WordPress.com



Varieties of HylomorphismHylomorphism, the metaphysics of form and matter, is a theory both ancient and modern. It is, as is well known, the basis of Aristotle’s metaphysics, a basis which carried over into much of medieval philosophy. In that medieval form, it was thought to have been vanquished with the development of modern philosophy and science. But it is making a comeback and today there are quite a number of prominent philosophers who advocate one or another variety of Hylomorphism, often (though not always) describing it as such and acknowledging the influence of Aristotle. In this essay, I want to contrast two different varieties of contemporary Hylomorphism, each of which picks up on a different element in Aristotle’s own version of the approach. One of these contemporary varieties is my own view but this paper is not so much concerned with advocacy of that view (though I will try to indicate why I favor it over the other variety of contemporary Hylomorphism that I look at) as it is with understanding the logical space. I begin with a brief overview of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism insofar as it relates to the ensuing discussion.1. AristotleAristotle’s use of the concepts of form and matter extends over many kinds of cases: substances such as biological organisms; ersatz substances such as artifacts; the soul and its relation to the body; chemical theories of stuffs; geometric figures; and no doubt more besides. Here I want to focus on those cases in which the use of the concepts of form and matter most clearly intersects with Aristotle’s explanatory framework of the four types of causes: formal, efficient, final, and material. This intersection between Aristotle’s use of the concepts of form and matter and his theory of the four types of causes is on display in his multiple treatments of biological organisms, which are his paradigm cases of hylomorphically complex substances, and it is this intersection, rather than merely the use of the concepts of form and matter, that I shall call Aristotle’s Hylomorphism. His Hylomorphism is also on display in his treatments of artifacts which, on the one hand, fail to qualify as bona fide substances but, on the other, serve as his primary means of introducing his readers to Hylomorphism. The intersection occurs in two stages. First, and most obviously, form and matter are themselves identified as two of the four causes. The formal cause of something, the “account of what the being would be,” is its form; the material cause, “that out of which as a constituent a thing comes to be,” is its matter (or perhaps its original matter). That still leaves the efficient cause, “the primary source of the change or the staying unchanged,” and the final cause, “the end… what something is for” (Physics II,3 194b23-35). The second stage of the intersection between the concepts of form and matter and the theory of the four types of causes is accomplished when Aristotle writes that the formal, efficient, and final causes “often coincide. What a thing is [the formal cause], and what it is for [the final cause], are one and the same, and that from which the change originates [the efficient cause] is the same in form as these” (ibid. II, 7 197a25). So the efficient and final causes are integrated into the framework of form and matter through their coincidence with the formal cause.I will briefly give two illustrations of how the formal, final, and efficient causes coincide, one of a biological organism, the other of an artifact. Here is a highly schematic version of Aristotle’s account of sexual reproduction in humans. An individual human is a composite of matter and the form human. The efficient cause of the coming to be of this individual is the male parent. “Man comes from man,” as Aristotle says. The parent is able to generate the offspring, a composite of form and matter, because he himself has that form (he is himself a human). So besides identifying the efficient cause with the male parent, Aristotle also identifies it with the form, acting in or through the parent. Thus, the formal cause of our individual is also its efficient cause. But what is the mechanism whereby this generation takes place? The semen of the male parent carries the form in question to the matter provided by the female parent, blood in the uterus. This union creates a composite of matter and form that either is, or becomes, the individual offspring. But clearly, at the point of union, the resulting composite is a long way from being a fully developed exemplar of the human species. It is the form, once again, now informing the matter of the generated individual, that guides the development of the embryo through the various stages it must traverse until it becomes a developed, adult human, itself now capable of transmitting the form or providing the matter for further reproduction. Thus the final cause, the end state towards which development is directed, is the form, and hence coincident with the formal and efficient causes of the individual. There is one further crucial observation to be made about this whole process concerning the transmission of the form from the male parent to the offspring. This form, I said, is carried in the semen; but the semen itself is not a human being at all, even in an undeveloped state (and not the matter of a human being). Montgomery Furth comments:A striking aspect of Aristotle’s account is the certainty and clarity of its appreciation of the fact that the biological phenomena require there to be two different ways in which specific form occurs: one the way in which it is exemplified by specimens of the species, and a different way that figures in the copying process from forebear to offspring… [T]he recognition that the second way must indeed be different is perhaps Aristotle’s most remarkable single insight, biological or otherwise. (113, emphasis in the original)Furth is surely not wrong to stress the importance of this view for understanding Aristotle since it underlies and renders unmysterious the teleological character of his outlook. The final cause is explanatory of the process that leads up to its attainment not because it reaches back spookily into the past but because it is already present in the past