If only hylo-morphism was so simple...I just spent a few months studying the concept, and let me tell you, Aristotle's form/matter distinction is so strange and complex and difficult to "boil down." Really, it takes a close, and very slow reading of the Physics (as well as other Aristotle texts), and a lot of reference to secondary sources, to get a handle on those difficulties. I'm not sure if this is an apt introduction, but I understand many people don't have the time to, as I said, read these texts carefully and closely, and they want an easy answer that conforms with the logic of the world they are already familiar with. But then you wouldn't be doing philosophy.

It's like Hegel said, when you want to study philosophy in earnest, you must "wear the vestments of the high priest," and never shy away from confusions or contradictions.

TFA is about philosophy, but the computer science concept is also interesting - composition of recursive functions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism_(computer_scien...

The issue I've always had with this kind of reductionist philosophy is that there is a very clear and obvious continuum between "table" and "not table". At no point can everyone clearly agree what is and isn't a table.

Sure, most people would agree that an assembled IKEA "LISABO" table is a table.

Okay.. what if one of the legs is removed and it is sideways? What if one leg is removed but it is propped up with a pile of boxes?

What if it's intact as designed, but slightly scuffed? Deeply gouged? Horribly worn to the point of having holes through the top but still able to support plates and cutlery? What if all four legs are also broken, but it's still serviceable as a Japanese-style low table? What if atom-by-atom, we erode its form until nobody alive agrees that it is a table? What if someone then changes their mind?

This is the problem: all forms of matter, unless specified down to individual atoms, are just social conventions -- inconsistent ones at that!

It's pretty similar to Chinese Neo-Confucian concepts of 理 (li) and 气 (qi). Qi being matter-energy. Li - being structure or form or pattern.

Although to be human in Chinese concepts, required more than just having the form of a human, and e.g. looking human, but also the ability to act like a human with concepts of e.g. 仁 (ren).

"4. Conclusion

If I do produce something new when I assemble the contents of the box, then the table is something more than just those contents. The table is not only its material parts, but also the formal organization of those parts.

And that is the fundamental claim of hylomorphism: that there is some kind of formal part, component, or aspect to any table, chair, rock, tree, rabbit, planet, or human being, something beyond its matter which accounts for its existence and nature."

Yes, and this is what Kant called 'the conditions of the possibility of knowledge', namely space and time in our reason. The form exists neither on the object nor in a Platonic heaven, but only in our minds because it is 'imposed' on the table by our reason and intellectual categories.

I wonder what Aristotle would’ve thought of Zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms: https://wiki.haskell.org/Zygohistomorphic_prepromorphisms

It works well for computer science as well. Values have types (forms) and bytes (matter). One type can be instantiated in multiple ways, for example you can have multiple integers, like 1,2,3,4 or the bytes 01000001 can represent different information, like 65 or 'A'.

The interesting thing is null, because here the distinction sort of breaks down.

It fits with mathematics. You have structure (a la Bourbaki or CT) and stuff (well founded sets).

RENE THOM: THE HYLEMORPHIC SCHEMA IN MATHEMATICS

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-5690-5_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics,_Form_and_Function

For reasons that I have difficulty articulating this seems relevant to some intuition I've had in the last several years about matter maintaining "information memory" across time in a way that energy doesn't seem to? I'm not a physicist so I might be totally wrong about that but form to me seems to imply some information that is constant across time?

From what I’ve understood of Buddhist philosophy, it rejects this view that some pile of wood can turn into a table. Of course a table exists... but there is nothing special about “forms”. Everything is dependent origination (everything is caused by something else). We conventionally and intuitively split things into sort of the process of making a cake and then say that the cake is something kind of absolute and rigid. But it’s all just process; one thing causes another thing which then causes another thing.

Psychologically speaking it is not helpful to think of forms as anything but convenient signs. Yeah they exist for practical purposes, but they actually don’t. Psychologically speaking (again) we need to get away from thinking that there is ever a split between “things” and “process”. Ultimately it’s all relativistic. The one Absolute Truth is that everything is relativistic... of course most people (philosophers?) reject that as a trivial contradiction, but Mahayana does some tricks (apparently—who am I, Wittgenstein?) which makes this seeming contradiction just work.

At the end of the day our natural intuitions are wrong. They were more towards Aristotle’s view. So we have to actively do things like analyze or meditate in order to see reality for what it truly is. In order to rid ourselves of clinging.

