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Hylomorphism - the eternity of matter
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Hylomorphism
Hylomorphism (Greek υλο- hylo-, "wood, matter" + -morphism < Greek -μορφη,
morph, "form") is a philosophical concept that highlights the
significance of matter in the composition of being, regarding matter to
be as essential to a being as its form. In laymen's terms, hylomorphism
is the view that a substance is defined by a combination of the matter
from which it is made and the form which that matter takes.
Hylomorphism served as a useful tool in medieval philosophy from (at
least) Avicebron to (at least) Thomas Aquinas.
Hylomorphic compounds first became prominent in philosophy in
Aristotle's conception of change offered in the Physics.
What is change
Hylomorphism can be seen as the alternative of atomism as an explanation
of how change happens. While the atomist theory claims that change is
the rearrangement of the fundamental bricks (what changes is the form
and not the matter), hylomorphism claims that what changes is the form
while the matter remains invariant.
The argument is that without an enduring substrate, like matter, or hyle,
there would be no change as such. According to a non-hylomorphic view,
such as bundle theory, the history of an object would be a series of
temporal parts strung out along the fourth dimension. Such parts would
have no real connection with each other, and would not constitute a
single changing object. (This view is called perdurance).
The most important challenge faced by hylomorphism, which Aristotle
tried to solve, is the difficulty of defining the form without accepting
the idea of fundamental bricks (atoms).
Some modern philosophers, such as Patrick Suppes in Probabilistic
Metaphysics, argue that hylomorphism offers a better conceptual
framework than atomism for the Standard Model of elementary particles.
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