as efficient cause, in the parent in one way, and in the semen in the other way.As an artifactual example, consider a bicycle. The bicycle has matter – steel, rubber, chrome, etc. (or perhaps wheels, frame, tires, etc.); these are what the bicycle is made out of, they are that “out of which as [constituents a bicycle] comes to be” (Physics 194b23). This matter is informed by something, the form of a bicycle, which makes the bicycle what it is. This is its formal cause. What is the bicycle’s efficient cause? Aristotle sometimes implies it is the maker and sometimes the art of bicycle making. What this adds up to is that the maker is able to make the bicycle because of the art of bicycle making that is ‘in’ her in some way, the art of bicycle making which includes the form of a bicycle. Furthermore, it is in virtue of having the form of the bicycle in it that the bicycle functions as a bicycle, that its wheels turn as the pedals do, that changing the gears can make it harder or easier to go uphill, and so on. Thus we have the coincidence of the efficient, formal, and final causes of the bicycle. We also see, once again, Aristotle’s striking insight at work; the teleological explanation here too, in this artifactual case, depends on the possibility of the form of the finished product’s being in things in two different ways. It can be in the bicycle and it can be in the mind of the maker in a way that does not make an actual bicycle out of her mind but enables it to play a role in bringing bicycles into existence. What these examples both exhibit, in virtue of the coincidence of the formal, efficient, and final causes, is a tight internal connection between what a thing is, how it comes to exist, and what it does or is for. The origin of something, its essence, and its function or characteristic behavior, are not adventitiously connected in such entities; an adequate account of them demands some unity of, or interconnection between, origin, essence, and telos. For the cases to which this theoretical framework applies, ontology (an account of the being of things) is itself essentially both historical and teleological. This powerful philosophical vision – that there are internal connections relating essence, origin, and telos – is distinctively Aristotelian, but it also transcends the particular way in which Aristotle develops it. Aristotle’s version of it depends, as we have seen in the two examples above, on positing the existence of special entities, forms, that are causally active in distinctive ways. They are capable of being in things in two ways (in addition to their relation to the matter of hylomorphically complex entities); they can be transferred from one thing to another; and they guide the activity and development of the things they are the forms of. This reliance on the existence of a certain kind of entity (forms as entelechies) makes Aristotle’s way of developing an ontology that is both historical and teleological what I call “realist.” Modern science finds no place for any causally active entities that resemble forms in being able to enter into historical and teleological explanations of what a thing is. Hence the rejection of Aristotelianism by modern science.In the following, I will discuss two responses that both count as neo-Aristotelian but which pick up on different elements in Aristotle’s account. Crudely put, one response keeps Aristotle’s realism but jettisons the overarching vision in which origin, essence, and telos come as a package. The other, my own view, keeps this vision but relinquishes the realism.2. Contemporary Realist HylomorphismOne kind of neo-Aristotelianism is found among philosophers who embrace Aristotle’s realism but adopt a ‘thin’ conception of form on which it has no essential connection to the broader vision of an historical and teleological ontology. They thereby avoid the conflict with modern science that afflicted Aristotelian Hylomorphism. I call this approach Contemporary Realist Hylomorphism (CRH) and it number among its advocates Kit Fine, Mark Johnston, and Kathrin Koslicki. CRH takes from Aristotle the idea that certain entities are composites of things that play the role of form, and things that play the role of matter and they look to the abstracta of contemporary ontology – such things as properties, relations, and (mathematical) functions – to play the role of Aristotelian forms. Such thin substitutes for full-blooded Aristotelian entelechies cannot, or can only incidentally, integrate an account of what a thing is with accounts of its origins and telos. I shall seek to explore this claim in connection with Fine. I begin with an exposition of his views. Fine postulates a kind of entity he calls embodiments. Embodiments can be rigid or variable. Variable embodiments would include all biological organisms and (most, if not all) artifacts, in other words, the paradigm examples of Aristotle’s historical, teleological ontology. I will approach the theory of variable embodiments through the theory of rigid embodiments, starting with a special kind of rigid embodiment that Fine calls qua objects. For any property P that an object O has, Fine suggests there is another entity, O insofar as it is P, or, as he canonically puts it, O qua P. Thus, Socrates was, among other things, a teacher of Plato and snub-nosed. So Fine thinks we should also recognize the existence of Socrates qua teacher of Plato and Socrates qua snub-nosed. These are distinct from each other and distinct from Socrates. As Fine explicitly notes in various places, Socrates is like the matter of each of these objects, and the properties being a teacher of Plato and being snub-nosed are like the forms. Fine uses the terminology of basis and gloss respectively for the things that play the role of matter and form in qua objects. Here are the three axioms that Fine postulates for qua objects:F1) O qua P exists at a time t if and only if O has the property P at t;F2) a) O qua P and O’ qua P’ are identical if and only if O=O’ and P=P’; and b) O qua P is not identical to O;F3) O qua P inherits all of O’s normal properties.F1 tells us the existence conditions for qua objects. The axiom places no restrictions on O and P; for any object and any property, if the object has that property