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Matter, Form and Object: Rejoinder to Sidelle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Aristotelian notions such as matter, form and substance (or object) should be used carefully; not only is the rich tradition in their background marked by variety of interpretation, even Aristotle's own use of these concepts is far from uniform. In his different works, matter, form and (primary) substance display contents that do not always agree. There is reason for believing that in the Metaphysics Zeta the notion of form embodies (or amounts to) essence, and that accordingly something without essence does not qualify as substance. This cannot be generalized or regarded as Aristotle's standard view, however, for in the Physics there are contexts in which the form is not conceived as (or does not embody) essence. There, “the form or shape” is the arrangement of the substance's parts, or the object's shape, in addition to either all or some of its qualities (i.e., the sensible shape). Outside the Metaphysics, substance, too, seems to be a less distinguished entity. In the Physics, and especially in the Categories, substance is anything capable of independent existence, any particular concrete thing that is a bearer of attributes. To the extent that our modern “object” corresponds to Aristotle's primary substance, it has a similar polysemy. While in some contexts it will mean an articulated object belonging to a specific kind, in others it will denote bodies without organized structure, that is, it will have as extension the particular bits and pieces that fill the world. A similar diversity applies to matter. When understood, for example, as a chunk out of which an artist casts her statue, matter is an object (a substratum), a body, itself endowed with a boundary (a form) and a multitude of properties. But matter can be much simpler than that; it can be a plain homoeomere, a mere element, or as in prime matter, may lack every actual attribute. When in my “Matter and Objecthood” I criticized Henry Laycock's views propounded in “Some Questions of Ontology” I found comparable ambiguities transposed to contemporary discourse. In the paper just cited, Laycock examines the ontic status of matter, contrasting it with objects as particular concrete things; throughout his discussion no radical distinction is made between articulated objects and unorganized bodies. In my criticism I employed ‘object’ in the same inclusive sense.
- Type
- Intervention/Discussion
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Spring 1995 , pp. 381 - 388
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995
References
Notes
1 Denkel, Arda, “Matter and Objecthood” (hereafter MO),Dialogue, 28,1 (1989): 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Laycock, Henry, “Some Questions of Ontology,” The Philosophical Review, 81 (1972): 3–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 I pointed this out in MO, pp. 6–7 and, quoting from Laycock's text, provided evidence (my n. 13).
4 Of course, here ‘yielding’ does not imply that there are forms in abstraction from matter, which if united with the latter generate objects. Form and matter are conceived of as analytic components of objecthood.
5 MO, p. 15.
6 Sidelle, Alan, “Formed Matter without Objects: A Reply to Denkel” (hereafter FMWO) Dialogue, 30,1–2 (1991): 163–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 The argument is invalid in that it becomes logically unwarranted to infer (c) from premises (a) and (b). See OM, p. 15.
8 FMWO, p. 165.
9 FMWO, p. 168.
10 Cf. FMWO, p. 170, n.3.
11 Surely no one would claim the sufficiency of form per se for objecthood. (Aristotle's gods or Aquinas' angels [intelligences] are immaterial beings, and not physical objects.) Hence at any rate, whether it be understood as mere shape or as essence, form by itself is a mere necessary condition for objecthood. I say that matter endowed with form is sufficient, with the proviso that if matter does not embody the qualities, sufficiency is ensured by form as the shape plus the qualities.
12 This way seems to be the reading Sidelle favours. See his FMWO, p. 166, and the end of section 2.
13 I cannot see how Sidelle, who recognizes my intent to use ‘object’ in the general (unrestricted) sense (see his n.3), imputes to me the restricted sense fairly and consistently when he formulates the alleged dilemma.
14 FMWO, p. 166.
15 See MO, pp. 6–8. The FIS or the Fundamentality and Independence of Stuff, upholds that matter is concrete but non-particular. Accordingly the distinctness of particular physical things does not apply to stuff itself. It may be that on occasion matter occurs in the constitution of particular things. This cannot be generalized, however. The existence of matter at a certain location does not entail that there are particular bits and pieces of it at that location.
16 The reason that Sidelle finds it “puzzling why [Denkel] should represent PM as involving the view that matter can exist without form, or at least feel… free to suppose that formed matter would suffice for objecthood” (FMWO, p. 170, n.8) is that Sidelle makes two false assumptions: (1) that my target is the PM rather than the FIS, and (2) that by ‘object’ I mean a particular thing with essence. 17 I am ready to grant with Sidelle that the question whether such bodies can be articulated objects with essence in the objective sense is another issue that should be treated separately.
18 Sidelle's paper is not clear on how he evaluates Laycock's position, or on whether he places him within the PM tradition. Compare, for example, his footnote 5, p. 170, with what he says on p. 165.
19 Laycock, “Some Questions of Ontology,” pp. 26, 27–28. Note that in the material quoted from p. 26 Laycock says “often” and not “always.”
20 FMWO, p. 166.
21 Cf. FMWO, pp. 165, 167.
22 FMWO, p. 168.
23 I am grateful to Virginia Taylor-Sachoglu and Adriano Palma for commenting on my draft.