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Hylomorphism. Jenny Czech and Natalia Molinatti. Hylomorphism. Aristotle: -Greek philosopher and student of Plato -wrote on several subjects including physics, biology, logic, and poetry Thomas Aquinas:
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Hylomorphism Jenny Czech and Natalia Molinatti
Hylomorphism • Aristotle: -Greek philosopher and student of Plato -wrote on several subjects including physics, biology, logic, and poetry • Thomas Aquinas: -When the question of the relation between faith and reason was brought up, Aquinas began to study the philosophy of Aristotle
Tenets of Hylomorphism • every being consists of two entities: matter and form • Matter: unchanging and potential property, the soul • Form: actual substantial essence, physical body • the body (form) and soul (matter) are united and cannot exist independently • The soul cannot fully exist without its form, the body, but it does have potentiality to become a human while standing alone. • Being the actual principle, the body must exist with the soul in order to become a human.
Hylomorphism was Aristotle's primary philosophical practice and he used it to explain the potentiality of humans. • The basic concept was grasped by many Ionian philosophers but Aristotle further developed the importance of two entities.
Mind/Body Connection • Mind: -Matter (hyle) -claybrickshouse • Body: -Form -includes qualia: colors, shapes, textures, flavors
Mind/Body Connection • The matter is what makes something alive • The form, must have matter to be alive, but the matter does not need the form • Not just any soul can inhibit any body • A corpse has the properties of the human body, but is not yet alive, therefore, the corpse must need the property of life, the soul.
Mind/Body--Four Causes Four Causes (1:28-1:57, 2:38-3:26) • Matter: what something is composed of • Form: shape or structure that the matter takes • Source/Efficient Cause: whatever created it • Final Cause: reason or purpose for which it was created
Mind/Body--Four Causes Matter: Form: Source/Efficient Cause: Final Cause: Ceramic, terra cotta Brown, rough, round, pot-shaped Potter To hold flowers and soil
Mind/Body Connection • Objection: - The ideas of Property Dualism: Frank Jackson and John O’Leary Hawthorne The two entities (mind and body) can NEVER be separated
What does it mean to be human? • Everything has form and matter but what distinguishes humans from other living things is the intellectual soul or as Aristotle calls it, the “nous”. • A soul is what characterizes an individual. As a person grows their body changes but the reason they are the same person is because of the unchanging soul.
What does it mean to be human? • Example: After death, the person no longer is human because he lost his soul. • Objection: The Monist belief that the soul and body are the same so after death they are inseparable. According to John Hicks the person will then reappear somewhere.
Are we good or evil? • Because the soul is intellectual, it has freewill. • A soul becomes good by doing good and likewise evil by doing evil. • We are not destined for evil but the soul leans away from good. Yet Aquinas feels that every being is good.
Social or Individualistic? • One factor that separates humans from other living things is their desire for personal connection to others. • The reason humans are social is because of their intellect which causes them to reach out and spread their ideas with others.
What Does it Mean to be Free or Predetermined? • The ability to use the intellect of the soul creates an urge to obtain knowledge. • Thomas Aquinas believed that man was made in the image of God through grace and thus lives to know and understand God. • Humans were specifically given the ability to think in order to do God’s will.
What Does it Mean to be Free or Predetermined? • Having a free soul means that one is able to think for himself and choose his own actions. • If a soul is predetermined then its outcome is already established and the soul is like a robot, doing what it is told.
What Does it Mean to be Free or Predetermined? • According to Hylomorphism a person is free because his soul has intellectual thought and is not bound to its body upon death. • A brute animal acts from natural instinct because it has no reason. • A person however uses judgment to act a certain way.
What gives meaning and purpose to life? • The ability to use the intellect of the soul creates an urge to obtain knowledge. • Thomas Aquinas believed that man was made in the image of God through grace and thus lives to know and understand God. • Humans were specifically given the ability to think in order to do God’s will.
What is identity? • Identity of a human being is the soul (matter) • The matter is what defines a human or living thing, making it do what it must to constitute as a living being. • The body (form) must not give a being its identity because the body cannot exist as a living being without the soul.
