Of course, there are material things like oaks and people, and it’s distinct from immaterial things like angels. But for a long time I’ve been wondering why my fellow Aristotelians think that there is matter, a component of material things. In the process of reflection, I have given up on matter as a fundamental ontological category. Of course, for theological and common-sense purposes, I need to have the concept of a material substance, but here I hope there is some reduction, such as that a material substance is a substance that has at least one geometric property. My Aristotelianism now inclines to be more like Leibniz’s than like the historical Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s. Material substances, on my view, are much like Leibniz’s monads; they are like Aristotle’s gods or Aquinas’s angels, plus whatever properties or causal powers are needed for them to count as material. I am my own form, and in this form there inhere accidents.
What philosophical work does matter play, particularly in Aristotelian theories?
- Many Aristotelians say that something remains through substantial change, namely matter.
The persistence of matter through substantial change is said to do justice to the intuition that the corpse is the remains of the living creature: that there is something in the corpse that was in the living creature. But it is notoriously difficult to remain faithful to the Aristotelian emphasis that identity always comes from form and allow that anything in the corpse is identical to anything in the prior living body. Absent a solution to this, the Aristotelian has to say that there is one bunch of matter prior to death, a bunch of matter informed by the form of the living body, and a different bunch of matter after death, informed by the forms of the substances making up the corpse. But that does not do justice to the common-sense intuition.
In the vicinity, too, there is the question of why it is that the corpse is physically like the living body. But this is not to be accounted for by matter, but by accidents such as shape, mass and color. Accidents are possessed by substances. Either accidents can or cannot survive the destruction of their underlying substance. If they can, then we have an explanation of why the corpse is physically like the living body. If they cannot, then adding that there is matter in both—and even that it is the same matter—does not help: we simply have to bite the bullet and say that the accidents of the living body have the power to cause similar accidents in the corpse.
- Matter may play a role in diachronic identity.
But since immaterial substances like angels can persist over time, matter isn’t needed to solve the problem of diachronic identity. Moreover, the problem of diachronic identity seems to me, as a four-dimensionalist, to be a pseudoproblem (see also this]). It is no more a problem how the same thing can exist in 2017 and in 2018 than it is a problem how someone can exist in the room and in the hall—just put a leg in each, and you’ll see how. Matter does nothing to help with the latter problem, since presumably it isn’t the same chunk of matter that’s in the room as in the hall. So, why should matter help with the former?
- Matter may play a role in problems of material composition.
Matter may also play a role in some specific solutions to the problem of material composition. One might, for instance, identify the lump with the matter and the statue with the substance composed of it, or the lump with one thing made of the matter and the statue with another thing made of the same matter, and then explain away the commonality of many properties, like mass, by the identity of matter. But either the statue and the lump have numerically the same accident of mass or they do not. If they do, then since accidents inhere in substances, not in matter, the commonality of matter doesn’t do any work. If they do not, then the commonality of matter doesn’t seem to have done much—we still have to explain why the two have an exactly similar accident of mass, given that they have numerically distinct ones.
What matter does do, I think, is help differentiate the classic statue–lump case from the horse–ghost case where Bucephalus’s ghost happens to walk right through the living Seabiscuit, in such a way that the ghost horse and the living horse happen to occupy exactly the same space. For we can say that the ghost case is a case of merely spatial colocation, while the statue–lump case is a case of having the same matter. And intuitively there is a difference between the two cases. Interestingly, though, this isn’t the material composition problem that matter usually gets invoked to solve. And since I don’t believe in statues, or in any other entities that could plausibly be thought to make there be two entities of one chunk of matter, this does little for me.
- Isn’t hylo-morphism the distinctively Aristotelian solution to the mind-body problem?
Sure. But, even more than the classic Aristotelian solution, my view is a dissolution to the mind-body problem rather than a solution. The form of course affects the accidents that constitute and shape our embodiment. All of this is due to the nexus—ontological, teleological and causal—that exists between the substance and its accidents (both substance–accident and accident–accident). It’s not a case of one thing moving another: it is just the common story of the form affecting the accidents and the accidents affecting one another.
