The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.

The idea of a material constitution has become influential for at least two reasons. The first reason is the absence of coincidence between the scope of the rules of the formal or written constitution and the wider field of constitutional rules. Second, the idea of a material constitution also comes into play as some authors will define the constitution by a specific content or ’matter’. This chapters aims at clarifying the uses of the reference to a constitutional matter by exploring the form versus matter distinction. The core of our case can be summed up as follows: the form of the constitution is law; the matter of the constitution is politics. Politics, as a social activity, influences law as much as law, in turn, can govern political action to a certain degree. In this process, legal substance is as relevant as legal form. What matters, thus, is a relative degree of fitness between political activity (or matter) and law. A (sufficiently) ’good’ constitution allows for political activity to take place, while shaping it in keeping with basic constitutionalist values and principles. Such a constitution can be defined as a principled instrument of self-government.

This chapter is a broad outline of the timeline of the Big Bang and the formation of the universe and solar system. It discusses the relationship between energy and matter, and how elements are formed from simpler elements due to the application of energy and gravity. This chapter emphasizes the large scales of time and space, and also how energy and matter are distributed across the vastness of universe. Finally, it discusses our solar system and similarities to other distant solar systems with planets in the ‘habitable zones’, and the potential for life outside Earth.

In GC II 5, Aristotle proceeds through a long and complicated argument against the view that there is a single primary body, concluding that a single simple body cannot function as the matter or origin of the other simple bodies. In doing so, he responds to a possible objection to his own account, defended in GC II 4, and confirms that each of the simple bodies is an origin for each of the others. This essay brings attention to the role of contrarieties in Aristotle’s refutation of theories that maintain a single primary body, either as the matter or the material origin of other simple bodies: given the role of contrarieties in explaining simple bodies, Aristotle finds that a single primary body is incompatible with the existence of change. By highlighting the role of contrarieties in explaining change, Aristotle leaves room for the primary contraries to function as a kind of matter, although the details of his account are not explored in GC II 5.

After arguing that each of the elements can come to be out of each of the three others, the bulk of GC II 4 presents and compares the speed and ease of three mechanisms by which the elements change into one another. While scholars have thought these three mechanisms are narrowly focused on individual changes, i.e., the three ways an element can change into each of the others, on my interpretation, the three mechanisms describe every possible complete cycle by which all four elements come to be, either singly or pairwise. Thus, I understand Aristotle’s interest in speed and ease as an interest in which mechanism generates all four elements most quickly and easily. My interpretation shows Aristotle builds on passages other scholars and translators have deemed textual oddities or mistakes and has the additional advantage of showing that Aristotle’s interest in the relative speed and ease of cycles of elemental transformation lays the groundwork for his metaphysical and scientific projects in GC II 10 and the Meteorology.

GC II 7 supports Aristotle’s elemental theory, according to which the four elements possess a common matter that enables their inter-transformation, over the superficially similar Empedoclean one, by arguing that the former theory, and it alone, can accommodate the formation of homogenous stuffs like flesh and bone from the four elements. According to the interpretation offered here, these stuffs are mixtures in the sense spelled out in GC II 10, and appear to be exhibit the kind of strong uniformity that some interpreters have denied to Aristotelian mixtures. Special attention is devoted to bringing out the significance of elemental mixture for Aristotle’s twin projects in GC: understanding the causes of generation and destruction and establishing a theory of the elements. Explaining the formation of elemental mixtures is a crucial step in showing how the generation of more complex substances is possible and how the four elements, as he conceives them, function as elements of more complex substances.

