Form, Matter, Substance, by Kathrin Koslicki

Abstract

Kathrin Koslicki's book Form, Matter, Substance is a clear, rigorous, and stimulating study of central issues in metaphysics discussed through the so-called 'Neo-Aristotelian' perspective.Koslicki detects a tension between Aristotle's ontology in the Categories -which she takes to be a 'blob' (non-reductive) ontology-and his later hylomorphic picture, which conceives particular substances as matter-form compounds. In her view of Aristotelian hylomorphism, the form is a part of the compound alongside its material parts (using one single sense of 'being a part'). She specifies the matter-form relation (one of the three 'hylomorphic relations' she distinguishes; p. 104) in terms of what she calls 'Robust Mereological Hylomorphic Pluralism' (RMHP). First, in line with her view of form as a part alongside material parts, she takes the matter-form relation as a type of mereological composition. Second, she favours robust hylomorphic pluralism. The form is a robust particular which cannot be analysed in reductive terms. Nor can it be specified using minimal conditions which could be satisfied even by the matter constituting a compound just in virtue of the matter's being spatiotemporally coincident with that compound. Thus, it does not follow from the fact that a compound's constituent matter is spatiotemporally coincident with it, and so has the same structure, arrangement, or organisation as it does, that the matter, too, has the same form. Rather, the constituent matter has a different form of its own, and so is numerically distinct from the compound. This pluralist aspect of her view denies the monist idea that no two numerically distinct objects can be spatiotemporally coincident. Rather, in her hylomorphic picture, despite being spatiotemporally coincident, the compound and its constituent matter are two numerically distinct objects with corresponding different essences.

Aristotle and Johnston on Hylomorphism and the Character of Objects

“…Given the above, we may put together Aristotle's position regarding the relation between matter and form. M. Peramatzis (2018: 15-20;2019) has proposed that the concepts Determinate, Determinable and Determinant may be employed to elucidate this relation. As has already been noted, for Aristotle, matter in itself is indeterminate, where this claim may be understood in one of two ways.…”