at a time, a corresponding qua object exists at that time. Since qua objects may themselves be the bases for other qua objects, and given the conditions on identity of qua objects given by F2, qua objects are likely to be very numerous indeed, even supposing, as Fine does not, a sparse conception of properties. F3 tells us what (some of) the properties of qua objects are. If Socrates is snub-nosed, and being snub-nosed is a normal property, then Socrates qua sitting is snub-nosed too (as is Socrates qua snub-nosed, something that does not follow merely from the fact that being snub-nosed is the gloss of that qua object). Non-normal properties include such things as existing, being identical to x, and not being a qua object. Since it will play no role in my discussion of Fine, I leave the distinction between normal and non-normal properties at an intuitive level.The theory of qua objects naturally suggests an extension of itself to objects that have more than one basis and appropriate n-ary relations in place of properties as their glosses. Fine calls such objects rigid embodiments and qua objects are simply monadic rigid embodiments. Canonical notation for such objects is x,y,z…/R, where x, y, z… are the bases of the rigid embodiment so designated, and R, a relation, its gloss. Fine gives as an example of a rigid embodiment a ham sandwich that has two slices of bread and a slice of ham as its bases and the relation of two things’ sandwiching a third (sandwiching, for short) as its gloss: b1,b2,h/sandwiching. A number of postulates are given for rigid embodiments, mostly mirroring those for qua objects but also going beyond those in describing explicitly some mereological features.It will be evident that rigid embodiments, as their name suggests, do not allow for the change of matter over time that is characteristic of hylomorphically complex objects like bicycles or biological organisms. F2(a), and its analogue for the general case of rigid embodiments, make it impossible that one and the same rigid embodiment should persist while its matter changes. Rigid embodiments do not have ‘metabolisms,’ literally or figuratively. To give a hylomorphic account of entities which can change their matter over time, Fine develops the theory of what he calls variable embodiments. Despite the common language of embodiment, however, and despite the connections between the theories of rigid and variable embodiments, variable embodiments turn out, from many points of view, to be quite different kinds of things from rigid embodiments: not a simple extension of the latter somehow to accommodate change of matter or parts, but a completely different kind of entity. Associated with a variable embodiment canonically represented as /F/ (e.g. with a particular organism or artifact) is a function F (called its principle) that takes times into objects. The object determined by F at t is called /F/’s manifestation at t. We can therefore say that a variable embodiment exists at a time just in case it has a manifestation at that time (i.e. just in case the function that is its principle has a value for that time). And /F/ is identical to /G/ just in case F=G. Variable embodiments can change their matter or parts because the functions that are their principles may map different times onto different objects. For example, let B be the function corresponding to my bicylce=/B/. B may map t1 onto a rigid embodiment BRt1, which itself is analyzed as (with a lot of simplification about what a bicycle is like) W1,W2,F/Bi, where the Ws are two wheels, F is the bicycle frame, and Bi is the relation that obtains when two wheels are attached to a frame in the correct ‘bicycle-ish’ way. Between t1 and t2, I change W2 for a new wheel W3. My bicycle, i.e. /B/, persists because its function B associates t2, after the wheel change, not with BRt1=W1,W2,F/Bi (which of course itself does not exist at t2) but with BRt2=W1,W3,F/Bi. It should be evident from this example that the combined theories of rigid and variable embodiments enable us to describe objects with highly complex hylomorphic structures. Here, the manifestations of /B/, a variable embodiment, are the rigid embodiments BRt1 and BRt2. These rigid embodiments have as elements wheels and frames, which themselves may be variable embodiments. Those variable embodiments will be manifested at different times by different rigid embodiments so that one and the same wheel or frame may persist through changes in its parts, and so on.Fine treats the bases and gloss of a rigid embodiment as parts of that embodiment. Since the parts of a rigid embodiment are not subject to change, Fine takes the parthood relation in question to be one of timeless parthood. With variable embodiments, we encounter the notion of temporary parthood. Fine takes a manifestation of a variable embodiment at a time to be a part of that embodiment at that time, hence a temporary part of it. The principle of a variable embodiment is a timeless part of it. Further axioms relate the two notions of parthood. For example, W1 is a timeless part of the rigid embodiment BRt1; BRt1 is a manifestation, and hence a temporary part, of /B/ at t1; so Fine’s axioms imply that W1 itself is a temporary part of /B/ at t1 as well. All of the parts of a variable embodiment that come to it via its manifestations (i.e. all parts other than its principle) are therefore temporary parts of it and, at least as far as Fine’s mereology applies to embodiments, all temporary parts are parts either by being manifestations, or by being parts of a manifestation, of something. The relation of being a manifestation of something, therefore, is the crux for understanding how things can change their matter or parts over time. Variable embodiments are, at any time at which they exist, initially analyzable into two parts, a timeless part which is their principle, and the same for all times, and a temporary part which is their manifestation at that time. These, as Fine himself notes, are the counterparts of the form and matter of Aristotelian Hylomorphism.I claimed above that Contemporary Realist Hylomorphism, here exemplified by Fine, while preserving Aristotle’s realism cannot, or can only incidentally, capture the richness of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism