Varieties of Hylomorphism

Hylomorphism, the metaphysics of form and matter, is a theory both ancient and

modern. It is, as is well known, the basis of Aristotle’s metaphysics, a basis which

carried over into much of medieval philosophy. In that medieval form, it was

thought to have been vanquished with the development of modern philosophy and

science. But it is making a comeback and today there are quite a number of

prominent philosophers who advocate one or another variety of Hylomorphism,

often (though not always) describing it as such and acknowledging the influence of

Aristotle. In this essay, I want to contrast two different varieties of contemporary

Hylomorphism, each of which picks up on a different element in Aristotle’s own

version of the approach. One of these contemporary varieties is my own view but

this paper is not so much concerned with advocacy of that view (though I will try to

indicate why I favor it over the other variety of contemporary Hylomorphism that I

look at) as it is with understanding the logical space. I begin with a brief overview of

Aristotle’s Hylomorphism insofar as it relates to the ensuing discussion.1

1. Aristotle

Aristotle’s use of the concepts of form and matter extends over many kinds of cases:

substances such as biological organisms; ersatz substances such as artifacts; the soul

1 I should stress that I am in no way a scholar of ancient philosophy. My understanding of Aristotle owes its greatest debt to Montgomery Furth’s Substance, Form and Psyche: An Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and a substantial one to Sarah Waterlow’s Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

1

and its relation to the body; chemical theories of stuffs; geometric figures; and no

doubt more besides. Here I want to focus on those cases in which the use of the

concepts of form and matter most clearly intersects with Aristotle’s explanatory

framework of the four types of causes: formal, efficient, final, and material. This

intersection between Aristotle’s use of the concepts of form and matter and his

theory of the four types of causes is on display in his multiple treatments of

biological organisms, which are his paradigm cases of hylomorphically complex

substances, and it is this intersection, rather than merely the use of the concepts of

form and matter, that I shall call Aristotle’s Hylomorphism. His Hylomorphism is

also on display in his treatments of artifacts which, on the one hand, fail to qualify as

bona fide substances but, on the other, serve as his primary means of introducing his

readers to Hylomorphism.

The intersection occurs in two stages. First, and most obviously, form and matter

are themselves identified as two of the four causes. The formal cause of something,

the “account of what the being would be,” is its form; the material cause, “that out of

which as a constituent a thing comes to be,” is its matter (or perhaps its original

matter).2 That still leaves the efficient cause, “the primary source of the change or

the staying unchanged,” and the final cause, “the end… what something is for”

(Physics II,3 194b23-35). The second stage of the intersection between the concepts

of form and matter and the theory of the four types of causes is accomplished when

Aristotle writes that the formal, efficient, and final causes “often coincide. What a

2 All quotations from William Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics Books I and II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

2

thing is [the formal cause], and what it is for [the final cause], are one and the same,

and that from which the change originates [the efficient cause] is the same in form

as these” (ibid. II, 7 197a25). So the efficient and final causes are integrated into the

framework of form and matter through their coincidence with the formal cause.

I will briefly give two illustrations of how the formal, final, and efficient causes

coincide, one of a biological organism, the other of an artifact. Here is a highly

schematic version of Aristotle’s account of sexual reproduction in humans. An

individual human is a composite of matter and the form human.3 The efficient cause

of the coming to be of this individual is the male parent. “Man comes from man,” as

Aristotle says. The parent is able to generate the offspring, a composite of form and

matter, because he himself has that form (he is himself a human). So besides

identifying the efficient cause with the male parent, Aristotle also identifies it with

the form, acting in or through the parent. Thus, the formal cause of our individual is

also its efficient cause. But what is the mechanism whereby this generation takes

place? The semen of the male parent carries the form in question to the matter

provided by the female parent, blood in the uterus. This union creates a composite

of matter and form that either is, or becomes, the individual offspring. But clearly, at

the point of union, the resulting composite is a long way from being a fully

developed exemplar of the human species. It is the form, once again, now informing

3 There is dispute over whether Aristotle took the form to be the generic form of the species or a particular form of the individual. I will present my picture in terms of the species interpretation because I think it is intrinsically more plausible, and because it makes for a simpler account of how the three non-material causes coincide. See Furth (op. cit., 133-5) for discussion of how this impacts the theory of reproduction.

3

the matter of the generated individual, that guides the development of the embryo

through the various stages it must traverse until it becomes a developed, adult

human, itself now capable of transmitting the form or providing the matter for

further reproduction. Thus the final cause, the end state towards which

development is directed, is the form, and hence coincident with the formal and

efficient causes of the individual.4

There is one further crucial observation to be made about this whole process

concerning the transmission of the form from the male parent to the offspring. This

form, I said, is carried in the semen; but the semen itself is not a human being at all,

even in an undeveloped state (and not the matter of a human being). Montgomery

Furth comments:

A striking aspect of Aristotle’s account is the certainty and clarity of its

appreciation of the fact that the biological phenomena require there to be

two different ways in which specific form occurs: one the way in which it is

exemplified by specimens of the species, and a different way that figures in

the copying process from forebear to offspring… [T]he recognition that the

second way must indeed be different is perhaps Aristotle’s most remarkable

single insight, biological or otherwise. (113, emphasis in the original)5

4 Waterlow (1982, 65-6) gives an excellent account of the identity of final and efficient causes in the development of the organism.5 The duality Furth speaks of here is distinct from the duality of the relation of the form to the composite and the relation of the form to the matter of the composite (for which latter I have tried to reserve the word “inform”).

4

Furth is surely not wrong to stress the importance of this view for understanding

Aristotle since it underlies and renders unmysterious the teleological character of

his outlook. The final cause is explanatory of the process that leads up to its

attainment not because it reaches back spookily into the past but because it is

already present in the past as efficient cause, in the parent in one way, and in the

semen in the other way.