And, yes, of course I agree with the Council of Vienne that the soul is the form of the body. On my view, talk of the soul is talk of the substance qua form and apart from the accidents constituting its materiality, and the substance qua form is a base for all the accidents which constitute us as having bodies. So, the soul is the form of the body.
- Physics talks of matter.
Sure, but physics probably doesn’t have a fundamental distinction between matter and energy, I think.
Anyway, I don’t deny that there is matter in the sense of substances that are so configured as to count as material. Quite possibly, where you have a heap of sand, you have a heap of material substances, and hence matter. (But perhaps not: perhaps fundamental physical reality is just a handful of fields.)
All in all, I just see little if any benefit to matter. And there is much mystery about it. Ockham’s razor cuts it away.
Unless, of course, we come to some philosophical problem that can’t be solved without matter, or can’t be solved as well without it…
33 comments:
There is another philosopher who doesn't believe in matter, namely Berkeley. How is your view different from his?
Good point Heath!
Alex, where can we go to understand your view. I don't understand it. And I assume it deviates from the classical Thomistic perspective set forth by Feser in Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (PS - he does interact with you in at least one chapter of that book).
Heath: I think there are nonminded substances like trees and like particles or fields. I don't think geometric properties reduce to mental ones.
John:
The view certainly deviates. And it's not written up or even worked out.
If you are your own form, and you have the same form as other human persons, then what distinguishes you from those other human beings? Presumably it would be accidents, but then that will force you to accept the identity of indiscernables (at least as applied to human persons). Do you see that as a cost?
It's a cost, but I've already accepted something stronger than the identity of indiscernibles: the identity of things with indiscernible origins. Accepting this thesis gives me an elegant account of transworld identity and a reduction of de re modality to de dicto (x is essentially F iff (h)(IsOriginOf(h,x) → L (y)(h(y) → F(y))). (Think of origins as properties.) Furthermore, it gives me an account of identity that does not presuppose identity: x=y iff (h)(IsOriginOf(h,x)=IsOriginOf(h,y)). Moreover, it explains how God can know who possible individuals would be.
Very interesting!
When you say that a material substance is identical with its "form," do you mean that it is identical with its essence or nature in the Aristotelian sense? So, e.g., am I identical with humanity? If so, do you favor a trope version of essences (so that, e.g., I am identical with my humanity and you are identical with yours)?
On my view essences are natures are forms, and all these are tropes.
But of course not all tropes are essences or nature or (substantial) forms.
I pretty much agree.
I understand that precisely these sorts of considerations led many medieval scholastics to conclude that angels also had matter, in the Aristotelian sense, albeit 'spiritual' matter (e.g., St. Bonaventure). There was a very big controversy about all this. I found a nice dissertation on this somewhere -- I think it was Michael Sullivan's? -- but can't find it at the moment.
Of course, once you go that route, then you might think an important distinction between physical and non-physical things is being missed, or at least not tracked, by 'material' vs. 'non-material'.
The view certainly deviates. And it's not written up or even worked out.
Any chance that it will be(written up or worked out)? I find this idea very interesting as I was recently reading This Paper which seems related to what you're trying to say here.
How certain are you, Pruss, that your view of the soul, specifically that the body is not an essential part of the human being but only exists as an accident of the soul (as I would interpret your remark), is compatible with the teaching of the council of Vienne? Does not the teachings imply that the body is an essetial part of the human being?
I don't see that implication. Consider this. The Council's main teaching is the soul is the form of the body. Why would that imply that having a body is essential to a human being? Maybe as follows:
1. The soul is essential to a human being.
2. If X is the form of Y, then it is essential to X that Y exist.
3. If B is essential to A, and it is essential to B that C exist, then it is essential to A to that C exist.
4. So, it is essential to the human being that the body exist.
But of course the Council has to deny (2), since they hold that the human soul is the form of the body and yet the human soul exists without the body in the interim state (between death and the resurrection).