with respect to its integration of the origins, essences, and teloi of the objects in its domain. Let me now attempt to explain why. For the sake of simplicity, I shall develop my comments around qua objects and so pretend that the examples I deal with do not, and cannot, change their matter over time. For reasons I cannot go into here, I think the problems that face the theory of variable embodiments in these respects are greater than those that face the theory of rigid embodiments. Take a simple example, a flint arrowhead. By analogy with Fine’s (admittedly simplified) treatment of a bronze statue as the bronze qua statue-shaped, one might think to identify the arrowhead with the qua object the flint qua arrowhead-shaped. Though it is indicated partially by means of the concept arrowhead, the property of being arrowhead-shaped is itself a purely natural one. Any old piece of flint can have it, by design or by accident. As an artifact, however, it is essential to the existence of an arrowhead, rather than merely an arrowhead-shaped piece of flint, that it be the product of a certain kind of intentional making and that it have a certain telos or function. Its function is to bury the arrow in what it is shot at, and its origin requires that it be made with the intention of having this function, or the intention that it be an arrowhead. (In Aristotle’s terms, the form of the arrowhead must come to it from the fletcher and it is that form that it gets from the fletcher in virtue of which it has the function that it does.) These features of an arrowhead are not guaranteed to the flint qua arrowhead-shaped. Thus, prima facie, Fine’s theory fails to offer a unified account of the essence, origin, and telos of the arrowhead. I say ‘prima facie’ because it might be thought that I have simply picked the wrong qua object with which to identify the arrowhead, and that Fine’s theory implies the existence of some other qua object which, if identified with the arrowhead, will ensure the right facts about its origin and telos. There is some truth to this objection, but I shall argue that it will not fully close the gap between Fine’s approach and Aristotle’s in the relevant respects. First, we must ask which qua object is a better candidate to identify the arrowhead with. One might think there is a qua object the flint qua arrowhead and that this is what the arrowhead is. Being an arrowhead, unlike being arrowhead-shaped, is not the kind of property that something can have by accident. Indeed, my claims in the previous paragraph were precisely that nothing could have the property of being an arrowhead (nothing could be an arrowhead) unless it had the right kind of origin and telos. Hence the flint qua arrowhead seems like an object that necessarily has the right kind of origin and telos to be the arrowhead. Unfortunately, however, on Fine’s theory, there is no such qua object. The flint and the arrowhead (assuming the arrowhead is a qua object with the flint as its basis) must be distinct (by axiom F2(b)). So the flint is not identical to the arrowhead and thus cannot have the property of being one. The object the flint qua arrowhead, however, only exists at such times as the flint does have the property of being an arrowhead. Hence, it never exists.One relevant property that the flint might have is not that of being an arrowhead, but that of being the matter of one. In fact, if the treatment of things like arrowheads as qua objects is on the right lines, the flint must have that property. So, there must exist an object the flint qua matter of an arrowhead. Might this qua object itself be the arrowhead? There are reasons to be cautious about such an identification. The flint will only have the property of being the matter of an arrowhead if there is some qua object, of which it is the basis, which is the arrowhead. To take that object itself to be the flint qua matter of an arrowhead (i.e. the flint qua being the basis of a qua object that is an arrowhead) seems to invite worries about well-foundedness. Exactly how to make precise these worries is beyond the scope of this paper and it is conceivable that they might be finessed in such a way as not to disallow the identification of the arrowhead with the very object, the flint qua matter of an arrowhead. But perhaps a superior candidate for identification with the arrowhead would be the flint qua having been intentionally worked on with the aim that it should be the matter of an arrowhead. (I shall abbreviate this property, or others of similar form, as Int.) Since being the matter of an arrowhead is not here taken as a property of the flint, but occurs only in the content of an intention, problems about well-foundedness would likely be avoided. So, let us take this qua object (the flint qua Int) to be the best candidate for identification with the arrowhead that Fine’s theory can offer. Still, the theory comes up short, I shall argue, in its attempt to combine realism with an account on which essence, origin and telos are integrated in the manner of Aristotle’s theory.It is undeniable that the flint qua Int has a certain origin and a certain telos essentially. If every arrowhead is some flint qua Int, then, by our choice of which qua objects to identify arrowheads with (namely, qua objects the gloss of which is Int), we have secured the desired result that arrowheads have certain origins and teloi essentially. But there is something troubling about how we have secured this result, relative to the Aristotelian Hylomorphism I described in the first section. Consider the universe of qua objects. It will include a) the flint qua arrowhead-shaped, b) the flint qua matter of an arrowhead, c) the flint qua Int, d) the flint qua having been worked on by a left-handed fletcher with the intention that it be the matter of an arrowhead, and many others that are more or less like these. Now we have been looking for the right qua object, among the many available, with which to identify the arrowhead, and I rejected a) and b) for various reasons and suggested c) as the best candidate. If that were right, then among all these qua objects, c) would be the familiar artifact, and the others not. Perhaps I’m wrong about that and a case could be made for