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The term 'metaphysics' orginated as the way of referring to those books of Aristotle that came after the book called Physics. It was just a way of referring to where certain books could be found.
The core concept of hylomorphism is the form. The jizz is this: an animal is thought of as an amount of ‘stuff’ (but see below) – for example, flesh, bone – possessing (a) an organisation and (b) a drive to develop in a certain direction. The conception was that the ‘stuff’ embodied a form, and it was the form that carried out the organisational and directional functions.
A horse was matter under a certain form.
What was matter?
Aquinas (and Aristotle) had the notion of ‘prime matter’ (materia prima). It was a notion that helped articulate the fact that sometimes a thing of a particular sort could change into a thing of another sort - a jug of cream into butter, for example.
Did the Scholastics think of prime matter then as some kind of completely unstructured – ie formless - goo out of which everything (almost) was made? No. Prime matter was something that could not exist prior to acquiring a form – could not exist independently of form. It existed only as ordered by some form or other.
The notion of matter as a basic stuff out of which things are made is not there in scholasticism, which maintains that every thing and every stuff has a form.
The new notion of 'matter' is there (in one form) in Descartes' notion of the plenum. Descartes speaks of the whole universe as being one single extended thing - the plenum:
"Let us conceive of matter, he says, as a real, perfectly solid body which uniformly fills the entire length, breadth and depth of ... space" (quoted from Descartes' Le Monde by John Cottingham in his brilliant guide Descartes, p.87; the bibliographical details of Le Monde are complicated but can be pursued via Cottingham's book, p 11 and following). The individual physical 'objects' of ordinary experience - boulders, trees, the bodies of horses and of human beings - are simply local disturbances in the plenum, like whirpools or eddies - or groups of these - in a river.
'From what has already been said, we have established that all the bodies in the universe are composed of one and the same matter, which is divisible into indefinitely many parts, and is in fact divided into a large number of parts which move in different directions and have a sort of circular motion.' (Decartes, Principles, II 46, according to Cottingham's Descartes p.92)
It was around the 'corpuscularianism' of Boyle (and, as we have seen, actually, Descartes) that the consensus settled at the end of the 17th Century. The universe is conceived of as consisting of an enormous (or infinite) number of solid discrete particles, each of them a definite size and shape.
There are, according to the corpuscularian, a limited variety of types of corpuscle. All they have in common are the properties essential to material objects .
The indivisible particles were thought of as subject to 'forces' of various kinds and as a result they sometimes combined, it was thought, to form complexes. The things of everyday experience - a table, a fence - were thought of as composed of the elementary particles, either as individuals or clustered into sub-complexes.
The properties of objects were thought of as arising out of the properties possessed by their component corpuscles.
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