Do you have some other argument in mind?
"Do you have some other argument in mind?"
No not really. It just seems strange if the human body is just an accident. How would one reconsile this with transubstantiation if the body is just an accident? And is there not a dogma which says that the material body of Christ is to be worshiped (I may very well be wrong on this). And if you look at dogma 54 on this list http://holyjoe.org/dogmas.pdf it says that man has two essential parts: a material body and a spiritual soul.
I am no longer inclined to say that I am my own form. For christological reasons I think it is better to say that i have the human form.
Pruss,
So would you still say that the human body exists accidentally to the soul?
It is an accident that one HAS a human body, but it is not an accident that one is such that one SHOULD have a human body.
Pruss, don't you think it's plausible that our bodies are composed of various substances (organs etc.) which are jointly subordinated to the form of our bodies?
~Ennio
It sounds plausible, but I don't know how to make sense of the subordination.
I have a couple of questions. So would you say that materiality is an accident of the soul, or that having material is an accident of the soul? Or are they just the same thing? Also, how would you make sense of Lateran IV and Vatican I when they say that we are composed of body and soul? How would you make sense of it when you used to say that we are our forms/souls? Finally, if you no longer say that we are souls, what would you say we are?
We are substances, and materiality is an accident of the substance, while the soul is the nature or essence or substantial form of the substance.
I see. This makes sense. Substances, like us, are composed of accidents, like materiality, and essence, like souls. Our accident of materiality can cease, while our substance, what makes us who we are, still remains. So, we survive death.
Wouldn't this conflict with your traveling forms interpretation of quantum mechanics, which states that there are worlds with matter that do not have forms?
That's a good point. But I don't know how *Aristotelian* the unformed matter of the traveling forms interpretation is.
Ennio Augusto's theory sounds similar to the Scotist view where the human substance is informed by several different forms subordinated to the rational form, though we're still one substance in that view and not made up out of multiple substances.
Re bullet-point 5: what do you think of Oderberg's paper on prime matter and energy? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2021.2010222
“Matter” in the Aristotelian–Thomistic frame is not a rival substance alongside form, nor a ghostly stuff to be weighed against physics. It names the intrinsic principle of passive potency by which a corporeal substance can receive, lose, and exchange substantial forms; it is precisely because it is not a thing (ens) but a co-principle (quo) that Ockham’s razor cannot shave it away. Razors cut superfluous entities, not explanatory principles without which generation, corruption, individuation within a species, growth and decay, and the very possibility of embodiment become unintelligible. Your monad-leaning proposal quietly replaces a real composition of act/potency with an aggregate of form-like “tropes” plus a promissory note that some of those tropes will mimic materiality. That move alters the data to fit the theory.
Your first complaint—that appeal to matter cannot honor the intuition that “the corpse is the remains of the living creature”—rests on a misdescription of what Thomists claim. Identity does not “come from” matter; identity of the living human suppositum comes from the substantial form (anima rationalis) actuating designated matter. Prime matter contributes not identity but continuity of underlying potency through substantial change. When death occurs, the human suppositum ceases; what persists is the same designated matter under new substantial forms, which is exactly why common speech says “remains.” The similarity you emphasize—shape, mass, color—does not show that accidents hop from a destroyed substance to a new one; it shows that dimensive quantity, as the first of bodily accidents rooted per se in matter, underwrites the conservation of geometrical disposition as a determinable that can immediately receive successor accidents proportioned to the new forms. We neither need nor want numerically identical accidents to straddle corruption; we need a subject proportioned to contraries. Without matter, the transition from organism to corpse is an unexplained switch of trope-bundles.
