In the wood of the suicides, Pier della Vigna, secretary to the emperor, swears on the thornbush that has become his body that he never broke faith with his lord. Though he is not a traitor, his body will hang from this tree like that of Judas, who was also a suicide. What is at stake in both crimes is a breaking of the fragile bond of faith that makes communication possible. How is it that people believe one another’s words, gestures, and protestations? and what can restore a trust once it is lost? This suicide violently broke the bond between his body and his soul, of which his body was the truest expression, because he could no longer make people believe him by means of his words. On what bond of trust can the emperor’s propagandist rely, if words and truth, like body and soul, have been severed from each other?

This chapter addresses an interpretive question about why Aristotle identifies generation, growth, and nourishment as the three distinct functions or activities of nutritive soul. Scholars typically try to explain this by appealing to the shared goal of these activities, though there is no consensus about what that goal is: Does Aristotle think that generation is a way of keeping oneself alive (and thus that the shared goal is self-maintenance), or is nourishment really a quasi-generative activity (and thus that the shared goal is “form (re)production”)? Rather than taking that approach, Gelber offers a different but complementary way of accounting for the unity of these activities, by focusing on the continuity of their shared physiological basis. As it is argued here, the fact that these biological processes form a continuous cycle stems from Aristotle’s adherence, in his biological theory, to principles from his hylomorphic metaphysics. Attending to the details in works such as Generation of Animals that focus on the mechanisms underlying generation, growth, and nourishment, it is shown how we can construct a coherent account of the unity of the three nutritive soul activities.

Like any good Aristotelian, Duns Scotus held that human beings share this feature with a large section of the created world. This essay provides an in-depth presentation and assessment of some crucial aspects of Duns Scotus’s contribution to the later medieval debate on hyomorphism, including his views on the existence and nature of prime matter, the plurality of substantial forms in a material substance, and the nature of animate substances.

This chapter focuses on the intellectual activities of Aristotelian philosophers within the late-Renaissance and early modern university context. It shows that Scholastic Aristotelianism constituted a varied, dynamic, and long-lasting philosophical tradition rooted in, but not limited to, problems arising from Aristotle’s texts. Late Scholastic solutions did not always pose obstacles to new sciences and matter theories, but also anticipated them. The chapter examines key variants of Aristotelianism in the context of their institutional settings and curricula. This provides an opportunity to re-assess radical Aristotelianism (e.g., Averroism), the late-Scholastic revival (e.g., the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum and Suárez) and Protestant Scholasticism. Developing Charles Schmitt’s thesis that there were many different, even conflicting, Aristotelianisms, the chapter argues that some so-called “anti-Aristotelians,” whom the moderns conscripted as allies to their cause, are better understood as working within a broader Aristotelian framework. Identifying the shared Aristotelian problem space of both more orthodox and controversial philosophers of the period affords a better understanding of both the conflicts themselves and the extensive debts that later developments bore to this tradition.

Commentators typically take the focus of Kant’s response of Hume to be directed at the latter’s account of causation, but this chapter argues that Kant’s critique of Hume is better understood in methodological terms. On this interpretation, Kant sees Hume as raising a ‘demarcation’ challenge’ that asks how we can distinguish between the proper deployment of reason in the natural sciences and its illegitimate use in dogmatic metaphysics – but, by Kant’s lights, Hume’s failure to recognize the ‘hylomorphic’ nature of our cognitive faculties prevents him from meeting the challenge he presents.

This chapter turns to Aquinas’s view that the human act is a hylomorphic composite. To discuss the human act’s hylomorphic structure, it first considers three power-exercises crucial to the execution of the human act once the choice has been made, namely, “command,” “use,” and the “commanded act.” It contends that the act of command is an act of reason that specifies the power by which a choice is to be executed. Use is a volitional act that activates, and sustains the exercise, of the power determined by command, and the commanded act is the exercise of this power. It then argues that use (rather than command) functions as the form of the commanded act by virtue of directing the latter to an end. The chapter draws on an insight from Chapter 4, arguing that formal and final causation coincide here, because what it is for a human act to be of a certain kind (and so to have a certain form) is for it to be directed to a certain end. The last section of this chapter discusses Aquinas’s account of how choice explains the hylomorphically organized human act, which relies on the notion of “virtual existence.”

