Miguel wrote:

I see no competition whatsoever. We just found out that material things are more composite than we once thiught they were, but the medievals were obviously already aware that bodies were composed by many different things which themselves were material (like organs, even though organs wouldn't properly be considered substances). Particles are just further parts; if they exist (many scientists, especially in QM don't actually believe fundamental particles exist btw, sounds a little weird but that's the way it goes) they are also composites of form and matter. So where's the competition?

No doubt this is true. But the thrust of my objection is that we have seemed to have uncovered the basic underlying structure of all material beings, that is, the atomic and subatomic levels. Where prime matter was posited once to account for the possibility of change in all beings, now physical atomic matter is posited as the substrate by which substantial change takes place,with aubstantial change being the reorganization of atoms into different structures. Notice I'm not advocating an all out reductionism. I am open to the idea that structures of atoms can yield emergentist or epiphenomenal qualities that the individual  atoms themselves don't have (e.g. sensation, thought, unity).   

Miguel wrote:

I would say that the chief insight of hylemorphism is really the distinction between formal and material causes as explanations, and how the idea of "matter" not structured into any form would be a mere abstraction. Atoms aren't just "little blobs of matter", they only are what they are (atoms) because of how they are structured; they're matter informed by the form of atom. This would go all the way down to the most fundamental particles: at the bottom, they are all matter structured in a certain common form. How would they not be? What else would they be? Little building blocks of "matter"? No, they are -- like other material beings -- material matter informed by a specific nature which unifies their attributes and structures them into the kind of thing we call quarks, or whatever.

But why should we accept that atoms and other material particles are composite of prime matter and form? It seems to me that prime matter is used by the Thomist to explain substantial change. But if one can explain substantial change through the motion of atoms, rather than some unseen purely potential substratum, then it would be unnecessary to seek an alternative metaphysical substitute.

Miguel wrote:

And so hylomorphism makes good sense of how there can be no simple "matter" that isn't structured into a certain form; how we may explain essences/sharing of essential features among material beings; how we can explain change and identity; how we can explain the fact that we come to objectively know things (by having the same form of material being X actually present in our intellect as an abstraction); how we can have a neat account of soul-body dualism; a way to give some explanation of consciousness; etc.

I don't see how atoms could do the work prime matter does; if anything it just pushes the the problems to another step.

Well if prime matter is seen as superfluous then I don't think we need to hold onto the Aristotelian idea of matter. You pointed out earlier that finding the atomic structure of beings just made us more aware of how composite beings really are. But the atomic basis is unifying, all physical beings are made up of it. If we need a persisting subject through substantial change we can readily admit that the organs of a corpse don't survive cremation or that the fibers of wood don't survive being burned into charcoal. But in all cases of material change the atomic and subatomic levels do persist. In other words, they are the persistent subject of change Aristotle was looking for.

I'm not sure what you mean by pushes the problem to another step.

FrenchySkepticalCatholic wrote:

Rick wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by pushes the problem to another step.

Perhaps I can help, with one question.

In what ways are two different atoms similar?

They share the same form. They are the same kind of thing

"But why should we accept that atoms and other material particles are composite of prime matter and form?"

Because of whar I just said? Do you think atoms are pure forms, or are they embodied forms? You yourself answered that atoms "share the same form", because "they are the same kind of thing"; right, and in what way are they *different* from one another? Because of prime matter, which allows us to talk of them as embodied beings with respective differences of matter, spatiotemporal location, etc. Since they both share the same form, the form obviously cannot be the principle of individuation for atoms, or they wouldn't actually share the same one form, but would each be different from one another!

As I said, the chief insight of hylomorphism is the distinction between formal and material causes, which is present also in atoms. Atoms are prime matter structured into a specific form -- the atomic form.

"It seems to me that prime matter is used by the Thomist to explain substantial change. "

That is partially incorrect. As I mentioned, hylomorphism (including the concept of prime matter) does explain substantial change, but it explains more than that. It also, for example, explains individuation among beings that share the same form; it allows us to make sense of the basic difference between material and formal causes in our questions, etc.

Prime matter is *not* superfluous. My whole point was that I see no way to make sense of atoms as anything but hylomorphic composites of form and prime matter. And also that hylomorphism (with prime matter) has more explanatory power for many issues.

Last edited by Miguel (4/09/2018 12:19 pm)

Miguel wrote:

"But why should we accept that atoms and other material particles are composite of prime matter and form?"

Because of whar I just said? Do you think atoms are pure forms, or are they embodied forms? You yourself answered that atoms "share the same form", because "they are the same kind of thing"; right, and in what way are they *different* from one another? Because of prime matter, which allows us to talk of them as embodied beings with respective differences of matter, spatiotemporal location, etc. Since they both share the same form, the form obviously cannot be the principle of individuation for atoms, or they wouldn't actually share the same one form, but would each be different from one another!

As I said, the chief insight of hylomorphism is the distinction between formal and material causes, which is present also in atoms. Atoms are prime matter structured into a specific form -- the atomic form. 

I'm still a bit hesitant to insert prime matter into my metaphysics. You mention that prime matter must act as a principle of individuation in order for us to explain why distinct beings can share the same form. As I said to FrenchySkepticalCatholic, why do we need prime matter to explain the many of the singular atomic form? I can just appeal to space. Each atomic particle occupies a distinct amount of space. If two atomic particles occupied the same space (the same exact space) then we would just have one particle, not two. Therefore, spatiotemporal location and physical motion (the means by which a physical being can occupy new locations) seems sufficient to explain why atomic particles are distinct and yet the same with regards to their shared nature.

Miguel wrote:

Prime matter is *not* superfluous. My whole point was that I see no way to make sense of atoms as anything but hylomorphic composites of form and prime matter. And also that hylomorphism (with prime matter) has more explanatory power for many issues.

Prime matter does seem more attractive when one considers the mind's ability to abstract a universal nature from a concrete substance. However, I am inclined to think that substances, a la the scholastic understanding, being concrete beings that individuate universals, is a bit suspect. How do we explain the idea that we can supposedly create our own universals and abstract from their concrete substances? For instance, a car, a house, a chair. Each is man-made, but can the finite and concrete individual really generate something like a universal? This is just to show that perhaps the scholastic idea of universals existing in concrete beings (only to be abstracted as universals by the intellect) is not as straightforward or commonsensical as it might seem.