Four-dimensionalism does not dissolve diachronic identity for hylomorphists; it bypasses it by redescribing persistence as world-tube continuity. But “put a leg in each room” equivocates on spatial and temporal extension. Spatial co-location of different parts at one time is not metaphysically analogous to the same suppositum existing at different times, because time measures act and potency, not merely position. Thomists are endurantists because substances are wholes whose being is received in esse and sustained through intrinsic principles; temporal parts talk relocates the explanandum. Matter here is not introduced to “solve” identity across time but to ground the capacity for accidental change and the multiplicity of numerically distinct individuals sharing one form. Your own fallback—identity by indiscernible origin—replaces inner principles with an extrinsic denomination. Making origin essential to individuals yields a brittle modal metaphysic, ties creaturely identity to an accidental causal history, and narrows divine creative freedom by baking a contingent external relation into essence. It also trades on identity to define identity, since the equivalence of origin-properties presupposes fixed cross-world individuation.
On composition, the statue–lump case helps your view less than you suggest and helps the Thomist more than you allow. The classical account denies that there are two coincident substances: there is bronze, a true substance; “statue” names an artifact form and a relation of the bronze to an extrinsic end. Hence we owe no ontological duplication to explain a single mass’s single accident of weight. Your contrast with a “ghost horse” misconstrues bodies as stackable where there is one parcel of designated matter and one dimensive continuum. Hylomorphism blocks that scenario by the very resource you would discard: the same matter cannot be informed simultaneously by two incompatible substantial forms in the same respect.
Your treatment of mind and body concedes the Council of Vienne’s formula while quietly evacuating its force. “The soul is the form of the body” does not mean “the soul is a trope that happens to ground the right accidents for embodiment.” In Thomism the human nature is essentially hylomorphic: rational animal. The rational soul is a subsistent substantial form, which is why it can exist separata after death; but that separated existence is an incomplete mode contra naturam, precisely because the soul remains ordered to inform matter. It is therefore false that “materiality is an accident of the substance” where the “substance” is a human person. The suppositum who is Socrates is not the soul alone; he is the composite. To say “it is an accident to have a body, though one ought to have a body” confuses deontic talk with ontology. The “ought” here is not a moral should but a natural ordination; and natural ordination to embodiment is exactly what we mean by essential to the species. Christology sharpens, rather than softens, the point: the Word assumes a complete human nature—body and rational soul. If body were accidental to that nature, the Incarnation would not be the assumption of our nature but of a trope-cluster plus optional geometry.
Recasting essences, natures, and substantial forms as tropes introduces a deeper cost. Substantial form is a principle of being and operation, not a bearer of accidents; accidents inhere in substances through form, not in form as if form were a little substance. Tropes, by their nature, are individuated determinations; but the form, as such, is not individuated except by matter in singulars and is universal only in the intellect. Collapse that distinction and you unmoor science from real common natures and de re modality from intrinsic principles; your proposed reduction of de re to de dicto via origins is the symptom.
Physics offers you no refuge from metaphysics, but it does not threaten it either. “Matter” in the Thomistic sense is not a posit rival to energy or fields; prime matter is pure potency, and secondary matter is quantified potency already under form. Whether the lowest physical level is particles, strings, or fields, if it is extended, mobile, and measurable, it is “material” in the metaphysical sense and intelligible only as form limiting potency. Changing the physical furniture does not stiff-arm the need for an intrinsic subject of change.
So the ledger looks different once the terms are kept in place. Matter in the Aristotelian–Thomistic account is not an idle wheel. It is the only coherent ground of substantial change without transmigration of accidents, of individuation without nominalism, of embodiment without dualism, of the interim state without making materiality accidental, and of the unity of living operations without resort to windowless monads. Eliminate matter, and you do not simplify; you suppress the very potency you must smuggle back in under the name of “geometric properties,” “accidents constituting materiality,” or “origins.” Keep hylomorphism, and the phenomena fall into an ordered whole: form gives act; matter receives it; the composite subsists.
Thank you for all these very thoughtful responses. I don't think I will have the energy (or maybe even ability) to respond to all of them. But I can ask something about this: "When death occurs, the human suppositum ceases; what persists is the same designated matter under new substantial forms": How does that work? How can the same matter come under two substantial forms? The identity of matter comes from the form. How then can the same matter have two forms, even if at different times? If so, then it would have two identities, and hence it wouldn't be the same matter.
