Suppose you have a cat. It is matter, but it is also form, or has form. The matter of certain atoms. The form is catness.
Now suppose you have another cat. It is different matter. But it is the same form: catness. Otherwise, how could we speak of "two cats?"
How do hylomorphists handle this situation?
I think a Platonist would say that there is one form which resides, so to speak, in the realm of ideas. Two things, one form. Is that consistent with hylomorphism? If the thing is form and matter, someone might think it follows from that that if the things are two, the forms must be two.
One of Locke's themes in *An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding* was that "there are no innate ideas." I'm not sure to what extent he was arguing with anyone in particular, and if so, what they would have said in their own defense. But the notion of innate ideas feels to me like something downstream of the rejection of Aristotelianism, and of hylomorphism. Locke wanted to deny that we just know mentally what things are like. It seemed cleaner to say that the mind starts as a blank slate and we discover what's in the world through experience.
The ultimate descent of empiricism into Humean skepticism shows the limits of that, and some kind of hylomorphism, or Platonism, might be needed as a defense against it. Ideas and forms are real. The world is orderly in a way that is intelligible to us, even though logic never guaranteed that, as empiricism ultimately illuminated. That intelligible orderliness is the foundation of the possibility of science. It cannot itself be proved, it must even be taken on faith, yet we know it. The grue hypothesis can be tested like any other; It must be rejected on the authority of intuition, not on empirical evidence. The authority of intuition is hard to explain but must arise from some platonic birthright of the soul to discern the real ideas on the basis of which the world is ordered.
Whether that's a rejection of materialism with respect to physical nature, I'm not sure. If you say that nature turns out to be mathematically explainable, or in Galileo's framing, that "mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe," and if at the same time you recognize that numbers are non-material yet real entities, is that a rejection of materialism?
But here's the point. It's very possible to reject Aristotelianism in favor of modern physical science which reasons only from efficient causes, and at the same time, to accept that the world was created by God and that human souls are real and immoral and that there is free will. If there is a long and very roundabout case for hylomorphism as an escape hatch from the problem of induction, the case for rejecting materialism about the human soul flows far more directly and infallibly from subjective experience.
"Subjective" and "objective" are hard to define, but we kind of know what they mean. The pursuit of scientific objectivity is a venerable enterprise. It's a motive for us was a zeal for truth, as against mere subjectivity, what seems true to somebody but maybe isn't, and especially, as against what seemed true to somebody, and then becomes a doctrine backed by force, which honest epistemic schools compel others to reject, if they have the courage to tell the truth. The pursuit of objectivity went a little too far; it turns out that we do have to trust our intuitions in the end. But it's possible to recognize this while? Still thinking that aristotelians let mere subjective feeling have too much authority, and build far too many edifices of elaborate claims on casual subjective feelings about how things should be.
CS Lewis represents a successful synthesis of modern science with Christianity, much as Thomas Aquinas represented a successful synthesis of Christianity with the Aristotelianism that was the best available science in his day. I'd like to see you engage more with him.
It’s been awhile since I read Miracles but I do remember thinking it was not a very successful synthesis. That he wanted to claim some of the advantages of a substance dualism without fully going there or addressing the involved questions. Maybe I can go back to it at some point.
I found Miracles very persuasive, far more so than most professional philosophy I've encountered in the same areas.
In general, I think the low regard in which CS Lewis is held in academia discredits academia and not Lewis. They don't have arguments fit to beat him. It's just the hegemony of fideist scientific materialism plus snobbery vs. a writer with popular appeal.
OK, but the problems with dualism don’t just come back to snobbery. There’s an interaction problem. If these are two metaphysically distinct worlds hooked together somehow then how do they influence one another? What connects them? I think we’ll continue to have dualists popping up here and there (Karl Popper was another famous one) because there is a certain allure to it: “I can have all the benefits of materialism but still believe in mind!” That was the draw for Descartes certainly.
But most people who apply themselves seriously to the question decide that dualism is unstable and unsatisfying. It tries to get the “best of both worlds” from materialism and idealism but often ends up getting the worst too, with a serious interaction problem on top of that. Hylomorphism requires some groundwork for sure but ultimately it offers a graceful synthesis next to which dualism just feels clunky and ad hoc. Like wanting to go back to Ptolemaic piles of star charts after seeing Kepler’s theorems… unless you have strong external reasons to want to do it, it doesn’t appeal.