b) after all, or perhaps for d), or some other as yet unspecified qua object. Then it would be that one that was the artifact. But the theory under discussion returns the same answer, with respect to all these entities, to the basic question of what kind of things they are: they are all simply qua objects. Their natures are exhaustively specified by their being the result of the qua operation on a given object-property pair. So the category of artifacts does not mark off entities that are ontologically distinctive in any way. Artifacts and non-artifacts will be exactly the same kinds of things. The same will go for organisms. Organisms will be distinguished from non-organisms merely by (sometimes very small) differences in their glosses. Organism will not be an ontologically significant kind any more than artifact.It might be objected that this charge is hardly damning. Seen from a sufficient distance, any kind of object may not significantly differ from any other kind. Number and organism, for example, are both just kinds of object. If we look from far enough away, at a level of generality that abstracts from details of whether something is spatially located or not, we may fail to see a significant difference between them. And quantity of matter (I assume for the purposes of illustration that objects falling under this kind are not hylomorphically complex) and organism are both just kinds of physical object. What then is the problem with holding that artifact and non-artifact (and organism and non-organism) are all just kinds of qua object?First of all, we should note that object and physical object may well not be genuine kind terms at all. If they are not, then the fact that one can describe both a number and an organism as an object (or a quantity of matter and an organism as a physical object) would not really show that even such obviously dissimilar things could be made to look not very different at a sufficient level of generality. It might be, for all we have said so far, that the very real ontological differences between them are not obscurable by retreating to higher-level ontological kinds. And in that case, we would not have a case to which we could appeal in maintaining that despite the fact that an arrowhead and the flint qua arrowhead-shaped appear on Fine’s theory to be so similar in nature when described canonically as some object qua some property, they may nonetheless be as different from each other as a number is from an organism.But even if one does think that object or physical object are genuine kinds, my objection still stands. The fact that genuine substances like organisms and artifacts, and entities like the flint qua having been worked on by a left-handed fletcher with the intention that it be the matter of an arrowhead might show no dramatic differences in their natures because they both fall under some high-level ontological kind like qua object or physical object is consistent with the fact that they should show dramatic differences at a lower level. But on the theory of embodiments, there is nothing about their natures that makes substances such as artifacts and organisms in any way special relative to the other objects posited by the theory. Of course, we can classify qua objects in terms of the properties that are their glosses (or equally, in terms of their bases). For example, we can discern a category of all qua objects the glosses of which contain the property round. Just so we can discern a category (corresponding very roughly to the category of artifacts) of all those the glosses of which contain the property acted on intentionally with the aim that it be the matter of a…. . And it may be true that the qua objects in question will be subject to various generalizations that are grounded in properties they have that derive from their glosses. But all these generalizations will be of the same order. The category of organisms and the category of artifacts will be no deeper, in the nature of things, than the category of things the matter of which has been drawn with a very fine camelhair brush or trembles as if it were mad. It will be no defense of Fine’s view to point out that what we have here is a conceptual analogue to the mereological problem of the many, and that here, as there, we can take David Lewis’s semantic way out. Lewis asks which of the many regions that overlap almost, but not quite, entirely is the outback. There seems no good reason to pick one rather than another. Lewis’s view is that the expression “the outback” does not refer determinately to any one of these areas, but indeterminately to any of them. We simply do not bother to fix its reference determinately to a single region since there is no practical importance to doing so. In the present instance, it might be said, we are not dealing with mereological overlapping but some kind of conceptual overlapping. For example, the property that is the gloss of d) above ‘contains’ or ‘implies’ the properties that are the glosses of a) and c). (Some suitable notion of property containment or implication, and more generally conceptual overlapping, would need to be spelled out to make this precise.) So Fine might hold that “the arrowhead” refers indeterminately to any of these objects, and that we have no practical need to pick any one of them and hold that the expression refers determinately to it.This is as it may be. Certainly, if CRH implies this kind of semantic indeterminacy, this is an important feature, presumably a price to be paid that must be taken into account in evaluating the theory. But this is not the primary focus of my objection. My objection is not that there are many competing candidates with which to identify the arrowhead, though that seems true, but rather that if the arrowhead is identified with any qua object, it will be an object whose nature is no different from things that are not only not arrowheads, but not artifacts at all. (And mutatis mutandis for organisms.)If we are considering high-level ontological kinds such as artifact or organism, whatever conceptual requirements we take such kinds to impose on the things falling under them, there are almost certainly qua objects which will meet those requirements. If it is a requirement on artifacts that they be the