As an artifactual example, consider a bicycle. The bicycle has matter – steel, rubber,

chrome, etc. (or perhaps wheels, frame, tires, etc.); these are what the bicycle is

made out of, they are that “out of which as [constituents a bicycle] comes to be”

(Physics 194b23). This matter is informed by something, the form of a bicycle, which

makes the bicycle what it is. This is its formal cause. What is the bicycle’s efficient

cause? Aristotle sometimes implies it is the maker and sometimes the art of bicycle

making. What this adds up to is that the maker is able to make the bicycle because of

the art of bicycle making that is ‘in’ her in some way, the art of bicycle making which

includes the form of a bicycle. Furthermore, it is in virtue of having the form of the

bicycle in it that the bicycle functions as a bicycle, that its wheels turn as the pedals

do, that changing the gears can make it harder or easier to go uphill, and so on. Thus

we have the coincidence of the efficient, formal, and final causes of the bicycle. We

also see, once again, Aristotle’s striking insight at work; the teleological explanation

here too, in this artifactual case, depends on the possibility of the form of the

finished product’s being in things in two different ways. It can be in the bicycle and

5

it can be in the mind of the maker in a way that does not make an actual bicycle out

of her mind but enables it to play a role in bringing bicycles into existence.6

What these examples both exhibit, in virtue of the coincidence of the formal,

efficient, and final causes, is a tight internal connection between what a thing is, how

it comes to exist, and what it does or is for. The origin of something, its essence, and

its function or characteristic behavior, are not adventitiously connected in such

entities; an adequate account of them demands some unity of, or interconnection

between, origin, essence, and telos. For the cases to which this theoretical

framework applies, ontology (an account of the being of things) is itself essentially

both historical and teleological. This powerful philosophical vision – that there are

internal connections relating essence, origin, and telos – is distinctively Aristotelian,

but it also transcends the particular way in which Aristotle develops it. Aristotle’s

version of it depends, as we have seen in the two examples above, on positing the

existence of special entities, forms, that are causally active in distinctive ways. They

are capable of being in things in two ways (in addition to their relation to the matter

of hylomorphically complex entities); they can be transferred from one thing to

another; and they guide the activity and development of the things they are the

forms of. This reliance on the existence of a certain kind of entity (forms as

entelechies) makes Aristotle’s way of developing an ontology that is both historical

and teleological what I call “realist.” Modern science finds no place for any causally

active entities that resemble forms in being able to enter into historical and

6 Again, the relation that the form of the bicycle has to the matter of the bicycle is something else.

6

teleological explanations of what a thing is. Hence the rejection of Aristotelianism by

modern science.

In the following, I will discuss two responses that both count as neo-Aristotelian but

which pick up on different elements in Aristotle’s account. Crudely put, one

response keeps Aristotle’s realism but jettisons the overarching vision in which

origin, essence, and telos come as a package. The other, my own view, keeps this

vision but relinquishes the realism.

2. Contemporary Realist Hylomorphism

One kind of neo-Aristotelianism is found among philosophers who embrace

Aristotle’s realism but adopt a ‘thin’ conception of form on which it has no essential

connection to the broader vision of an historical and teleological ontology. They

thereby avoid the conflict with modern science that afflicted Aristotelian

Hylomorphism. I call this approach Contemporary Realist Hylomorphism (CRH) and

it number among its advocates Kit Fine, Mark Johnston, and Kathrin Koslicki.7 CRH

takes from Aristotle the idea that certain entities are composites of things that play

the role of form, and things that play the role of matter and they look to the

abstracta of contemporary ontology – such things as properties, relations, and

(mathematical) functions – to play the role of Aristotelian forms.8 Such thin

7 Kit Fine, “Acts, Events and Things.” Language and Ontology. Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1982), 97-105 and “Things and Their Parts,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1992), 61-74; Mark Johnston, “Hylomorphism,” Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006), 652-98; Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).8 This characterization overlooks important differences between the named philosophers. Koslicki is the most forthright in her defense of the view that the formal element of an object is a part of it. Fine is somewhat equivocal on this matter

7

substitutes for full-blooded Aristotelian entelechies cannot, or can only incidentally,

integrate an account of what a thing is with accounts of its origins and telos. I shall

seek to explore this claim in connection with Fine. I begin with an exposition of his

views.

Fine postulates a kind of entity he calls embodiments. Embodiments can be rigid or

variable. Variable embodiments would include all biological organisms and (most, if

not all) artifacts, in other words, the paradigm examples of Aristotle’s historical,

teleological ontology. I will approach the theory of variable embodiments through

the theory of rigid embodiments, starting with a special kind of rigid embodiment

that Fine calls qua objects. For any property P that an object O has, Fine suggests

there is another entity, O insofar as it is P, or, as he canonically puts it, O qua P. Thus,

Socrates was, among other things, a teacher of Plato and snub-nosed. So Fine thinks

we should also recognize the existence of Socrates qua teacher of Plato and Socrates

qua snub-nosed. These are distinct from each other and distinct from Socrates. As

Fine explicitly notes in various places, Socrates is like the matter of each of these

objects, and the properties being a teacher of Plato and being snub-nosed are like the

forms. Fine uses the terminology of basis and gloss respectively for the things that

and Johnston explicitly rejects the view. I don’t think the variety of opinion on this question makes any difference for what I have to say here, but rather than qualify my descriptions of CRH, I shall iron out the twists and turns of Fine’s view and simply ignore Johnston here. I discuss Johnston’s view in detail, and how it differs from Koslicki’s with respect to whether forms are parts, in my “Constitution and Composition: Three Approaches to their Relation,” ProtoSociology 27 (2011), 212-35.