So honestly, I can't really compare hylomorphism with dualism because I don't understand it. If it's more than a vague placeholder for dualism, then I don't see how you even get past the "two cats" problem. We can only count things because multiple things have one form, so a thing isn't both matter and form in the sense of identity. Things *participate* in forms, or something; they aren't their forms.
But "mind is real; matter is real; reduction of mind to matter fails (or at any rate, it certainly can't be proved); how mind and matter connect is a hard and somewhat mysterious question but clearly they do" is a nice package of truths that isn't unstable because it's firmly grounded in (a) experience plus (b) refusal to accept false reductionism.
The odd thing about Christian Aristotelianism is that Aristotle, unlike Plato, seems a little bit like an unrefined materialist. You know him better than I do, but my sense is that he doesn't clearly believe in the supernatural, and that makes a lot of modern secular philosophers feel like he's sort of on their side. Isn't there something about the soul being the form of the body? If so, how can the soul exist without the body? But Christianity most certainly does believe in a supernatural soul which outlives the body. Whatever Descartes' actual personal state of faith (and is there really a reason to doubt the sincerity of his Christianity?) his dualism is the clear affirmation of the supernatural soul that Christianity needs.
Maybe the most important question I want to ask a philosopher is: do you believe in the supernatural? No: materialist. Yes: dualist. Which side are the hylomorphists on? There are nuances within both sides, but that there are alternatives to both sides, I'm not convinced.
Your schematic includes Thomists, materialists, and postmodernists, but apparently not dualists.
That's a problem, because it's possible to think that scientific, materialistic explanations beat Aristotelian explanations for the phenomena of physical nature, being simpler, clearer and more predictively successful, well denying, or never even considering because it's obviously false, scientific, materialistic explanations work for the human soul.
And not only possible but very typical. Descartes doubted much; he didn't doubt the human soul. on the contrary, that was the one thing that he couldn't doubt. locks, metaphysics and epistemology deconstructed experience and rebuilt concepts from the ground up in an empiricist fashion, but he didn't deny the human mind or the human soul, or try to explain them as mere motions of atoms.
Descartes and Locke were far more influential on modernity the mechanistic psychology of Hobbes.
You’re right that I left out dualists. Sorry, it’s hard to get to everything at once; we can circle back. Dualism just isn’t (and hasn’t I think ever been) a very popular view, because it’s widely seen (I think correctly) as a kind of unstable halfway house between a hylomorphic view that blends form and matter tightly and a materialist or physicalist view that treats the physical as all there is. Rejecting form but trying to “glue it back on” as it were at discrete connection points feels like a sloppy hack job. But you’re right of course that Descartes was influential… just mostly by helping to discredit traditional metaphysics. His own metaphysical view was mostly rejected but did help pave the way to a more thoroughgoing materialism.
“Ghost in the machine” is the phrase you hear a lot in connection with dualism. “If you’re going to expel form, just let it go!” However as I mentioned before there are still substance dualists, just not very many. We can come back to it but this is a broad brush narrative and dualism is a bit of a lacuna to my way of thinking.
It doesn't seem very plausible to me that dualism is a rare or unpopular view. CS Lewis was clearly a dualist and is very popular. Descartes was a dualist, very influential, and maybe that led to atheistic materialism in some after generations, but that's a lot of people adopting Cartesian influenced ways of thinking without becoming a theistic materialists.
At the popular level, “you die and go to heaven” is the oversimplified street religion. Dualist.
My knee-jerk is the dualism is what most people think because it's obviously true. What kind of empirical evidence would refute that?
It’s possible that a kind of inchoate dualism is “popular” among normal Christians (would be hard to check since most of the people in question wouldn’t have explicit philosophical stances on record and maybe wouldn’t know or would be inconsistent when asked) but I’d be inclined to say that that’s because modernity has taught us not to look for or expect a compelling synthesis of different aspects of reality. Among professional philosophers it exists but is not that popular for the reason I’ve said. Feels like the superglue hack-job solution to the problem of mind and matter.
By the way, a question about hylomorphism.
Suppose you have a cat. It is matter, but it is also form, or has form. The matter of certain atoms. The form is catness.
Now suppose you have another cat. It is different matter. But it is the same form: catness. Otherwise, how could we speak of "two cats?"
