ones – but this isn’t really a taxonomy but an evolutionary geneaology. Taxonomists basically argue that we should taxonomise based on existing features, whilst geneaologists argue that we should taxonomise based on geneaology.
The question about what something is lead whitehead to claim that he overcame the notion of substance. If he is right there is an essence of processes. If we go back to platonism, Whitehead has in mind platonic forms as substances. Whilst Aristotle doesn’t consider substances as eternal and unchanging. According to Plato, the substances are the ideal forms. A human being can be more or less a human being in Plato to the degree that they participate in humanity. Aristotle finds this ethically objectionable but also logically objectionable. If I say that I am more human than you, than this may be good cause for genocide. There is no dog that is more dog than another dog.
If process-metaphysicians attack this image against Plato, they run against an open door.
For immaterialists, someone who thinks only immaterial things exist, only souls have essences. In Berkeley there is no reality, no substancehood of appearances. In Leibniz there are well-founded phenomena in the science of physics, even if they are not actually real. But physical phenomena are still not substantial, only the monads are, which are more like souls than atoms.
In cartesian dualism, there is a different account – not a hylomorphic account. Ultimately the compounds of matter and form are not really compounds but accidental units – ghost in the shell. You can define the essence of the human body without ever referring to the soul. You do so by describing the constructive physical principle which the human body is – like a structure of flesh and bones and nerves together with perception. The body is an operative hole, whether there is body or not.
The most difficult question: how about materialism? What do materialists do with the question of what it is they are talking about. In many materialists, you use the strategy of avoiding the question. What really matters is matter, and everything else is accidental because it could be different, and just focus on how matter is composed. But Aristotle already explained that a human being does not all of a sudden turn into a ship, because there has to be a form that implicates which is which.
What about species in materialism? They are accidental. Darwin thought of them as races. If you claim like Darwin that there are no species, you still have to explain how races are different. In standard materialism this is not even addressed as a problem. One exception is Ernst Bloch, who has a kind of materialism with process metaphysical account of reality. He claims many predecessors to that view, he claims to stand in a tradition that starts with a certain interpretation of Aristotle, which survives through islamic and hebrew philosophy, and then some heretical christians, and then some other guys and then bloch. Matter has the inherent ability to create ever-more and ever-new essences. Matter is the fountain of all forms. This is a way to deify matter, matter itself is creative as a kind of God. There is a roughly similar account in Bergson in speaking of creative evolution. Bloch does not like Bergson at all however. What we need on top of novelty is teleology. It is a goal-directed process. From the imperfect to ever-increasing perfection – so similar to whitehead.