8

play the role of matter and form in qua objects. Here are the three axioms that Fine

postulates for qua objects:

F1) O qua P exists at a time t if and only if O has the property P at t;

F2) a) O qua P and O’ qua P’ are identical if and only if O=O’ and P=P’; and b)

O qua P is not identical to O;

F3) O qua P inherits all of O’s normal properties.9

F1 tells us the existence conditions for qua objects. The axiom places no restrictions

on O and P; for any object and any property, if the object has that property at a time,

a corresponding qua object exists at that time. Since qua objects may themselves be

the bases for other qua objects, and given the conditions on identity of qua objects

given by F2, qua objects are likely to be very numerous indeed, even supposing, as

Fine does not, a sparse conception of properties. F3 tells us what (some of) the

properties of qua objects are. If Socrates is snub-nosed, and being snub-nosed is a

normal property, then Socrates qua sitting is snub-nosed too (as is Socrates qua

snub-nosed, something that does not follow merely from the fact that being snub-

nosed is the gloss of that qua object). Non-normal properties include such things as

existing, being identical to x, and not being a qua object. Since it will play no role in

my discussion of Fine, I leave the distinction between normal and non-normal

properties at an intuitive level.

The theory of qua objects naturally suggests an extension of itself to objects that

have more than one basis and appropriate n-ary relations in place of properties as 9 Fine, “Acts, Events and Things,” 100.

9

their glosses. Fine calls such objects rigid embodiments and qua objects are simply

monadic rigid embodiments.10 Canonical notation for such objects is x,y,z…/R, where

x, y, z… are the bases of the rigid embodiment so designated, and R, a relation, its

gloss. Fine gives as an example of a rigid embodiment a ham sandwich that has two

slices of bread and a slice of ham as its bases and the relation of two things’

sandwiching a third (sandwiching, for short) as its gloss: b1,b2,h/sandwiching. A

number of postulates are given for rigid embodiments, mostly mirroring those for

qua objects but also going beyond those in describing explicitly some mereological

features.

It will be evident that rigid embodiments, as their name suggests, do not allow for

the change of matter over time that is characteristic of hylomorphically complex

objects like bicycles or biological organisms. F2(a), and its analogue for the general

case of rigid embodiments, make it impossible that one and the same rigid

embodiment should persist while its matter changes. Rigid embodiments do not

have ‘metabolisms,’ literally or figuratively. To give a hylomorphic account of

entities which can change their matter over time, Fine develops the theory of what

he calls variable embodiments. Despite the common language of embodiment,

however, and despite the connections between the theories of rigid and variable

embodiments, variable embodiments turn out, from many points of view, to be quite

different kinds of things from rigid embodiments: not a simple extension of the

10 The theory of rigid and variable embodiments is set out in Fine, “Things and Their Parts.”

10

latter somehow to accommodate change of matter or parts, but a completely

different kind of entity.

Associated with a variable embodiment canonically represented as /F/ (e.g. with a

particular organism or artifact) is a function F (called its principle) that takes times

into objects. The object determined by F at t is called /F/’s manifestation at t. We can

therefore say that a variable embodiment exists at a time just in case it has a

manifestation at that time (i.e. just in case the function that is its principle has a

value for that time). And /F/ is identical to /G/ just in case F=G. Variable

embodiments can change their matter or parts because the functions that are their

principles may map different times onto different objects. For example, let B be the

function corresponding to my bicylce=/B/. B may map t1 onto a rigid embodiment

BRt1, which itself is analyzed as (with a lot of simplification about what a bicycle is

like) W1,W2,F/Bi, where the Ws are two wheels, F is the bicycle frame, and Bi is the

relation that obtains when two wheels are attached to a frame in the correct

‘bicycle-ish’ way. Between t1 and t2, I change W2 for a new wheel W3. My bicycle,

i.e. /B/, persists because its function B associates t2, after the wheel change, not

with BRt1=W1,W2,F/Bi (which of course itself does not exist at t2) but with

BRt2=W1,W3,F/Bi. It should be evident from this example that the combined theories

of rigid and variable embodiments enable us to describe objects with highly

complex hylomorphic structures. Here, the manifestations of /B/, a variable

embodiment, are the rigid embodiments BRt1 and BRt2. These rigid embodiments have

as elements wheels and frames, which themselves may be variable embodiments.

Those variable embodiments will be manifested at different times by different rigid

11

embodiments so that one and the same wheel or frame may persist through changes

in its parts, and so on.

Fine treats the bases and gloss of a rigid embodiment as parts of that embodiment.

Since the parts of a rigid embodiment are not subject to change, Fine takes the

parthood relation in question to be one of timeless parthood. With variable

embodiments, we encounter the notion of temporary parthood. Fine takes a

manifestation of a variable embodiment at a time to be a part of that embodiment at

that time, hence a temporary part of it. The principle of a variable embodiment is a

timeless part of it. Further axioms relate the two notions of parthood. For example,

W1 is a timeless part of the rigid embodiment BRt1; BRt1 is a manifestation, and hence

a temporary part, of /B/ at t1; so Fine’s axioms imply that W1 itself is a temporary

part of /B/ at t1 as well. All of the parts of a variable embodiment that come to it via

its manifestations (i.e. all parts other than its principle) are therefore temporary

parts of it and, at least as far as Fine’s mereology applies to embodiments, all

temporary parts are parts either by being manifestations, or by being parts of a

manifestation, of something. The relation of being a manifestation of something,

therefore, is the crux for understanding how things can change their matter or parts

over time. Variable embodiments are, at any time at which they exist, initially

analyzable into two parts, a timeless part which is their principle, and the same for

all times, and a temporary part which is their manifestation at that time. These, as

Fine himself notes, are the counterparts of the form and matter of Aristotelian

Hylomorphism.

12

I claimed above that Contemporary Realist Hylomorphism, here exemplified by Fine,

while preserving Aristotle’s realism cannot, or can only incidentally, capture the

richness of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism with respect to its integration of the origins,

essences, and teloi of the objects in its domain. Let me now attempt to explain why.