How do hylomorphists handle this situation?
I think a Platonist would say that there is one form which resides, so to speak, in the realm of ideas. Two things, one form. Is that consistent with hylomorphism? If the thing is form and matter, someone might think it follows from that that if the things are two, the forms must be two.
One of Locke's themes in *An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding* was that "there are no innate ideas." I'm not sure to what extent he was arguing with anyone in particular, and if so, what they would have said in their own defense. But the notion of innate ideas feels to me like something downstream of the rejection of Aristotelianism, and of hylomorphism. Locke wanted to deny that we just know mentally what things are like. It seemed cleaner to say that the mind starts as a blank slate and we discover what's in the world through experience.
The ultimate descent of empiricism into Humean skepticism shows the limits of that, and some kind of hylomorphism, or Platonism, might be needed as a defense against it. Ideas and forms are real. The world is orderly in a way that is intelligible to us, even though logic never guaranteed that, as empiricism ultimately illuminated. That intelligible orderliness is the foundation of the possibility of science. It cannot itself be proved, it must even be taken on faith, yet we know it. The grue hypothesis can be tested like any other; It must be rejected on the authority of intuition, not on empirical evidence. The authority of intuition is hard to explain but must arise from some platonic birthright of the soul to discern the real ideas on the basis of which the world is ordered.
Whether that's a rejection of materialism with respect to physical nature, I'm not sure. If you say that nature turns out to be mathematically explainable, or in Galileo's framing, that "mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe," and if at the same time you recognize that numbers are non-material yet real entities, is that a rejection of materialism?
But here's the point. It's very possible to reject Aristotelianism in favor of modern physical science which reasons only from efficient causes, and at the same time, to accept that the world was created by God and that human souls are real and immoral and that there is free will. If there is a long and very roundabout case for hylomorphism as an escape hatch from the problem of induction, the case for rejecting materialism about the human soul flows far more directly and infallibly from subjective experience.
"Subjective" and "objective" are hard to define, but we kind of know what they mean. The pursuit of scientific objectivity is a venerable enterprise. It's a motive for us was a zeal for truth, as against mere subjectivity, what seems true to somebody but maybe isn't, and especially, as against what seemed true to somebody, and then becomes a doctrine backed by force, which honest epistemic schools compel others to reject, if they have the courage to tell the truth. The pursuit of objectivity went a little too far; it turns out that we do have to trust our intuitions in the end. But it's possible to recognize this while? Still thinking that aristotelians let mere subjective feeling have too much authority, and build far too many edifices of elaborate claims on casual subjective feelings about how things should be.
CS Lewis represents a successful synthesis of modern science with Christianity, much as Thomas Aquinas represented a successful synthesis of Christianity with the Aristotelianism that was the best available science in his day. I'd like to see you engage more with him.
It’s been awhile since I read Miracles but I do remember thinking it was not a very successful synthesis. That he wanted to claim some of the advantages of a substance dualism without fully going there or addressing the involved questions. Maybe I can go back to it at some point.
I found Miracles very persuasive, far more so than most professional philosophy I've encountered in the same areas.
In general, I think the low regard in which CS Lewis is held in academia discredits academia and not Lewis. They don't have arguments fit to beat him. It's just the hegemony of fideist scientific materialism plus snobbery vs. a writer with popular appeal.
OK, but the problems with dualism don’t just come back to snobbery. There’s an interaction problem. If these are two metaphysically distinct worlds hooked together somehow then how do they influence one another? What connects them? I think we’ll continue to have dualists popping up here and there (Karl Popper was another famous one) because there is a certain allure to it: “I can have all the benefits of materialism but still believe in mind!” That was the draw for Descartes certainly.
But most people who apply themselves seriously to the question decide that dualism is unstable and unsatisfying. It tries to get the “best of both worlds” from materialism and idealism but often ends up getting the worst too, with a serious interaction problem on top of that. Hylomorphism requires some groundwork for sure but ultimately it offers a graceful synthesis next to which dualism just feels clunky and ad hoc. Like wanting to go back to Ptolemaic piles of star charts after seeing Kepler’s theorems… unless you have strong external reasons to want to do it, it doesn’t appeal.