What forms identity? • What forms the soul? • knowing, perceiving, opining, • desiring, wishing, and generally • all other modes of appetition • The soul produces movements-growth, maturity, and decay
Nature vs. nurture? • Nature is the innate qualities (ones with which living things are born) -The soul is an innate quality which creates life in the form of a human. • -The soul creates identity of a being and therefore overpowers the ideals of behaviorism which consider nurture as the primary qualities.
De Anima- Quote 1 Aristotle explains his view and beliefs of the soul as a kind of harmony. Expanding upon this, he states that “harmony is a blend or composition of contraries”. This would insinuate that the soul is composed of many things that may contradict each other, but harmony infers that there is a certain proportion of each and the soul does not contain proportions. Aristotle continues to explain that a generally good state of the body would be a harmony. Therefore, health, happiness, thought etc would all be attributed to the harmony of the soul. With our bodies being composed of contraries, we have bad states as well that add to the harmony of the soul. These could include sadness and illness. “There is yet another theory about soul, which has commended itself to many as no less probable than any of those we have hitherto mentioned, and has rendered public account of itself in the court of popular discussion. Its supporters say that the soul is a kind of harmony, for (a) harmony is a blend or composition of contraries, and (b) the body is compounded out of contraries. Harmony, however, is a certain proportion or composition of the constituents blended, and soul can be neither the one nor the other of these. Further, the power of originating movement cannot belong to a harmony, while almost all concur in regarding this as a principal attribute of soul. It is more appropriate to call health (or generally one of the good states of the body) a harmony than to predicate it of the soul.” (Aristotle)
De Anima- Quote 2 The metaphor of breathing in homogenous (of a common origin)air and a heterogeneous (composed of different kinds) soul . Aristotle juxtaposes humans to animals by explaining that animals act in certain ways based on their surroundings because they have no soul. The soul is being animated as if it is the one doing the actions of the body. If it is true that animals become animate by drawing into themselves a portion of what surrounds them, the partisans of this view are bound to say that the soul of the Whole too is homogeneous with all its parts. If the air sucked in is homogeneous, but soul heterogeneous, clearly while some part of soul will exist in the inbreathed air, some other part will not. The soul must either be homogeneous, or such that there are some parts of the Whole in which it is not to be found. From what has been said it is now clear that knowing as an attribute of soul cannot be explained by soul's being composed of the elements, and that it is neither sound nor true to speak of soul as moved. But since(a) knowing, perceiving, opining, and further (b) desiring, wishing, and generally all other modes of appetition, belong to soul, and (c) the local movements of animals, and (d) growth, maturity, and decay are produced by the soul, we must ask whether each of these is an attribute of the soul as a whole, i.e. whether it is with the whole soul we think, perceive, move ourselves, act or are acted upon, or whether each of them requires a different part of the soul?
Discussion Questions • Why is it that not all things have a soul since everything is either an element of is formed out of one or several elements? What is it that unifies the elements into a soul? • Does life and its components depend on one part of the soul, more than one, or all? Or does life depend on the soul at all?
Works Cited Aristotle. ""Aristotle De Anima"" Archive. Kansas City Public LIbrary, n.d. Web. 04 Jan. 2013. "Aristotle's Psychology." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). N.p., 11 Jan. 2000. Web. 08 Jan. 2013. Christofidou, Andrea. "Self and Self-Consciousness: Aristotelian Ontology and Cartesian Duality." Philosophical Investigation. 2nd ed. Vol. 32. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 134-62. Print. "hylomorphism". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2013 "Hylomorphism: The Myth of Formlessness." Larval Subjects. N.p., 13 Apr. 2012. Web. 07 Jan. 2013. Rea, Michael C. "Hylomorphism Reconditioned." Philosophical Perspectives. Vol. 25. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 341-56. Print. Toner, Patrick. "On Hylemorphism and Personal Identity." European Journal of Philosophy. 1111 ed. Vol. 10. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 454-73. Print