GC II 9 resumes the task announced already in GC I 3: explicating generation and corruption so as to account for the fact that these processes are ontologically distinct from alteration. Aristotle identifies the causes of generation and corruption with a view to explaining their contribution in bringing these processes about. First, the chapter discusses the material cause and identifies the kind of matter that functions as a cause of these processes. Rather than presenting matter as merely passive the chapter paints a picture of it as contributing to the causation of generation by supplying the capacities without which form would be unable to fulfill its forming function, and as contributing to that of corruption by its readiness to both lose properties and gain others. The chapter goes on to censure Aristotle’s predecessors for failing to point to an efficient cause of generation and corruption, even though they claim that identifying such a cause is a principal motivation for their theorizing. Though largely critical, this discussion is carefully calibrated to unveil essential features of the efficient cause and in that way prepare the account for this cause in GC II 10.

This chapter focuses on James Joyce’s investments in life at the microscopic level in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a way of linking literature and science methodology with Grusin’s (2015) concept of a “nonhuman turn.” Ebury’s intervention is to turn an established critical conversation about Joyce’s knowledge of the nature of matter towards his aesthetic and ethical emphasis on nonhuman life, and consider how his interests in science facilitate an awareness of connectedness across different categories of being. Previous ecocritical scholarship on Joyce has mostly concerned itself with whole entities, from Joyce’s representation of rivers or trees to Joyce’s attitudes to specific species and biological principles. Ebury builds on Tim Clark’s (2015) “scale framing” approach to argue that Joyce’s use of the nonhuman microscopic scale, informed by the complexities of quantum physics, might help us to cope with the difficult equation of our responsibility to the nonhuman.

Aquinas refers to that in virtue of which the patient is acted upon as passive potentiality; and he claims that to every type of active power, there corresponds a determinate type of passive power. This chapter considers Aquinas’s views on passive powers. The chapter first considers Aquinas’s views on the constituents of material substances that give rise to their passive potentialities for being acted upon. Aquinas holds that material substances have passive potentialities in virtue of both their matter and their qualitative forms. The chapter next considers Aquinas’s views on how a material substance’s passive potentialities are identified and distinguished from one another. Finally, the chapter argues that Aquinas thinks that a substance’s passive potentialities for undergoing action are the same as its potentialities for existing in determinate ways. For example, a pot of water’s potentiality for being heated is the same as its potentiality for being hot.

The relationship between religion and concern for the environment has not always been an easy one. Theological ascription of ultimate value to God, rather than to creatures, has been said to underlie ecological destruction, exacerbated also by religious notions of human uniqueness. Conversely, some religious groups have feared that concern for nature will risk deflecting attention from God. Faced with such a stand-off, we turn to the idea of ‘participation’ – of partaking from, or sharing in – which offers common ground between these two domains, with its sense of dependence and derivation. From a theological perspective (here concentrating on the Christian tradition), particular emphasis will fall on the idea of creation as good gift, and on the derivation of all things from God, in all of their aspects. From the side of biology, themes of participation appear both in the form of ecological dependence in the present and of evolutionary relations of derivation and reception running down biological history. Approached in these terms, the theologian conviction that creation is not ultimate need not degrade it, nor need attention to creation stand in competition with religious devotion.

In “Lucretian Materialism,” Brent Dawson examines how Lucretius’ first-century BCE epic poem The Nature of Things, which was lost and then rediscovered in the fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini, influenced the development literature and philosophy in the early modern period and beyond. Dawson contends that the poem supplies a model for thinking about plurality and universality, two of modern nature’s essential features. The chapter includes detailed definitions of key concepts from Lucretius’ poem including matter, void, swerve, image, and soul, and examines how these concepts influenced subsequent authors and philosophers like Milton, Hobbes, and Bacon. Dawson ends the chapter with a Lucretian interpretation of one of nature’s most important appearances in early modern English literature: Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. He argues that the most Lucretian feature of Spenser’s deity Nature is her indeterminate character – she is universal insofar as she persists in mutability.

This chapter introduces readers to conceptions of matter and materiality that shape current conversations in material culture studies, sensitive to the rise of object biographies, commodity histories, fetishism, the new materialism, and the “multispecies” or “ontological” turn in anthropology.