For the sake of simplicity, I shall develop my comments around qua objects and so

pretend that the examples I deal with do not, and cannot, change their matter over

time. For reasons I cannot go into here, I think the problems that face the theory of

variable embodiments in these respects are greater than those that face the theory

of rigid embodiments.11 Take a simple example, a flint arrowhead. By analogy with

Fine’s (admittedly simplified) treatment of a bronze statue as the bronze qua statue-

shaped, one might think to identify the arrowhead with the qua object the flint qua

arrowhead-shaped.12 Though it is indicated partially by means of the concept

arrowhead, the property of being arrowhead-shaped is itself a purely natural one.

Any old piece of flint can have it, by design or by accident. As an artifact, however, it

is essential to the existence of an arrowhead, rather than merely an arrowhead-

shaped piece of flint, that it be the product of a certain kind of intentional making

and that it have a certain telos or function. Its function is to bury the arrow in what it

is shot at, and its origin requires that it be made with the intention of having this

function, or the intention that it be an arrowhead. (In Aristotle’s terms, the form of

the arrowhead must come to it from the fletcher and it is that form that it gets from

the fletcher in virtue of which it has the function that it does.) These features of an

11 See my Making Objects and Events: A Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (in progress) for in-depth discussion of some of the problems facing the theory of variable embodiments.12 See Fine, “Acts, Events and Things,” 101.

13

arrowhead are not guaranteed to the flint qua arrowhead-shaped. Thus, prima facie,

Fine’s theory fails to offer a unified account of the essence, origin, and telos of the

arrowhead.

I say ‘prima facie’ because it might be thought that I have simply picked the wrong

qua object with which to identify the arrowhead, and that Fine’s theory implies the

existence of some other qua object which, if identified with the arrowhead, will

ensure the right facts about its origin and telos. There is some truth to this objection,

but I shall argue that it will not fully close the gap between Fine’s approach and

Aristotle’s in the relevant respects. First, we must ask which qua object is a better

candidate to identify the arrowhead with. One might think there is a qua object the

flint qua arrowhead and that this is what the arrowhead is. Being an arrowhead,

unlike being arrowhead-shaped, is not the kind of property that something can have

by accident. Indeed, my claims in the previous paragraph were precisely that

nothing could have the property of being an arrowhead (nothing could be an

arrowhead) unless it had the right kind of origin and telos. Hence the flint qua

arrowhead seems like an object that necessarily has the right kind of origin and telos

to be the arrowhead. Unfortunately, however, on Fine’s theory, there is no such qua

object. The flint and the arrowhead (assuming the arrowhead is a qua object with

the flint as its basis) must be distinct (by axiom F2(b)). So the flint is not identical to

the arrowhead and thus cannot have the property of being one. The object the flint

qua arrowhead, however, only exists at such times as the flint does have the

property of being an arrowhead. Hence, it never exists.

14

One relevant property that the flint might have is not that of being an arrowhead,

but that of being the matter of one. In fact, if the treatment of things like arrowheads

as qua objects is on the right lines, the flint must have that property.13 So, there must

exist an object the flint qua matter of an arrowhead. Might this qua object itself be

the arrowhead? There are reasons to be cautious about such an identification. The

flint will only have the property of being the matter of an arrowhead if there is some

qua object, of which it is the basis, which is the arrowhead. To take that object itself

to be the flint qua matter of an arrowhead (i.e. the flint qua being the basis of a qua

object that is an arrowhead) seems to invite worries about well-foundedness.14

Exactly how to make precise these worries is beyond the scope of this paper and it is

conceivable that they might be finessed in such a way as not to disallow the

identification of the arrowhead with the very object, the flint qua matter of an

arrowhead. But perhaps a superior candidate for identification with the arrowhead

would be the flint qua having been intentionally worked on with the aim that it should

be the matter of an arrowhead. (I shall abbreviate this property, or others of similar

form, as Int.) Since being the matter of an arrowhead is not here taken as a property

of the flint, but occurs only in the content of an intention, problems about well-

foundedness would likely be avoided. So, let us take this qua object (the flint qua Int)

to be the best candidate for identification with the arrowhead that Fine’s theory can

13 Assuming, that is, that if the arrowhead is a qua object, it is one which has the flint as its basis. If its basis were something else, perhaps an aggregate of flint molecules, or another qua object with the flint as its basis, then what I say in the text would need to be complicated but nothing would be materially affected.14 Similar reasoning would suggest that the flint qua matter of an arrowhead also cannot itself be the matter (i.e. the basis) of the arrowhead, if the arrowhead is a qua object.

15

offer. Still, the theory comes up short, I shall argue, in its attempt to combine realism

with an account on which essence, origin and telos are integrated in the manner of

Aristotle’s theory.

It is undeniable that the flint qua Int has a certain origin and a certain telos

essentially.15 If every arrowhead is some flint qua Int, then, by our choice of which

qua objects to identify arrowheads with (namely, qua objects the gloss of which is

Int), we have secured the desired result that arrowheads have certain origins and

teloi essentially. But there is something troubling about how we have secured this

result, relative to the Aristotelian Hylomorphism I described in the first section.

Consider the universe of qua objects. It will include a) the flint qua arrowhead-

shaped, b) the flint qua matter of an arrowhead, c) the flint qua Int, d) the flint qua

having been worked on by a left-handed fletcher with the intention that it be the

matter of an arrowhead, and many others that are more or less like these. Now we

have been looking for the right qua object, among the many available, with which to

identify the arrowhead, and I rejected a) and b) for various reasons and suggested c)

as the best candidate. If that were right, then among all these qua objects, c) would

be the familiar artifact, and the others not. Perhaps I’m wrong about that and a case

could be made for b) after all, or perhaps for d), or some other as yet unspecified

qua object. Then it would be that one that was the artifact. But the theory under

15 I do not bring to bear here a worked out theory of essence but I assume that a property that a qua object has in virtue of its gloss will be essential to it. Note that the flint qua Int does not have its origin essentially because it inherits Int from the flint, as per F3, since Int is almost certainly not a normal property (and clearly ought not to be a property of the resulting qua object). Rather, it is because of the nature of Int that the flint qua Int comes into existence through work’s being performed on its matter.

