- Greg
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
John West wrote:
Perhaps it's because I've only been half following this thread (and only haphazardly at that), but I think I've lost track of what the dispute is about.
As I understand it, it has been a debate about what is involved in claiming that the soul is the form of the body, how profitable it is to call such a view "immaterialism", and how much distance there is or should be between hylomorphic and substance dualism.
The intellect isn't the soul, but a passive power of the soul (ST I.79.1).
When I say the intellect is a form, I'm speaking along the lines of ad 1. The soul is, anyway, the principle of intellectual operation (I q. 75 a. 2c). One has to be just as careful whether one is saying that man thinks by his soul or that man thinks by his intellect.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
As I understand it, it has been a debate about what is involved in claiming that the soul is the form of the body, how profitable it is to call such a view "immaterialism", and how much distance there is or should be between hylomorphic and substance dualism.
We're taking the body of a human to be his material substance, minus the intellectual power, right? It doesn't really make sense to say the body is prime or designated matter.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
We're taking the body of a human to be his material substance, minus the intellectual power, right? It doesn't really make sense to say the body is prime or designated matter.
Yes, the body is not prime matter.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
Okay. So does the material substance instantiate the intellectual power, or does the soul? If the former, the relation between the body and the intellectual power is instantiation. If the latter, the relation between the body and the intellectual power is that a constituent of the body instantiates the intellectual power. (I've so far assumed the latter, for post-mortem reasons.)
Instantiation is a mighty strange relation, but it's also a mighty common one. (If the relation between the body and intellectual power is instantiation, then the relation between the body and intellectual power is no stranger than the relation between a rose and red.)
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So does the material substance instantiate the intellectual power, or does the soul?
My inclination is to say neither. The instantiation relation is just the being-an-instance-of relation, is it not? If X instantiates Y, then X is an instance of Y. It seems that neither material substance nor soul is an instance of intellectual power.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
The instantiation relation is just the being-an-instance-of relation, is it not? If X instantiates Y, then X is an instance of Y. It seems that neither material substance nor soul is an instance of intellectual power.
Not quite. If x instantiates the property F, x “has” or “bears” F. (I'm using property in the sense of property opposed to substance, which includes both accidents and substantial forms.)
I can give you a list of formal properties of the instantiation relation (e.g. it's nonsymmetrical) but, since it's a primitive relation, not define it.
The instantiation relation is also sometimes called the “exemplification relation”.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
We're taking the body of a human to be his material substance, minus the intellectual power, right? It doesn't really make sense to say the body is prime or designated matter.
Yes, the body is not prime matter.
My apologies: I wasn't thinking when I wrote this. The body is man's designated matter. Aquinas frequently says that the soul is the form of the body, but one might be left wondering whether the body is the matter or the man. But I found this: "If, however, the intellectual soul is united to the body as the substantial form, as we have already said above (Article 1), it is impossible for any accidental disposition to come between the body and the soul, or between any substantial form whatever and its matter." (ST I q. 76 a. 6c).
We don't have a notion of what man's matter is prior to a comprehension of his form, on Aquinas's view, and I don't think we need to.
My understanding is that instantiation, as a relation neutral between accidents and substantial forms, won't be fundamental on an Aristotelian view, in that an Aristotelian thinks that the relation between a thing and its accidents and a thing and its form are very importantly different. So it doesn't follow from our comprehension of one case of the instantiation relation (the relation between a rose and red) that we comprehend another (the relation between a man or a body and substantial form).
The relation between a man and his soul is the relation between a substance and a substantial form. The relation between a body and its soul is the relation between matter and a substantial form. The relation between a man and his intellectual power is the relation between a substance and a power. The relation between the body and the intellectual power is the relation of being the matter of a substance which has a power. (This last relation is not an important one for Aquinas's account, I think. When Aquinas says the intellect is the form of the body, as he does in I q. 76 a. 1c, he means the soul by "intellect," not the intellectual power.)
However, when I said that we have been discussing "what is involved in claiming that the soul is the form of the body," I didn't mean that we have been discussing what kind of relation obtains between the soul and the body. I meant we had been discussing the bearing of that thesis on what it is for activity to be intelligent and of what sorts of explanations the intelligence of activity should admit (i.e., concretely, in saying that some thought is the formal cause of some intelligent behavior, what else are we committed to?).
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
My apologies: I wasn't thinking when I wrote this. The body is man's designated matter. Aquinas frequently says that the soul is the form of the body, but one might be left wondering whether the body is the matter or the man. But I found this: "If, however, the intellectual soul is united to the body as the substantial form, as we have already said above (Article 1), it is impossible for any accidental disposition to come between the body and the soul, or between any substantial form whatever and its matter." (ST I q. 76 a. 6c).
I suppose that makes sense. Aquinas originally wanted to give men substantial forms of corporeity before giving them substantial forms of humanity, but later collapsed the two into one (with the corporeity still “logically preceding” the humanity).
My original worry was that this makes “the body” basically just prime matter stamped with spatial (and perhaps temporal) dimensions, whereas we typically think of the body as something with various accidents (e.g. skin with colour). You can chalk this up to an odd use of the term “body”, though.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
My understanding is that instantiation, as a relation neutral between accidents and substantial forms, won't be fundamental on an Aristotelian view, in that an Aristotelian thinks that the relation between a thing and its accidents and a thing and its form are very importantly different. So it doesn't follow from our comprehension of one case of the instantiation relation (the relation between a rose and red) that we comprehend another (the relation between a man or a body and substantial form).
How, specifically, does the relation differ between cases? The prime matter instantiates the substantial form essentially whereas the rose instantiates the red contingently, but there are essentially instantiated accidents (proper accidents).*
In any case, this needn't change my essential point that the relation between the body and soul or body and intellectual power is “mighty strange [...], but [...] mighty common”. Only the specifics of my example (e.g. the rose and substantial form of roseness, or the rose and its power to wilt).
*Feel free to ignore this first paragraph if you feel it will take you too far from the OP.
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Re: Hylemorphic dualism and the interaction problem
Isn't there a dispute over whether the intellectual power is immaterial or non-material? (What does it mean for something that exists to be non-material without being immaterial?)
You see, I think the conceptual side of the interaction problem is overrated. It's, at bottom, the question of how an immaterial substance can cause an effect in a material substance. In response, I'm inclined to ask why (if causation is a primitive relation between two entities) an immaterial substance can't stand at one end of a causal relation and a material substance at the other or why (if causation is the actualization of a disposition) an immaterial substance can't actualize a material substance's disposition or why (if causation is something else like, e.g., counterfactual dependence) given some other specific account of causation an immaterial substance can't cause an effect in a material one. I'm applying a similar general approach to the question of interaction and hylemorphic dualism. Basically, I think a lot of the problems around interaction crop up because people are operating at too coarse a grain of analysis.