Can physics be beneficial for bringing about human moral and spiritual goods? Modern physics is perpetually in search for grand unification of our world-pictures, but its method is arbitrarily self-limiting in ruling out any place in its conception of nature for the human as spiritual and moral beings. But this estrangement between nature and the human has not always been the case. Drawing from Pierre Hadot’s pioneering work, this essay retrieves the notion of physics as ‘spiritual exercise’ from ancient philosophy and early Christianity for reimagining the enterprise of physics today. Envisaged as spiritual exercise, ancient physics goes beyond a mere acquisition of ‘objective’ knowledge of nature towards the fashioning of human moral and spiritual transformation. Illustrating from Origen of Alexandria, I show that this vision of physics is principally grounded upon a metaphysics that unites all parts of nature, including human nature, into a single whole. This chapter argues that it is desirable to retrieve the ancient vision today not as a displacement of modern physics but through the re-invention of natural philosophy alongside it. This retrieval should give urgency to the task of rethinking the desirability of a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of nature for today.

Cavendish displayed a lifelong fascination with one of the hardest of the “hard” problems, the nature of infinity. In an age which saw the birth of calculus as well as revolutionary developments in cosmology, a consistent theory of infinity was generally regarded as an illusory goal. Cavendish tackled this vexing scientific problem, which represented a radical departure from the cosmological and theological consensus of the 1660s; it anticipates a new worldview which emerged toward the end of the century, in which biblical revelation was eventually subordinated to empirical science, the Copernican hypothesis triumphed over rival theories, and the notion of a plurality of worlds became commonplace rather than shocking. From the playful speculations of the 1650s, Cavendish’s confident analysis of the nature of infinity had evolved into an essential ingredient in her prescient “theory of everything.”

This is a close scrutiny of De Anima II.5, led by two questions. First, what can be learned from so long and intricate a discussion about the neglected problem of how to read an Aristotelian chapter? Second, what can the chapter, properly read, teach us about some widely debated issues in Aristotle’s theory of perception? I argue that it refutes two claims defended by Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Sorabji: (i) that when Aristotle speaks of the perceiver becoming like the object perceived, the assimilation he has in mind is ordinary alteration of the type exemplified when fire heats the surrounding air, (ii) that this alteration stands to perceptual awareness as matter to form. Claim (i) is wrong because the assimilation that perceiving is is not ordinary alteration. Claim (ii) is wrong because the special type of alteration that perceiving is is not its underlying material realisation. Indeed, there is no mention in the text of any underlying material realisation for perceiving.

This chapter first argues against the widely accepted “mentalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the perception of external objects. On that view, the perception of objects results from an act of synthesis of the diverse perceptual input provided by the different sense modalities. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of perception does not require such mental “construction” of external objects. For him, we unfailingly perceive external objects by way of modally specific perception: perception without qualification is primarily of external 3-D objects, while modally specific perception is of perceptual qualities. As the special senses cannot operate in isolation from the perceptual system as a whole, it follows that we see colors, hear sounds, etc., and thereby perceive the objects whose colors and sounds they are. The second part offers a causal interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of perception as “reception of the form without the matter,” according to which the causal history of sensory affection fixes the content of the resulting act of perception: perception is cognitive in virtue of being the matterless presence of external things’ qualities in the perceiver.

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.

In the Scientific Revolution the concept of body evolved along several divergent lines, from conceptions that rely exclusively on extension and motion to more elaborate accounts that include attributes such as solidity and force. A host of complications were disputed, such as atomism versus the infinite divisibility of bodies, the distinction between primary and secondary properties, and the possibility of a vacuum. This chapter explores these and other issues, but with an emphasis on the relationship between body and spatial extension. Descartes's three-part distinction—i.e., whether the relationship between body and extension is conceptually, modally, or really distinct—serves as a framework for investigating the development of early modern theories of material body, a process that laid the basis for the ontology and epistemology of modern science.