Regarding dimensive quantity, are you thinking that when the human H changes to a corpse C, H's dimensive quantity Q_H causes C's dimensive quantity Q_C (since it sounds like you don't want accidents to straddle substances, so you don't want to say that Q_H = Q_C)? But *that* part of the story at least doesn't need matter.
Great questions. Let me tighten the Thomistic nuts and bolts you’re pressing on.
First, “the identity of matter comes from the form” is too quick in Thomism. The identity of the living human substance comes from the substantial form (the rational soul). But “matter” as such is not a supposit that gets its identity the way a complete substance does. Prime matter is pure passive potency; it has no act of its own and therefore no proper “who-ness” to lose or gain. When Thomists say “the same designated matter remains,” they do not mean “one self-identical little thing that first is human flesh and then is corpse-stuff.” They mean: the same parcel of underlying potency, delimited as this parcel by dimensive extension (materia signata quantitate), is successively actualized by different substantial forms. The matter never has two forms at once; it is successively under H at t₁ and under C at t₂. Diachronic sameness of subject here is not sameness of a complete concrete individual, but sameness of the receptive principle that is conserved and immediately re-actualized. So there is no “two identities” problem: identity in the strict sense belongs to the composite; the matter’s “sameness” is analogical, tracking the continuity of the underlying potency as delimited by extension.
How does that continuity avoid a gap? By the classic generation/corruption scheme: subject (matter) – privation – form. At the instant of substantial change there is no temporal slice where matter exists bare; God’s conserving causality and the proximate efficient causes of the change ensure an immediate loss of H and reception of C in the same underlying subject. If you remove that subject, you’ve turned substantial change into the sheer replacement of one world-tube by another with no intrinsic bridge—precisely what the “remains” intuition denies.
On dimensive quantity: no, I am not saying “Q_H causes Q_C” as if an accident hopped across substances and numerically endured. Accidents do not “straddle.” Rather:
• Dimensive quantity is the first accident of bodies and is rooted per se in matter as delimited potency.
• When H corrupts, Q_H ceases with H; Q_C begins with C.
• The fact that Q_C is very similar to Q_H is explained by the continuity of the same parcel of matter being immediately actualized by a successor form under the action of the same efficient causes (deprivation, cooling, chemical breakdown, etc.). The similarity is not produced by Q_H doing causal work after H is gone, but by the agent acting on the same subject with continuous conditions.
Why does this still need matter? Because without a subject of reception you face a dilemma: either (a) let accidents exist or transmit without a substance (ruled out except by miracle), or (b) treat the likeness of Q_H and Q_C as a brute coincidence between two trope-bundles. Hylomorphism avoids both by positing an intrinsic subject whose very job is to be capax contrariorum—capable of receiving contrary forms and their accidents at different times—so that substantial change is real change of something, not the magical swap of one total state for another.
So the short answers are:
• The “same matter under two forms” means one and the same underlying potency (prime matter, designated by extension) successively informed—never simultaneously—thereby preserving a real subject of corruption and generation without confecting a second “identity.”
• The Q_H → Q_C likeness does not eliminate matter; it presupposes a continuing subject that can lose one set of accidents and immediately receive another from the new form under the same efficient causes. Without that subject, you have resemblance without explanation—or you smuggle in precisely the receptive principle that “matter” names.
I think the crucial sentence in this very helpful explanation is: "the matter’s “sameness” is analogical, tracking the continuity of the underlying potency as delimited by extension"
As I read this, it analogically counts as the same parcel of matter because matter continuously possesses Q_H and then Q_C. But if so, then I don't think this is really *sameness*. We have a parcel of matter that has Q_H. And then we have a parcel of matter that has Q_C. If we cannot literally say it is the numerically same parcel, then all the "sameness" claim comes to is that Q_C is continuous with Q_H, and that in both cases the accident has a parcel of matter as a subject. I don't think this does any more justice to the ordinary intuition that one thing persists in the substantive change than does my story.
But perhaps I am misunderstanding, and you do believe in some primitive identity of matter across time?
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