16

discussion returns the same answer, with respect to all these entities, to the basic

question of what kind of things they are: they are all simply qua objects. Their

natures are exhaustively specified by their being the result of the qua operation on a

given object-property pair. So the category of artifacts does not mark off entities

that are ontologically distinctive in any way. Artifacts and non-artifacts will be

exactly the same kinds of things. The same will go for organisms. Organisms will be

distinguished from non-organisms merely by (sometimes very small) differences in

their glosses.16 Organism will not be an ontologically significant kind any more than

artifact.

It might be objected that this charge is hardly damning. Seen from a sufficient

distance, any kind of object may not significantly differ from any other kind. Number

and organism, for example, are both just kinds of object. If we look from far enough

away, at a level of generality that abstracts from details of whether something is

spatially located or not, we may fail to see a significant difference between them.

And quantity of matter (I assume for the purposes of illustration that objects falling

under this kind are not hylomorphically complex) and organism are both just kinds

of physical object. What then is the problem with holding that artifact and non-

artifact (and organism and non-organism) are all just kinds of qua object?

16 Of course, the pretense that we can analyze such things as organisms in terms of rigid, rather than variable embodiments, is even more absurd than the corresponding pretense that we can do so for (most) artifacts. My point should be recast in the framework of variable embodiments really to hit home.

17

First of all, we should note that object and physical object may well not be genuine

kind terms at all.17 If they are not, then the fact that one can describe both a number

and an organism as an object (or a quantity of matter and an organism as a physical

object) would not really show that even such obviously dissimilar things could be

made to look not very different at a sufficient level of generality. It might be, for all

we have said so far, that the very real ontological differences between them are not

obscurable by retreating to higher-level ontological kinds. And in that case, we

would not have a case to which we could appeal in maintaining that despite the fact

that an arrowhead and the flint qua arrowhead-shaped appear on Fine’s theory to be

so similar in nature when described canonically as some object qua some property,

they may nonetheless be as different from each other as a number is from an

organism.

But even if one does think that object or physical object are genuine kinds, my

objection still stands. The fact that genuine substances like organisms and artifacts,

and entities like the flint qua having been worked on by a left-handed fletcher with the

intention that it be the matter of an arrowhead might show no dramatic differences

in their natures because they both fall under some high-level ontological kind like

qua object or physical object is consistent with the fact that they should show

dramatic differences at a lower level. But on the theory of embodiments, there is

nothing about their natures that makes substances such as artifacts and organisms

in any way special relative to the other objects posited by the theory. Of course, we

17 See Amie Thomasson, Ordinary Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112-5 and 121-5, for arguments to this effect.

18

can classify qua objects in terms of the properties that are their glosses (or equally,

in terms of their bases). For example, we can discern a category of all qua objects

the glosses of which contain the property round. Just so we can discern a category

(corresponding very roughly to the category of artifacts) of all those the glosses of

which contain the property acted on intentionally with the aim that it be the matter

of a…. . And it may be true that the qua objects in question will be subject to various

generalizations that are grounded in properties they have that derive from their

glosses. But all these generalizations will be of the same order. The category of

organisms and the category of artifacts will be no deeper, in the nature of things,

than the category of things the matter of which has been drawn with a very fine

camelhair brush or trembles as if it were mad.

It will be no defense of Fine’s view to point out that what we have here is a

conceptual analogue to the mereological problem of the many, and that here, as

there, we can take David Lewis’s semantic way out. Lewis asks which of the many

regions that overlap almost, but not quite, entirely is the outback. There seems no

good reason to pick one rather than another. Lewis’s view is that the expression “the

outback” does not refer determinately to any one of these areas, but indeterminately

to any of them. We simply do not bother to fix its reference determinately to a single

region since there is no practical importance to doing so.18 In the present instance, it

might be said, we are not dealing with mereological overlapping but some kind of

conceptual overlapping. For example, the property that is the gloss of d) above

‘contains’ or ‘implies’ the properties that are the glosses of a) and c). (Some suitable

18 David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 212.

19

notion of property containment or implication, and more generally conceptual

overlapping, would need to be spelled out to make this precise.) So Fine might hold

that “the arrowhead” refers indeterminately to any of these objects, and that we

have no practical need to pick any one of them and hold that the expression refers

determinately to it.

This is as it may be. Certainly, if CRH implies this kind of semantic indeterminacy,

this is an important feature, presumably a price to be paid that must be taken into

account in evaluating the theory. But this is not the primary focus of my objection.

My objection is not that there are many competing candidates with which to identify

the arrowhead, though that seems true, but rather that if the arrowhead is identified

with any qua object, it will be an object whose nature is no different from things that

are not only not arrowheads, but not artifacts at all. (And mutatis mutandis for

organisms.)

If we are considering high-level ontological kinds such as artifact or organism,

whatever conceptual requirements we take such kinds to impose on the things

falling under them, there are almost certainly qua objects which will meet those

requirements. If it is a requirement on artifacts that they be the product of

intentional labor, we have qua objects the gloss of which guarantees that they are

the products of intentional labor; if it is a requirement on organisms of kind K that

Ks comes from Ks, there are qua objects that exist only on condition that their

existence is engendered by other qua objects of the same kind. But in all such cases,

the fact that the given qua objects match the specifications imposed by the high-

20

level kinds is a consequence only of the particular properties that constitute their

glosses. It is never a consequence of anything that distinguishes such objects at a

fundamental level from other things that do not fall under those high-level kinds. It

is never a consequence of any deep fact about the qua objects in question. One could

say that among qua objects, all differences are relatively superficial. So, if artifacts

and organisms are qua objects, the differences between them and things that are

neither will be relatively superficial.19

The situation is quite different for Aristotle. Alongside substances like biological

organisms (and more equivocally, artifacts), Aristotle recognizes the existence of

another kind of entity, dubbed by modern scholars “kooky objects” or (less

tendentiously) “accidental unities,” objects “whose very existence rests on the

accidental presence, or compresence, of some feature, or features, in a substance.”20

