Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy ed. by Gideon Manning (review)

This important volume contains a number of useful papers. The topic that ties most of the essays together is, of course, hylomorphism. Michael Edwards argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholastic philosophers’ increased use of anatomical and medical literature in their writings on the soul cannot simply be a result of the availability of new anatomical data and a commitment, implicit in hylomorphism, to the view that an understanding of the soul requires an understanding of the body. Gary Hatfield discusses Descartes’s efforts to give purely mechanical accounts of the various sensory operations (reconceived so as not to include anything mental), which were thought by Aristotelians to have their ultimate origin in the sensitive soul. And Justin Smith discusses Leibniz’s indebtedness to chymical and iatrochemical writers for his early, wholly mechanical account of nutrition, arguing that this account is important in the development of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics of corporeal substance. Less directly connected to the topic of hylomorphism is William Newman’s paper, in which he argues that Daniel Sennert advocated “an empirically based atomism coupled with affinity” nearly a century before the publication of Étienne-François Geoffroy’s Table des differents rapports in 1718 (100).

The other five papers included in the collection all argue that one or more non-scholastic early modern philosophers endorsed hylomorphism. Many scholars who make such claims do not discuss the logically prior issue of what exactly hylomorphism involves. This is so for three of these five papers. Thus, while discussing Leibniz’s hylomorphism, Daniel Garber points to Leibniz’s view that matter is passive and form active and then claims, without citing any particular scholastic philosopher, that this view was traditional. Likewise, both Garber and Ariew rely on the claim that many scholastic philosophers understood substantial forms to be principles of unity, but again without citing any particular schoolman. And in his contribution to this volume, Hiro Hirai examines Daniel Sennert’s accounts of the generation of living beings, in part with a view to showing how thorough Sennert’s synthesis of Aristotelian hylomorphism and Democritean atomism was. But when he explains that Sennert understood certain atoms or corpuscles to be informed by a soul, he does not discuss the nature of this informing relation. One is left to wonder whether an animated corpuscle has organs, according to Sennert, as Aristotle’s definition of the soul in De anima II.1, 412a27–b1, clearly requires.

Questions that scholars writing on this topic should ask, but often fail to ask, include: (1) Can a thinker be said to endorse hylomorphism when he understands his substantial forms to be substances in their own right? (Scholastic philosophers commonly denied this of all substantial forms except the human soul.) (2) Can a philosopher be said to endorse hylomorphism if he thinks that the soul is not a principle (much less the ultimate principle) of the operations involved in nutrition and reproduction? (3) Can a thinker be said to endorse hylomorphism if he denies that most of the human soul’s powers are enmattered, that is, are powers residing in various corporeal organs? (4) Can a philosopher be said to endorse hylomorphism if he denies substantial forms of apparently homogeneous bodies like gold and water?

In his paper, Gideon Manning does offer an answer to the question of what hylomorphism is, and this in the course of arguing that philosophers like Descartes and Hobbes endorsed a hylomorphic conception of corporeal substance. But I daresay that, even if he deserves credit for tackling the question, his answer is wide of the mark. He claims, in particular, that hylomorphism involves a conception of matter and form as mere subject and property. By way of support, he offers a reading of Aristotle’s discussion, in Physics I.1–7, of the three principles of change—subject, form, and privation (which Manning...