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Yep.
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Maybe "Is form structure?" by Oderberg
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seigneur wrote:
Maybe "Is form structure?" by Oderberg
I have Real Essentialism but I don't think I've ever given that article a read. Thanks.
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It would be useful to know what exact question you are attempting to solve. Here you ask, "Do you think the subatomic is just a mathematical structure we abstract from the wholeness of a substance? I know the reductionist contra the essentialist will claim just the opposite, that the subatomic is the substance."
Those questions seem to seek to equate the scholastic concept of substance with some current concept in modern physics. This is not how it works.
The article I gave, "Is [Aristotelian/scholastic] form [the same as physical] structure?" answers basically no. They cannot be equated. This is to do with the respective (a scholastic's and a physicist's, respectively) presuppositions or premises and aims which are mutually incompatible. The physicist talks about physics. The scholastic talks about metaphysics, which is a different plane of reality.
To return to your question that I quoted in the beginning, everything the physicist talks about is an abstraction or reduction from the wholeness. This goes both for the atomic level and the subatomic. Atoms are not tiny physical objects that bounce around, but rather forces with consistently attributable values. Subatomic level is the same way. Neither is the same thing as the scholastic substance, but rather the physical manifestation of the substance, namely matter.
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In
Gil Sanders wrote:
A crucial consequence of hylomorphism is that it denies that the macro world is reducible to particles. The particles in a substance do not exist as actual particles in a macro level substance but rather exist virtually as parts of a macro substance – i.e. the particles do not exist as individual substances arranged as some pattern (contra reductionism) but exist only as parts of a substance that confer and derive their actuality to and from the substantial form as a whole. A substance is the “essence of a thing… what it is said to be in respect of itself” (Metaphysics Z.4. 1029b14). Something exists virtually insofar as it has the potential to exist as an individual substance but actually exists not as an individual substance but as a part of another substance by both giving its actuality to this substance and having its actuality through the substance. A good example is H20. The hydrogen and the oxygen do not exist as individual substances, but rather exist as virtual parts of the water substance. The water thereby acquires powers that neither hydrogen nor oxygen have in themselves, but nor could these powers be acquired without either of their particular actualities (as opposed to some other actual chemical) being so conjoined to become a new substance. Thus in some sense, hydrogen and oxygen stop existing as actual things.
Make of it whatever you will, but my intuition has always agreed that "particles" is the wrong name for whatever it is physicists are observing. "Particles" gives the impression of tiny billiard balls or such objects and that's the wrong impression.
The right impression is more like water that as if falls into particles (waterdrops) when you, wanting to take a closer look, isolate smaller amounts of it, and then at some point it becomes indivisible and turns into vapor. And vapor is not non-water. It's water-beyond-waterdrops. The same way, quantum phenomena are not non-matter. They are matter-beyond-particles where the particles are no more "what matter really is" than waterdrops are "what water really is". It's matter/water in a particular state given particular conditions.
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That passage is illuminating, and it'd helping me formulate certain ideas that have been rolling around in my head. The subatomic and atomic structures of the physical realm have always been a mystery to me. I'm starting to think the subatomic and atomic structures of reality are always constituent, always subservient to a higher metaphysical determinant--be it form? And perhaps the best way to view these fundamental levels of reality is by informing our analyses of them with our understanding of the macro realities they inhere. And as far as I understand the subatomic level is always virtually present in the atomic level and doesn't exist independently.