These include such things as musical Socrates and Callias in the Lyceum (where

these are not identical to, respectively, Socrates and Callias). These objects have

19 Alone among the contemporary realist hylomorphists, Koslicki is, commendably, sensitive to this issue. Her response, described in terms of Fine’s apparatus, is to recognize the existence only of qua objects the gloss of which is a property associated with a kind recognized by some other criterion (science, perhaps, or everyday life). The resulting recognized qua objects will not, therefore, lose their ontologically distinctive nature among a welter of other qua objects that have the same nature but do not fall under kinds that are independently recognized. She accomplishes this at least partly by invoking as the formal elements of hylomorphically complex entities not properties – a limitation on which would seem arbitrary – but what she calls structures. A full examination of her view would therefore require an extensive discussion of structures, something I cannot undertake here. See The Structure of Objects, chapters 7-9.20 Gareth Matthews, “Accidental Unities,” in Malcolm Schofield and Martha Nussbaum (eds.), Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1982), 223-40, at 224. Matthews is responsible for the term “kooky objects.”

21

been understood by some modern scholars in ways that make them very like Fine’s

qua objects.21 One might, inspired by Fine, even go so far as to say that they could be

analyzed in terms of form and matter, Socrates and Callias being the matter of the

two accidental beings referred to, and being musical and being the in the Lyceum

their forms. But even describing them in this way would not conceal just how

different they were, in deep ways, from genuine substances. In particular, their

‘forms’ would not play the role of formal causes, since presumably the essence of

Callias in the Lyceum, if it has one, is no less determined by Callias than by the

property of being in the Lyceum. Nor does being in the Lyceum play any role as

efficient or final cause since Callias need not acquire the property of being in the

Lyceum from anything else that has it in order for Callias in the Lyceum to come to

exist; nor does it determine anything like a function or characteristic behavior since,

given its ephemeral nature, Callias in the Lyceum presumably has no function or

characteristic behavior. In the light of this, one could say that the trouble with the

21 Frank Lewis, Substance and Predication in Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and S. Marc Cohen, “Accidental Beings in Aristotle’s Ontology,” in G. Anagnostopoulos and F. D. Miller (eds.), Reason and Analysis in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Essays in Honor of David Keyt (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 231-42. Lewis refers canonically to accidental unities such as generous Socrates with the notation “Socrates + generous” and says that the “notation x + y here is meant to express the notion of compounding, first brought to my attention by Kit Fine” (96). I assume that compounding is none other than the operation signified by the qua locution in Fine’s “Acts, Events and Things.” Cohen suggests understanding accidental unities in terms of Jaegwon Kim’s theory of events as property exemplifications. In fact, Kim’s theory bears a striking resemblance to Fine’s theory of qua objects, though I cannot pursue this parallel here. There is some discussion of it in my Making Objects and Events.

22

theory of embodiments is that it loses Aristotle’s distinction between substances

and accidental beings and treats all of them on the pattern of the latter.

3. A non-realist Hylomorphism

What I want to do in this section is to outline what I call a non-realist version of

Hylomorphism that, I hope, will capture better the crucial Aristotelian insight about

the unity of origin, essence, and telos, though it does not preserve the element of

realism present in both Aristotle’s account or the views of contemporary realist

hylomorphists like Fine. I will describe this non-realist Hylomorphism in the context

of artifacts which, for reasons that will become apparent, are the paradigms of

hylomorphically complex objects on my account. I will briefly discuss, at the end,

how the approach may be extended to organisms.

Consider, again, our two examples from the beginning of this paper: the case of

sexual reproduction in organisms, and the case of the creation of an artifact by a

maker. For Aristotle, the case of the organism was the real exemplar of a

hylomorphically complex substance. Artifacts serve to lead the reader to understand

the theory in its proper application. But in order to accomplish that task, artifacts

must be accounted for in the same theoretical framework as applies more genuinely

to organisms. So, a place was found for the form of the bicycle, which exists in the

mind of the bicycle maker in such a way as not to make a bicycle out of her mind,

and is then transferred to the matter in which the form will inform in such a way as

to make it the matter of a bicycle. This form, by determining the essence of the

bicycle, is what enables the bicycle to perform its characteristic functions. We thus

23

have a unified account of the way in which a bicycle comes to be, what it is, and what

it does or how it ‘behaves.’ All of this parallels, and is intended to parallel, the

biological case.

But when all is said and done, what does the account of the creation of an artifact

really amount to? In saying that the form is in the mind of the maker, we might as

well say that the maker has some intentions with respect to what she will do and

make; in saying she transfers the form to the matter, we might as well say that she

works on the matter in the light of her intentions; and in saying that the form guides

and determines the behavior of the bicycle, we might as well say that the bicycle

does certain things, and that its parts have functions with respect to what it can do,

as a result of having been made according to the maker’s intentions. So, an artisan

works on some material with certain intentions, intentions framed in terms of

artifactual kinds, functions, and characteristic behaviors, and as a result brings into

existence some object that has the material worked on as its matter, and that has

some essential relation to kinds of behavior and functions.

This deflationary, or non-realist, understanding of the account given by Aristotle in

terms of forms is available for artifacts because the story of how essence, origins,

and telos are connected can be tied to the explicit intentionality of the makers of

those artifacts. We do not need some further entity, a form, to serve as an entelechy,

a hypostatization of that intentionality. But rather than foreclose the possibility that

nothing but an artifact can be hylomorphically complex, we can express the non-

realist version of Hylomorphism I advocate in more abstract terms thus. There exist

24

objects of distinctive kinds which, in virtue of belonging to those kinds, essentially

have certain functions and characteristic behaviors and whose existence is

essentially the result of an historical process of the right kind. These objects have

matter to which they are not identical, but they are not composites of that matter

and some other entity which is either is, or plays the role of, a form.