product of intentional labor, we have qua objects the gloss of which guarantees that they are the products of intentional labor; if it is a requirement on organisms of kind K that Ks comes from Ks, there are qua objects that exist only on condition that their existence is engendered by other qua objects of the same kind. But in all such cases, the fact that the given qua objects match the specifications imposed by the high-level kinds is a consequence only of the particular properties that constitute their glosses. It is never a consequence of anything that distinguishes such objects at a fundamental level from other things that do not fall under those high-level kinds. It is never a consequence of any deep fact about the qua objects in question. One could say that among qua objects, all differences are relatively superficial. So, if artifacts and organisms are qua objects, the differences between them and things that are neither will be relatively superficial.The situation is quite different for Aristotle. Alongside substances like biological organisms (and more equivocally, artifacts), Aristotle recognizes the existence of another kind of entity, dubbed by modern scholars “kooky objects” or (less tendentiously) “accidental unities,” objects “whose very existence rests on the accidental presence, or compresence, of some feature, or features, in a substance.” These include such things as musical Socrates and Callias in the Lyceum (where these are not identical to, respectively, Socrates and Callias). These objects have been understood by some modern scholars in ways that make them very like Fine’s qua objects. One might, inspired by Fine, even go so far as to say that they could be analyzed in terms of form and matter, Socrates and Callias being the matter of the two accidental beings referred to, and being musical and being the in the Lyceum their forms. But even describing them in this way would not conceal just how different they were, in deep ways, from genuine substances. In particular, their ‘forms’ would not play the role of formal causes, since presumably the essence of Callias in the Lyceum, if it has one, is no less determined by Callias than by the property of being in the Lyceum. Nor does being in the Lyceum play any role as efficient or final cause since Callias need not acquire the property of being in the Lyceum from anything else that has it in order for Callias in the Lyceum to come to exist; nor does it determine anything like a function or characteristic behavior since, given its ephemeral nature, Callias in the Lyceum presumably has no function or characteristic behavior. In the light of this, one could say that the trouble with the theory of embodiments is that it loses Aristotle’s distinction between substances and accidental beings and treats all of them on the pattern of the latter.3. A non-realist HylomorphismWhat I want to do in this section is to outline what I call a non-realist version of Hylomorphism that, I hope, will capture better the crucial Aristotelian insight about the unity of origin, essence, and telos, though it does not preserve the element of realism present in both Aristotle’s account or the views of contemporary realist hylomorphists like Fine. I will describe this non-realist Hylomorphism in the context of artifacts which, for reasons that will become apparent, are the paradigms of hylomorphically complex objects on my account. I will briefly discuss, at the end, how the approach may be extended to organisms.Consider, again, our two examples from the beginning of this paper: the case of sexual reproduction in organisms, and the case of the creation of an artifact by a maker. For Aristotle, the case of the organism was the real exemplar of a hylomorphically complex substance. Artifacts serve to lead the reader to understand the theory in its proper application. But in order to accomplish that task, artifacts must be accounted for in the same theoretical framework as applies more genuinely to organisms. So, a place was found for the form of the bicycle, which exists in the mind of the bicycle maker in such a way as not to make a bicycle out of her mind, and is then transferred to the matter in which the form will inform in such a way as to make it the matter of a bicycle. This form, by determining the essence of the bicycle, is what enables the bicycle to perform its characteristic functions. We thus have a unified account of the way in which a bicycle comes to be, what it is, and what it does or how it ‘behaves.’ All of this parallels, and is intended to parallel, the biological case. But when all is said and done, what does the account of the creation of an artifact really amount to? In saying that the form is in the mind of the maker, we might as well say that the maker has some intentions with respect to what she will do and make; in saying she transfers the form to the matter, we might as well say that she works on the matter in the light of her intentions; and in saying that the form guides and determines the behavior of the bicycle, we might as well say that the bicycle does certain things, and that its parts have functions with respect to what it can do, as a result of having been made according to the maker’s intentions. So, an artisan works on some material with certain intentions, intentions framed in terms of artifactual kinds, functions, and characteristic behaviors, and as a result brings into existence some object that has the material worked on as its matter, and that has some essential relation to kinds of behavior and functions. This deflationary, or non-realist, understanding of the account given by Aristotle in terms of forms is available for artifacts because the story of how essence, origins, and telos are connected can be tied to the explicit intentionality of the makers of those artifacts. We do not need some further entity, a form, to serve as an entelechy, a hypostatization of that intentionality. But rather than foreclose the possibility that nothing but an artifact can be hylomorphically complex, we can express the non-realist version of Hylomorphism I advocate in more abstract terms thus. There exist objects of distinctive kinds which, in virtue of belonging to those kinds, essentially have certain functions and characteristic