What is Matter (And Why Does it Matter?)

What Is Matter (and Why Does It Matter)?

Edward Feser

Common sense also associates the natures of many things with distinctive purposes, which it regards as pervading at least the living world. By nature, birds aim at building nests and finding worms for their young, by nature eyes are for seeing and legs for walking, by nature a plant’s roots seek out water, and so on.

Thus speaks common sense. But is it right? How does it relate to what modern science tells us about the nature of matter? And are these questions of more than academic interest? Philosophers have defended a variety of answers, but three in particular are especially relevant for our purposes. The first is the view of thinkers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that common sense is basically correct, albeit in need of a deeper articulation and correction around the edges. Their position is known as hylomorphism, and Robert C. Koons develops an intriguing new defense of it in his book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?

Hylomorphism is best explained by contrast with the other two views, though. The second is known as atomism, first developed by ancient Greek philosophers like Leucippus and Democritus, and revived in a variety of modified forms by early modern thinkers associated with the Scientific Revolution...

In the atomist view, there is no sharp distinction in reality between stone and wood, a dog and a bird, or any other material things. At bottom they are really all just the same sort of thing, namely masses of colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless particles....Nor are there any genuine purposes in nature...

For atomism, then, common sense is deeply mistaken about the true nature of the material world. This is also the judgment of the third philosophical view, which is known as monism and was first defended by ancient Greek philosophers like Parmenides and Heraclitus. According to monism, our ordinary experience of the world, which seems to reveal a wide variety of distinct material objects, is illusory. There is in reality only one thing, the universe as a whole. Just as the color, size, shape, and weight of a stone are mere modifications of the stone rather than entities in their own right, so too, for monism, are tables, chairs, rocks, trees, dogs, and cats and people mere modifications of the one big entity that is the universe.

What Is Matter (and Why Does It Matter)?

Edward Feser

I think I'll go with common sense and hylomorphism. In any case it is necessitated by an interactional dualist view of human consciousness, which brings with it the world of spirit in addition to the physical world of matter and energy. If interactional dualism is true (and there is a lot of evidence for it), then all the immaterial properties and capacities of human consciousness are real and not illusions, and meanings and purposes are also real and imbued to living beings and physical objects through their spiritual aspects.

I think I'll go with common sense and hylomorphism. In any case it is necessitated by an interactional dualist view of human consciousness, which brings with it the world of spirit in addition to the physical world of matter and energy. If interactional dualism is true (and there is a lot of evidence for it), then all the immaterial properties and capacities of human consciousness are real and not illusions, and meanings and purposes are also real and imbued to living beings and physical objects through their spiritual aspects.

Hylomorphism has its own issues IMO, I think it actually contradicts a good deal of NDEs actually b/c it isn't clear if spiritual entities like souls dwell in physical [by which I meant 3D+] spaces.

Cartesian Dualism also suffers from the idea that the mind is extensionless.

I think what you mean by dualism is just a soul and body distinction, which is a level "above" metaphysical Ground. Idealism, Subtle Matter, and so on could be true and we would still have a soul and body distinction.