This abstract characterization we have just seen illustrated in the case of artifacts. It

is in virtue of being a bicycle, for example, that an object is for locomotion, has parts

that have braking as their function, etc.; and bicycles must be the products of the

intentional making of a bicycle maker. The steel and rubber (or wheels and frame)

are the matter of the bicycle and the bicycle is distinct from these (and from their

aggregate). But the bicycle is not itself a composite of the steel and rubber plus some

extra, formal entity. From this, I extract two potentially controversial elements for

further comment:

a) the matter that is worked on, that becomes the matter of the resulting

artifact, but that is not identical to that artifact;

b) the intentional labor of the artisan, labor which is necessary for the

existence of something that belongs to an artifactual kind, and that by being

part of the process by which such objects come into existence, bestows on

them their functionality.

4. Substantial Kinds and Ideal Objects

25

Reasons for thinking that an artifact made out of some matter is not identical to that

matter are, in the first instance, the usual modal and temporal intuitions: the matter

exists before the artifact does; the artifact can be destroyed without the matter

thereby being destroyed; the artifact can endure through change in its matter; and

so on. These intuitions are interpreted against the backdrop of a more far-reaching

metaphysical picture, one that rejects four-dimensionalism and the theory of

temporal parts as the way to account for the apparent phenomena expressed in

them. But perhaps more important to note is the concommitant that artifactual

kinds, on this account, are substantial kinds. This is a way of putting the idea that in

an act of making an artifact, a new object that falls under the artifactual kind – a

bicycle, a chair, a symphony - really comes into existence; an artifact is not its

matter, treated or acted on in some way, even though, perhaps, treating or acting on

some matter in the right way may be necessary and sufficient for the coming into

existence of an artifact.22 If we insist, nonetheless, on such locutions as “the chair is

the wood modified in such and such a way (i.e. arranged chair-wise),” then the

expression “the wood modified in such and such a way” must be seen as a single

complex noun that refers to some object distinct from the wood.23

What is the nature of the objects brought into existence by the right kind of work on

the matter? This is a hard question to answer because it is hard to say what are the

22 For more on substantial kinds and bringing things into existence, see my “Ready-mades: Ontology and Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming).23 In “Ready-Mades: Ontology and Aesthetics,” I refer to this as the hyphen reading of such expressions, since it takes them implicitly to be of the form “the wood-modified-in….” rather than the comma reading, which takes them as “the wood, modified…”.

26

natures of most kinds of objects. I will offer a few positive, and a few negative

characterizations, and also compare this impressionistic answer with the kinds of

answers given by the realist hylomorphic theories at which we have looked. On my

view, the objects created have matter, and inherit some of their natures from that

matter. In the most typical cases, their matter is material, and so the objects created

are, in a sense, material. They have locations in space and time and are causally

efficacious. But they are material because they have (material) matter, not because

they are (material) matter. In other cases, of abstract artifacts such as symphonies

or fictional characters, the matter is not material, and so the resulting

hylomorphically complex objects are not material – at a minimum, they have no

spatial location.24 What is common to all such objects, whether made out of abstract

or material matter, is that they are mind dependent, not just in the sense that minds

are, in fact, needed to bring them into existence, but that being brought into

existence by a mind is an essential feature of them. Hence, whether material or not,

all such objects are what I call “ideal” objects. Being ideal, in this sense, is not

incompatible with being material (i.e. having material matter), with having a spatial

location, and with existing after the mind or minds that bring them into existence

themselves no longer exist; and it is certainly not incompatible with being real, or

really existing.25

24 See my “Constitution and Qua Objects in the Ontology of Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009), 203-17 for a hylomorphic account of musical works along these lines.25 It is important to be clear that the respect in which my theory is non-realist is quite different from the respect in which, at least as applied to artifacts, it might be called idealist. It is non-realist in the sense that it does not take objects that have matter to be composites of that matter and some other entity. It is idealist (at least as applied to artifacts) because it takes (some) very real objects within its purview

27

Does the inability to say more precisely what the nature of the objects posited by my

approach compare unfavorably with, say, Fine’s approach, on which it may seem

that we can say precisely what hylomorphically complex objects are in familiar

terms? Qua objects (to look at just this kind of embodiment) have their natures

precisely revealed, it might be thought, by the very canonical notation by which they

are described: O qua P. Let us suppose we know what is the nature of O, and what is

the nature of properties. Then are we not able to say, precisely, what the nature of O

qua P is? It seems to me that we are not, and that any sense we have that the theory

of qua objects can inform us of the nature of what it takes hylomorphically complex

objects to be better than can the non-realist alternative I have been sketching is

illusory. It is true that it can give precise existence and identity conditions for qua

objects in terms of the objects and properties that are constitutive of them; but it

still does not say, in these conditions, what such an object is. Nor does Fine think

otherwise. A careful look at his presentation of the theory reveals that he takes

himself to be introducing a new kind of sui generis object – that is, an object the

nature of which cannot be given in terms of other things – for which the existence

and identity conditions are offered as postulates, and not as parts of a definition.26

to be ideal objects, in the sense described in the text. This should cause no problem unless one is stipulatively using “real” to imply “not mind dependent.” But why would one do that?26 Some recent ontologists (notably Amie Thomasson in, among other works, “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” in David Chalmers, David Manley and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009)), following in the footsteps of Carnap, have advocated a deflationary approach to understanding metaphysical claims. On this view, there really is no question about the natures of things beyond what is entailed by the existence and identity conditions contained in the concepts they fall under. I think Fine’s language in both 1982 and 1996 indicates that he does not adopt this deflationary understanding of his own theory. For example, he writes:

28

We may know very well what the natures of O and P are but we do not get to the

nature of the qua object O qua P without a grasp of the operation of glossing. And

that’s just another way of saying, without a grasp of what the nature of a qua object

is.27

Similar remarks apply to Aristotle’s own theory. We can say that a hylomorphically

complex object is a composite of form and matter, but three problems remain in

understanding the nature of the composite. First, do we understand what a form is?

