From the Catechism of the Council of Trent
I’m still trying to get a better understanding of this myself. But I did stumble upon this article today while thinking about this issue that I thought might interest you: St. Thomas on Substantial Unity Against the Pluriformists. Particularly relevant to the question you raised in my quotation of your post is this passage:
It seems to me that what he is saying is that substantial forms refer to subjects whereas accidental forms refer to qualifications on pre-existing subjects. In other words, substantial forms are nouns and accidental forms are adjectives that describe nouns. So ice, liquid water, and water vapor all have the same substantial form because they are all the same thing, namely water. The physical states are accidental because they describe the subject of water. If I said “oh, there’s a solid over there” you’d ask “a solid what” because solidity is an accidental form that qualifies something. If I said “oh, there’s water over there” it would seem to be silly to ask “a watery what.” I imagine the case would be similar for H2 vs. H+ because the difference would be the charged status, and charged modifies a subject making it an accidental rather than substantial form. I haven’t thought too much about this though to know if it holds more generally.
Yes master…
This is something that was covered in the article I linked to in the previous post as well. I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter.
Linus you predictably leave the kitchen when it gets too hot and it comes to demonstrating armchair concepts by real world examples.
Agreed.
.Its a linguistic problem too TAM.
That is heretical. This is not a normal substantial changte where an old form disappears and a new form appears. That is why it is not called a substantial change but a Transubstantiation. It is the whole substance of the bread and wine, their matter and their form which has been changed. And this does not happen in a substantial change.
Great stuff Balto - this is just the direction Linus needs to go if he wants to engage and influence people!
Yes I think this existing “virtually” business is as close as Aquinas or Aristotle ever gets to an ancient parallel to the problem facing Catholic Chemists.
Because the word “substance” implies something which cannot be broken down into parts. For example, you think a rock is an objectively real object, but if you look closer it is just a combination of atoms, which are combinations of smaller parts, etc. This shows that the rock does not objectively exist, because that would imply that there was some pseudo-spiritual identity of the rock of which the atoms were parts. But as crazy as the previous idea sounds, you still believe in it.
No, the problem is that the the philosophers of science of today have succumbed to scientism. They are telling Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophers " there is no room at the table. " It began with Hume and Descartes and Bishop Berkley and now philosophy has become the forgotten science for the most part, though it is making a slow come back. There is much more interest in both philosophers than there was in the latter part of the 20th century. In other words, if a branch of knowledge doesn’t make something useful, if it doesn’t lead to something that produces a predictive theory then it is useless, and being useless in the productive or predictive sense then it isn’t true
.Thanks! I gave it a read so now I think I understand what your concerns are a little better.
It’s weird because I always thought that the chemical considerations were the easiest to try to fit into a hylemorphic framework. I have more difficulty trying to discern the substantial difference between say, a dog and a cat, since they are both sentient animals. I was reading a book that attempts to fit modern scientific knowledge into an Aristotelian metaphysical framework: The Modeling of Nature: The Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis. The author discusses chemical considerations in some detail. Here’s another one that I want to get that may answer some of these questions, if you are interested: The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics
I’m not sure why the Aristotelian would disagree with the modern chemist about the nature of hydrogen being an atom with a single proton. They would probably agree with it. I know David Oderberg frequently likes to use the example of gold as being a substance with atomic number 79. Your example of soot vs. charcoal vs. diamond is more interesting, and I think it would be up to the chemist to determine whether those are really distinct substances. At first I was going to say that diamond and charcoal have different properties, such as brittleness, but that may count as an accidental form according to my previous definition. What the modern chemist cannot do is call the idea of hylemorphism itself into question. Well I suppose they can and many do, but they seem to not be able to act as though it is false. We seem to know that certain things like the elements are distinct things even if we have difficulty discerning the differences between certain combinations of things.
I don’t think they’d deny that water is composed of individual particles. The quantity and shape of water would be regarded as an accidental form.
Yes, but I think this is a crucial point that needs to be made. You are talking about the efficient cause of water, which is two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom reacting and forming covalent bonds with one another. But substantial form refers to the formal cause, which is to say why is water, water? One might say, “oh water is just what happens when hydrogen and oxygen behave in such and such a way…” whatever the rest of the explanation is. But it is hard to see how one has reduced water to simply oxygen and hydrogen if you always have to keep the notion of water in mind to explain the behavior of oxygen and hydrogen. The article I linked to yesterday seems to make this point when Aquinas argues that we have this tendency to think of a form as a type of thing since we form a mental concept of it, but in reality it is not a thing but a principle by which things are certain types of things. So it is not that the form is a thing that gets into contact with matter but the principle in virtue of which the matter becomes a certain type of thing rather than another. That’s the point I was trying to make.
I think that is exactly what it means for something to be possessed virtually. The difficulty lies in the fact that people tend to associate the word “virtual” with computers and “virtual reality” which makes it seem like to say that something is virtually possessed is to say that it is not really there but only appears to be there. But as the article you linked to pointed out “virtual” comes from the Latin world “virtus” which is the word for power, so the powers of hydrogen and oxygen are present in water but harnessed to a particular end. Potentiality means that the power is not there now but could be there. So hydrogen and oxygen have waterness potentially when they are simply hydrogen and oxygen, since they don’t have the powers of water until they chemically react with one another.
Well I don’t know why you think that Aristotle’s metaphysics depends on infinite divisibility. It is true that Aristotle and Aquinas erroneously thought that inorganic matter was one type of thing that is irreducible. Now we know that inorganic substances are composed of various elements that are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons, etc. But I don’t think they would have thrown out their metaphysics if they had known this fact. After all, they made provisions for organic substances, which they knew were composed of heterogeneous parts. If I am remembering correctly, I think the word “organic” is etymologically derived from the Greek word “organon” which means “instrument”, since organic things have different parts that serve different functions rather than being a homogeneous whole like they assumed inorganic matter was. So it seems that the atomic description of inorganic matter could be fit seamlessly into an Aristotelian metaphysical framework.
No, you’re not understanding what they are saying. If you break water down into its parts, you no longer have water anymore, but hydrogen and oxygen. So a substance really is something that cannot be broken down and modern science seems to support this since you cannot explain the behavior of oxygen and hydrogen in water without reference to the structure and properties of water as a whole. You are assuming that the hylemorphist is committed to the absurd view that a substance is absolutely not divisible into any other thing at all. No hylemorphist, ancient, medieval, or modern, has ever asserted such a thing. They were aware that substances are composed of parts since they considered organic things to be substances and organic things quite obviously have disparate parts.