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I’d still object that no one has shown that hylomorphism has the correct categories.
I did not propose any categories to use.
I was referring to hylomorphism’s 1001 categories.
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or even that reality is categorical rather than how our minds make sense of the world.
Then that is idealism, and you’re not really studying “reality”, you are studying your own psychology.
We don’t need to get into that, since monism speaks of one entity (be it mind or world) and that entity might truly be one rather than divided into 1001 categories.
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And I’d still object that we don’t have to answer such questions to study the mind.
The question will be answered either consciously or unconsciously. It seems to matter a great deal because it means the difference between studying “minds” vs. studying your own mental representations of whatever reality is, whether it exists or not.
How we mentally represent isn’t something we should assume in researching the mind, since it’s a big part of what we can learn. For instance, we know that the brain is wired for pattern recognition, so we can infer that Homo Sapiens is biased to see reality as sets of patterns. The desire to categorize would then be an artifact of having a mind built to recognize patterns.
You are using the categories of “atom” and “molecule” to explain the phenomenon you experience. Hylomorphism is not interested in offering categories to explain reality.
Atom and molecule refer to observable phenomena. In your second sentence, you may have forgotten to add that “Hylomorphism is not interested in offering categories to explain reality other than potency, actuality, prime matter, matter, form, substance, substantial forms, accidental forms, body, soul, passive intellect, active intellect, etc., etc.”.
A paella is an accidental form. It is nothing more than the ingredients.
There you go, you just used one of hylomorphism’s 1001 categories.
When it’s matter ceases to be informed by the ingredients and becomes informed by my rational soul. You are asking this question because you suppose that reality is “nothing but” the atoms and that these names “paella” and “balto” are just words we ascribe to certain configurations of atoms.
You’re not the first person on this thread to tell me what I believe without even knowing me. Perhaps there’s a connection between belief in hylomorphism and jumping to conclusions without cause. Even so it’s an extraordinary insult to say that a monist mother sees her baby as a mere configuration of atoms.
First you’d have to explain why we should believe that forms exist at the atomic level, since “atoms” exist, but no other level, since we apparently take atoms to be real things that exist apart from our minds but nothing larger than that. Turning around and denying that they have intelligible forms seems to commit you to the view that all reality reduces to prime matter, pure potency, which is to say that there is no material world, only a mental world that gives us representations that appear in some regular fashion for no reason at all. Affirming that forms exist at the atomic level immediately leads to the question of why we should suppose that they do not exist at the macro level also, given that the macro world is more intelligible to us than the atomic world, not less.
< sigh > All I asked was “Then when you eat it, at what point does it stop being paella and become balto?” and somehow you’ve woven it into this thing you have about bags of atoms.
On this thread I’ve been likened to an atheist, told I’m no longer welcome at the Christian country club, and now that I’m incapable of seeing babies and can only see bags of atoms. Why should a person prefer hylomorphic dualism? After 70 posts, it would have been good to see just one positive reason.
I don’t know what you are getting at here. My only guess is that you are supposing that forms and matter are distinct things, which is what Platonism supposes. Hylomorphism rejects that view. The form is the intelligible aspect of the paella. It is not a “thing” anymore than the visual aspects of the paella are a separately-existing “thing.”
No, it was simply we only know of paella because it is part of our universe. If it was truly a separate thing, it would necessarily be outside our universe and there would be no way to get to it, no way to know whether or not it exists.
If you purport to study “reality”, as geology and psychology both purport to do, then yes, you have implicitly assumed that reality is intelligible. Earlier you were concerned that maybe reality is not intelligible after all, yet here you are saying that “up to now, it is.” How do you know that, without assuming hylomorphism to some degree?
I don’t remember any such concern, and now it’s my turn to be lost. What proportion of the world’s population, including one billion Chinese etc., even know of hylomorphism? If I stand at the entrance to the mall, even in Catholic Spain, I doubt more than a handful would have ever heard of it. Yet, you say, that overwhelming majority of humanity must somehow magically be assuming hylomorphism to some degree.
In your dreams.
We can continue studying geology, along with the mind and anything else without making any assumptions whatsoever, in the same way that stone age man didn’t have to make any assumptions about reality or intelligibility to learn how to hunt. It just turns out to be one of the things we can do.
Perhaps we should stop now - can’t think of anything more I wanted to say on this thread. Thanks for the conversations.
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, but I guess you were equally amused that real philosophers call hylomorphism psychology rather than being smart enough to call it philosophy like wot u do.
Um, what? How we represent things is a datum for which any coherent theory of mind would have to account. It’s not an assumption. I don’t know how you can see these mental representations as anything other than an empirical data point in need of explanation without making some kind of reductionist assumption, which you claim you are not doing.