behaviors and whose existence is essentially the result of an historical process of the right kind. These objects have matter to which they are not identical, but they are not composites of that matter and some other entity which is either is, or plays the role of, a form. This abstract characterization we have just seen illustrated in the case of artifacts. It is in virtue of being a bicycle, for example, that an object is for locomotion, has parts that have braking as their function, etc.; and bicycles must be the products of the intentional making of a bicycle maker. The steel and rubber (or wheels and frame) are the matter of the bicycle and the bicycle is distinct from these (and from their aggregate). But the bicycle is not itself a composite of the steel and rubber plus some extra, formal entity. From this, I extract two potentially controversial elements for further comment:a) the matter that is worked on, that becomes the matter of the resulting artifact, but that is not identical to that artifact; b) the intentional labor of the artisan, labor which is necessary for the existence of something that belongs to an artifactual kind, and that by being part of the process by which such objects come into existence, bestows on them their functionality.4. Substantial Kinds and Ideal ObjectsReasons for thinking that an artifact made out of some matter is not identical to that matter are, in the first instance, the usual modal and temporal intuitions: the matter exists before the artifact does; the artifact can be destroyed without the matter thereby being destroyed; the artifact can endure through change in its matter; and so on. These intuitions are interpreted against the backdrop of a more far-reaching metaphysical picture, one that rejects four-dimensionalism and the theory of temporal parts as the way to account for the apparent phenomena expressed in them. But perhaps more important to note is the concommitant that artifactual kinds, on this account, are substantial kinds. This is a way of putting the idea that in an act of making an artifact, a new object that falls under the artifactual kind – a bicycle, a chair, a symphony - really comes into existence; an artifact is not its matter, treated or acted on in some way, even though, perhaps, treating or acting on some matter in the right way may be necessary and sufficient for the coming into existence of an artifact. If we insist, nonetheless, on such locutions as “the chair is the wood modified in such and such a way (i.e. arranged chair-wise),” then the expression “the wood modified in such and such a way” must be seen as a single complex noun that refers to some object distinct from the wood.What is the nature of the objects brought into existence by the right kind of work on the matter? This is a hard question to answer because it is hard to say what are the natures of most kinds of objects. I will offer a few positive, and a few negative characterizations, and also compare this impressionistic answer with the kinds of answers given by the realist hylomorphic theories at which we have looked. On my view, the objects created have matter, and inherit some of their natures from that matter. In the most typical cases, their matter is material, and so the objects created are, in a sense, material. They have locations in space and time and are causally efficacious. But they are material because they have (material) matter, not because they are (material) matter. In other cases, of abstract artifacts such as symphonies or fictional characters, the matter is not material, and so the resulting hylomorphically complex objects are not material – at a minimum, they have no spatial location. What is common to all such objects, whether made out of abstract or material matter, is that they are mind dependent, not just in the sense that minds are, in fact, needed to bring them into existence, but that being brought into existence by a mind is an essential feature of them. Hence, whether material or not, all such objects are what I call “ideal” objects. Being ideal, in this sense, is not incompatible with being material (i.e. having material matter), with having a spatial location, and with existing after the mind or minds that bring them into existence themselves no longer exist; and it is certainly not incompatible with being real, or really existing.Does the inability to say more precisely what the nature of the objects posited by my approach compare unfavorably with, say, Fine’s approach, on which it may seem that we can say precisely what hylomorphically complex objects are in familiar terms? Qua objects (to look at just this kind of embodiment) have their natures precisely revealed, it might be thought, by the very canonical notation by which they are described: O qua P. Let us suppose we know what is the nature of O, and what is the nature of properties. Then are we not able to say, precisely, what the nature of O qua P is? It seems to me that we are not, and that any sense we have that the theory of qua objects can inform us of the nature of what it takes hylomorphically complex objects to be better than can the non-realist alternative I have been sketching is illusory. It is true that it can give precise existence and identity conditions for qua objects in terms of the objects and properties that are constitutive of them; but it still does not say, in these conditions, what such an object is. Nor does Fine think otherwise. A careful look at his presentation of the theory reveals that he takes himself to be introducing a new kind of sui generis object – that is, an object the nature of which cannot be given in terms of other things – for which the existence and identity conditions are offered as postulates, and not as parts of a definition. We may know very well what the natures of O and P are but we do not get to the nature of the qua object O qua P without a grasp of the operation of glossing. And that’s just another way of saying, without a grasp of what the nature of a qua object is.Similar remarks apply to Aristotle’s own theory. We can say that a hylomorphically complex object is a composite of form and matter, but three problems remain in understanding the nature of the composite. First, do we understand what a form is? We may