There is an alternative view that exists in BFO/OBI for example where you have a 'planned process' which contain a set of processes to execute a 'plan specification' to act on 'material entities' (your parts and the table) and the parthood relations.

This is a start, but I think it doesn’t do hylomorphism justice. Many of us (as I was, before I overcame the inculcated bias) suffer from a kind of unsophisticated atomism. This is what happens in the vacuum of intellectual discipline and formation characteristic of our education systems. It is important to distinguish between physical models and metaphysical theory. Now, metaphysics doesn’t ignore physical models, but it does view physical models through the lens of physical methodology so that they are interpreted in a sound and responsible way. A naive reading of physical theory can easily lead to a mechanistic metaphysics, because while the physical sciences are not inherently mechanistic, the tradition does insinuate mechanism. In a mechanistic metaphysics, the artifact becomes the paradigmatic object, and pretty soon, reality becomes nothing but a shifting aggregate of atoms. Gone is the world of human beings, trees, cats, and dogs. Gone is the very intelligibility of the world and the very powers of reason that sought to grasp it. To say that mechanism, and especially materialism, doesn’t even get off the ground is beating a dead horse at this point (the obstinate still hanging on have doubled down to the point of embracing the patent absurdity of eliminativism, for example).

The renewed interest in hylomorphism (or hylomorphic dualism) is it seems related to the perhaps relatively modest, but certainly discernible resurgence of interest in Aristotlean metaphysics in the last decade or two. Speaking from experience, it is not easy to break mechanistic habits of mind, but it is possible. One way out, I find, is to begin with the realization that even if we accept a naive atomism, the atom itself is a thing, and to be a thing is to be an instantiated form. For if you truly have many atoms, as an atomist believes, then you have a plurality of things that are of like kind (the “matter” in hylomorphism is, first and foremost, prime matter, not something determinate as a kind of stuff, which itself requires form to be a kind of stuff; form is what causes a thing to be what it is). And if you happen to fall into the reductive mechanistic trap, you should recall that the further you go down that road, the more you undermine the very capacity of reason to know reality, the less you can explain the very possibility of reason, and the less your position holds weight as a result. We do not begin with atoms, but the world we experience everyday, and it is within that world that we perform scientific investigations and reason philosophically. Get something wrong, draw the wrong conclusion, and you can face a retorsion argument, a paradox of the sort skepticism generally faces (“there is no truth!” type of stuff).

I recommend some of Edward Feser’s books on the subject. “The Last Superstition” is a light read in that respect, but “Scholastic Metaphysics” is more of a proper manual.

Before this I only knew hylomorphism as an abstract algorithm (that can, among others, implement the factorial function). I had no idea it has such an esoteric side.

great vsauce video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE

it's called emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Hooray for mereological nihilism, which seems to me to the obvious, easy, thing to conclude.

I love Xunzi’s definition of human and wish it were more widely discussed in the West:

水火有氣而無生，草木有生而無知，禽獸有知而無義，人有氣、有生、有知，亦且有義，故最為天下貴也。力不若牛，走不若馬，而牛馬為用，何也？曰：人能群，彼不能群也。人何以能群？曰：分。分何以能行？曰：義。故義以分則和，和則一，一則多力，多力則彊，彊則勝物；故宮室可得而居也

Water and fire have qi but lack life. Trees and shrubs have life but lack intelligence. Birds and beasts have intelligence but lack morality. Humans have qi, life, intelligence, and moreover morality, hence are most honored under heaven. Our strength is not like the ox, nor our speed that of the horse, yet we employ them. How is it so? I say, humans work together and they do not. How do we work together? Through social roles. Where do social roles come from? Morality. Thus morality creates social roles, and from social roles comes harmony, from harmony comes unity, from unity comes strength. Strength overcomes obstacles and conquers nature. Thus we have mansions and palaces to reside in.

It’s a very clear distillation of Chinese thought, but no one ever talks about it.

One commonly encounters a conflation of the philosophical idea of atoms, time, matter, motion, etc., with the (modern) scientific concepts. That atoms are composed of quarks of course has no bearing on the original (and persistently recurring) idea that there has to be a fundamental element, some irreducible "thing", whether that's framed in terms of energy quanta, information bits, integers, sets, or what have you. Similarly, Einstein's relativity of time and the curvature of space, this idea of space-time, does not invalidate the fundamental notion of something following another and of the instantaneous arrangement, notions that are orthogonal to the concept of entanglement in a Riemann manifold.