We may be able to say what work it is supposed to do in the theory, but its own

nature remains mysterious. Secondly, what is the relation between form and matter

in the relevant composites? What is it for matter to be informed by a form? Thirdly,

what is the relation between a form and the composite? (The answer to this

question does not flow automatically from an answer to the previous question.)

Without answers to these three questions, we cannot be said to have given a better

account of the nature of the composite than I have given of what I called “ideal

objects.” So, in conclusion, I do not think that the realist varieties of Hylomorphism

which contrast with my own do substantially better in being able to say what the

“Our view is that the operation of rigid embodiment is sui generis; it is not to be understood in terms of any other way of forming wholes from parts, whether from standard mereology or elsewhere. But still, we may obtain an implicit understanding of the operation in terms of the postulates by which it is governed” (Fine, “Things and Their Parts,” 66). I criticize Thomasson’s Carnapian deflationism in my “Much Ado about Something-from-Nothing: or, Problems for Ontological Minimalism,” in Stephan Blatti and Sandra Lapointe (eds.), Ontology After Carnap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).27 The deficit between the axioms of the theory and the nature of the objects that the axioms are about is even more evident in the case of variable embodiments, but I shall not dwell on that here.

29

nature is of the hylomorphically complex entities they posit. All approaches involve

a large amount of sui genericism.

5. Functions and Intentions

While the first controversial element I picked up on speaks to the relation between

essence and origin, the second speaks to the relation between essence and telos. It

holds that the intentional labor of the artisan bestows on the artifacts created their

functionality.28 Artifacts are (typically, though there are possible exceptions)

associated with functions, both as wholes and, often, in their parts. Bicycles are for

locomotion, and the brakes on a bicycle are for slowing or stopping that locomotion.

What could make such “what it is for” claims true? Theories of functions fall into two

large groups: systemic and historical. Systemic theories see functions as deriving

from the role something plays in a larger system, whatever the reason is that

explains its playing that role. Historical theories see functions as stemming from

some fact or facts concerning the history of the thing that has the function. For

artifacts, the case for an historical approach seems particularly strong. One might

initially put the point by saying that it is because bicycles are built with certain

intentions that they are for locomotion, but this misstates the case insofar as it

suggests that a bicycle could be built without those intentions and hence not be for

locomotion. Rather, it is because the matter is worked on with certain intentions

that a bicycle is built, and that an object comes into being that has a certain function.

28 This is a fairly common view of functions in artifacts. See, for example, Risto Hilpinen’s “Authors and Artifacts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993), 155-78.

30

That something is a bicycle, and that it has that function, are simply two sides of the

same coin. And it is the historical process of intentional making that grounds both

sides of that coin.

It is by reflecting on the notion of function that we can begin to see how the non-

realist variety of Hylomorphism that I have been outlining might apply outside the

realm of artifacts. Organisms are entities that seem to be characterized by all sorts

of functions. For that very reason, the Argument from Design treated them as

artifacts and inferred the existence of an intelligent maker. Assuming we reject this

account, how can we still see organisms in terms of functions? Many philosophers

look for the answer in the evolutionary processes to which organisms are subject,

and it has been philosophers of biology as such as Ruth Millikan and Karen Neander

who have been instrumental in developing historical conceptions of function. Thus,

extension of the non-realist variety of Hylomorphism to organisms may depend on

the fact of evolution. Evolution will supply the same kind of non-realist, deflationary

reading of Aristotle’s original account of the coming into being of organisms as was

available so readily for artifacts. By contrast, the realist Hylomorphism of Aristotle,

not needing a deflationary account of its talk of form on the model of the

deflationary account I offered for artifacts, was consistent with a non-evolutionary

conception of the biological world.

It should be evident that I am, in a sense, turning Aristotle on his head. The primary

case of hylomorphically complex entities for Aristotle was organisms. Artifacts could

be assimilated to this model but, partly because they didn’t really seem to need that

31

theory, but were readily susceptible to a non-realist, deflationary understanding,

seemed second-class or ersatz substances. I have taken the case of artifacts as

primary precisely because they are so readily understandable without the need for a

conception of form. And this non-realist approach can be extended to organisms

because, and only because, we now have the theory of evolution at hand. If one is

determined to see organisms in functional terms (as I think we should be), there are,

at bottom, just three ways to do so: the Aristotelian way, which requires entelechies

and an eternal universe; the theistic, which takes them to be artifacts intentionally

endowed with functions by a maker; and the historical, which requires a process

like evolution that underwrites functions in terms of selection. If you take biological

organisms to be characterized by functions, and you reject theism and

Aristotelianism, then something like the theory of evolution is a (hypothetically)

necessary truth.

6. Conclusion

I conclude with two brief addenda. First, while the account I have given of

hylomorphically complex objects applies to artifacts and organisms, I do not think it

can be extended much beyond this.29 In particular, non-artifactual objects that are

not subject to evolution, things like rocks, stars, mountains, and so on, will either

have to be rejected, and our talk of them treated as a façon de parler, or will need to

find a completely different story to tell for them.

29 One place where it can be extended, with some interesting results, is to the domain of actions. I deal with this in Making Objects and Events.

32

Secondly, it may be wondered whether the non-realist theory I have described

really counts as a variety of Hylomorphism. Why is it not simply hylism? It is

senseless, of course, to quibble about a name. But the reasons I think of the theory

as hylomorphist are that it takes objects to have matter to which they are not

identical and it places great emphasis on the fact that such objects can undergo

changes in their matter over time, the fact that they have “metabolisms.” In both

these respects, my theory resembles those of Aristotle and Fine and is motivated by

(at least some of) the same concerns that they are responding to. If this is not

sufficient to earn a title to the name “Hylomorphism,” I am willing to relinquish it.

33