So honestly, I can't really compare hylomorphism with dualism because I don't understand it. If it's more than a vague placeholder for dualism, then I don't see how you even get past the "two cats" problem. We can only count things because multiple things have one form, so a thing isn't both matter and form in the sense of identity. Things *participate* in forms, or something; they aren't their forms.
But "mind is real; matter is real; reduction of mind to matter fails (or at any rate, it certainly can't be proved); how mind and matter connect is a hard and somewhat mysterious question but clearly they do" is a nice package of truths that isn't unstable because it's firmly grounded in (a) experience plus (b) refusal to accept false reductionism.
The odd thing about Christian Aristotelianism is that Aristotle, unlike Plato, seems a little bit like an unrefined materialist. You know him better than I do, but my sense is that he doesn't clearly believe in the supernatural, and that makes a lot of modern secular philosophers feel like he's sort of on their side. Isn't there something about the soul being the form of the body? If so, how can the soul exist without the body? But Christianity most certainly does believe in a supernatural soul which outlives the body. Whatever Descartes' actual personal state of faith (and is there really a reason to doubt the sincerity of his Christianity?) his dualism is the clear affirmation of the supernatural soul that Christianity needs.
Maybe the most important question I want to ask a philosopher is: do you believe in the supernatural? No: materialist. Yes: dualist. Which side are the hylomorphists on? There are nuances within both sides, but that there are alternatives to both sides, I'm not convinced.
Your schematic includes Thomists, materialists, and postmodernists, but apparently not dualists.
That's a problem, because it's possible to think that scientific, materialistic explanations beat Aristotelian explanations for the phenomena of physical nature, being simpler, clearer and more predictively successful, well denying, or never even considering because it's obviously false, scientific, materialistic explanations work for the human soul.
And not only possible but very typical. Descartes doubted much; he didn't doubt the human soul. on the contrary, that was the one thing that he couldn't doubt. locks, metaphysics and epistemology deconstructed experience and rebuilt concepts from the ground up in an empiricist fashion, but he didn't deny the human mind or the human soul, or try to explain them as mere motions of atoms.
Descartes and Locke were far more influential on modernity the mechanistic psychology of Hobbes.
You’re right that I left out dualists. Sorry, it’s hard to get to everything at once; we can circle back. Dualism just isn’t (and hasn’t I think ever been) a very popular view, because it’s widely seen (I think correctly) as a kind of unstable halfway house between a hylomorphic view that blends form and matter tightly and a materialist or physicalist view that treats the physical as all there is. Rejecting form but trying to “glue it back on” as it were at discrete connection points feels like a sloppy hack job. But you’re right of course that Descartes was influential… just mostly by helping to discredit traditional metaphysics. His own metaphysical view was mostly rejected but did help pave the way to a more thoroughgoing materialism.
“Ghost in the machine” is the phrase you hear a lot in connection with dualism. “If you’re going to expel form, just let it go!” However as I mentioned before there are still substance dualists, just not very many. We can come back to it but this is a broad brush narrative and dualism is a bit of a lacuna to my way of thinking.
Mind exists. Matter exists. Ergo, dualism.
It doesn't seem very plausible to me that dualism is a rare or unpopular view. CS Lewis was clearly a dualist and is very popular. Descartes was a dualist, very influential, and maybe that led to atheistic materialism in some after generations, but that's a lot of people adopting Cartesian influenced ways of thinking without becoming a theistic materialists.
At the popular level, “you die and go to heaven” is the oversimplified street religion. Dualist.
My knee-jerk is the dualism is what most people think because it's obviously true. What kind of empirical evidence would refute that?
It’s possible that a kind of inchoate dualism is “popular” among normal Christians (would be hard to check since most of the people in question wouldn’t have explicit philosophical stances on record and maybe wouldn’t know or would be inconsistent when asked) but I’d be inclined to say that that’s because modernity has taught us not to look for or expect a compelling synthesis of different aspects of reality. Among professional philosophers it exists but is not that popular for the reason I’ve said. Feels like the superglue hack-job solution to the problem of mind and matter.
Sorry for the multiple postings of the same comment. It's a big of some sort. Won't let me delete them. If you can, I'll be grateful.
I deleted the copy posts but after that it kept urging me to ban you from the Substack! lol. (“You really don’t seem to like this guy…”)
I’m pretty sure I dismissed all those but if you somehow find yourself blocked let me know and I’ll try to fix it…