The introductory chapter of this book offers a brief account of the relation between action theory and moral philosophy in Aquinas. It argues that Aquinas has a descriptive, metaphysical account of the human act, one that investigates the human act’s ontology as well as its aetiology, that is, respectively, what the human act is and how it is explained. This account brackets normative considerations about what acts are morally good or bad. The introduction specifies that the book deals with this descriptive theory, and it also motivates the book’s main textual focus, which is on one aspect of Aquinas’s Prima secundae discussion of the human act, namely, the phase leading from choice (electio) to the actual performance of the human act. Finally, the introduction states the main thesis of the book, which is that both choice and the human act that it explains are hylomorphically structured, for Aquinas. Choice is a composite of a volition and a preferential intentional structure inherited from a previous judgment, and the human act is a composite of a volition and a power-exercise caused by volition, such as a bodily movement.

This chapter turns to an examination of choice and its hylomorphic structure. To spell out this structure, it further investigates the formal-causal dependence relation between volition and judgment already considered in Chapter 4. It argues that Aquinas draws a distinction between two types of forms, a form extrinsic to the volition, which is the preceding practical judgment, and a form intrinsic to volition, which is the intentional structure that volition inherits from the preceding judgment. It furthermore suggests that the intentional structure of volition involves two components analogous to those present in judgment. There is an attitudinal component analogous to assent in judgment, which Aquinas refers to as “adherence,” and there is also a content adhered to, namely, a means as related to an end. The final section applies this general picture to choice to explain its hylomorphic structure. It argues that choice is a volition whose intrinsic form consists of an attitude of preferential adherence attaching to one means rather than another, where this form is an intentional structure derived from the previous judgment of choice.

This chapter analyzes the key notion of the “human act” (actus humanus) around which Aquinas’s action theory revolves. It argues that, for Aquinas, the general term ‘act’ is used broadly to denote any power-exercise in nature, whether in the animate or the inanimate domain. Given this broad scope of the term ‘act,’ the chapter considers, in a next step, what sets human acts apart from other power-exercises. It argues that, according to Aquinas, one differentiating feature is that a human act is a hylomophically organized composite of two power-exercises, where a volition that he refers to as “use” is the formal component and a power-exercise caused by volition that he refers to as the “commanded act” is the material component. However, as the chapter also shows, Aquinas chiefly relies on an aetiological criterion to differentiate human acts from other power-exercises, arguing that a human act is explained by a preceding act of free choice. It then shows that choice likewise displays a hylomorphic structure, for Aquinas. It is a volition materially speaking, and its form is the preferential character that this volition inherits from a preceding judgment that Aquinas refers to as the “judgment of choice.”

Chapter 1, “Inner Sense as the Faculty for Inner Receptivity”, sets the stage by introducing Kant’s basic model of representation and by defining two pairs of concepts that will guide my analysis: reflexivity and referentiality, on the one hand, and objective and subjective validity on the other. Through an examination of the historical context, the chapter develops an account of inner sense as a transcendental faculty of sensibility, and gives preliminary accounts of central concepts, including affection, sensation, appearance, intuition, perception, and experience. As a result, the chapter suggests that – by analogy with outer sense – inner sense receives inner appearances and yields distinctively inner intuition according to its specific form, i.e., time. The full argument for this claim will be put forward only in Chapter 2. Finally, by considering insights concerning the faculties for desire and feeling from the third Critique and the Anthropology, the chapter develops a broader notion of inner receptivity as susceptibility to all mind-internal causes.

I consider the way in which even modern thinkers, trying to escape the myth of the given and the espistemological frame, remain impeded until they countenance meaningful form ‘out there’ in things, as well as ‘in here’ in one’s mind. Without this embrace of non-reductive naturalism, such thinkers are unable to appreciate the body as a mediating sphere between the material and the spiritual, despite their attempt to do so.