be able to say what work it is supposed to do in the theory, but its own nature remains mysterious. Secondly, what is the relation between form and matter in the relevant composites? What is it for matter to be informed by a form? Thirdly, what is the relation between a form and the composite? (The answer to this question does not flow automatically from an answer to the previous question.) Without answers to these three questions, we cannot be said to have given a better account of the nature of the composite than I have given of what I called “ideal objects.” So, in conclusion, I do not think that the realist varieties of Hylomorphism which contrast with my own do substantially better in being able to say what the nature is of the hylomorphically complex entities they posit. All approaches involve a large amount of sui genericism.5. Functions and IntentionsWhile the first controversial element I picked up on speaks to the relation between essence and origin, the second speaks to the relation between essence and telos. It holds that the intentional labor of the artisan bestows on the artifacts created their functionality. Artifacts are (typically, though there are possible exceptions) associated with functions, both as wholes and, often, in their parts. Bicycles are for locomotion, and the brakes on a bicycle are for slowing or stopping that locomotion. What could make such “what it is for” claims true? Theories of functions fall into two large groups: systemic and historical. Systemic theories see functions as deriving from the role something plays in a larger system, whatever the reason is that explains its playing that role. Historical theories see functions as stemming from some fact or facts concerning the history of the thing that has the function. For artifacts, the case for an historical approach seems particularly strong. One might initially put the point by saying that it is because bicycles are built with certain intentions that they are for locomotion, but this misstates the case insofar as it suggests that a bicycle could be built without those intentions and hence not be for locomotion. Rather, it is because the matter is worked on with certain intentions that a bicycle is built, and that an object comes into being that has a certain function. That something is a bicycle, and that it has that function, are simply two sides of the same coin. And it is the historical process of intentional making that grounds both sides of that coin.It is by reflecting on the notion of function that we can begin to see how the non-realist variety of Hylomorphism that I have been outlining might apply outside the realm of artifacts. Organisms are entities that seem to be characterized by all sorts of functions. For that very reason, the Argument from Design treated them as artifacts and inferred the existence of an intelligent maker. Assuming we reject this account, how can we still see organisms in terms of functions? Many philosophers look for the answer in the evolutionary processes to which organisms are subject, and it has been philosophers of biology as such as Ruth Millikan and Karen Neander who have been instrumental in developing historical conceptions of function. Thus, extension of the non-realist variety of Hylomorphism to organisms may depend on the fact of evolution. Evolution will supply the same kind of non-realist, deflationary reading of Aristotle’s original account of the coming into being of organisms as was available so readily for artifacts. By contrast, the realist Hylomorphism of Aristotle, not needing a deflationary account of its talk of form on the model of the deflationary account I offered for artifacts, was consistent with a non-evolutionary conception of the biological world. It should be evident that I am, in a sense, turning Aristotle on his head. The primary case of hylomorphically complex entities for Aristotle was organisms. Artifacts could be assimilated to this model but, partly because they didn’t really seem to need that theory, but were readily susceptible to a non-realist, deflationary understanding, seemed second-class or ersatz substances. I have taken the case of artifacts as primary precisely because they are so readily understandable without the need for a conception of form. And this non-realist approach can be extended to organisms because, and only because, we now have the theory of evolution at hand. If one is determined to see organisms in functional terms (as I think we should be), there are, at bottom, just three ways to do so: the Aristotelian way, which requires entelechies and an eternal universe; the theistic, which takes them to be artifacts intentionally endowed with functions by a maker; and the historical, which requires a process like evolution that underwrites functions in terms of selection. If you take biological organisms to be characterized by functions, and you reject theism and Aristotelianism, then something like the theory of evolution is a (hypothetically) necessary truth.6. ConclusionI conclude with two brief addenda. First, while the account I have given of hylomorphically complex objects applies to artifacts and organisms, I do not think it can be extended much beyond this. In particular, non-artifactual objects that are not subject to evolution, things like rocks, stars, mountains, and so on, will either have to be rejected, and our talk of them treated as a fa?on de parler, or will need to find a completely different story to tell for them.Secondly, it may be wondered whether the non-realist theory I have described really counts as a variety of Hylomorphism. Why is it not simply hylism? It is senseless, of course, to quibble about a name. But the reasons I think of the theory as hylomorphist are that it takes objects to have matter to which they are not identical and it places great emphasis on the fact that such objects can undergo changes in their matter over time, the fact that they have “metabolisms.” In both these respects, my theory resembles those of Aristotle and Fine and is motivated by (at least some of) the same concerns that they are responding to. If this is not sufficient to earn a title to the name “Hylomorphism,” I am willing to relinquish it. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download