(September 12, 2013 at 8:21 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: No. You're projecting your own materialism onto Aristotle. Form is not a consequence of substance. The term is hylomorphism and it refers to the concept that all real substances (which has a particular meaning) are a unity of form and matter, neither of which can exist separately but may be discerned as such by the intellect.
(Why do we always end up debating the same topic on two threads simultaneously?)
You are correct - I should have made this clarification earlier.
The sense in which Feser (and, by extension, I) used the word "form" and the one you are talking about here are two different things. Ironically, this ends up revealing how Feser commits the fallacy of equivocation.
Platonic Forms (notice the capital F - which I'd be using to indicate this meaning) refer to the ontologically separate abstract universals. According to Plato, its from this Form that concrete bodies acquire their essence. In Feser's terms, 'dogness' would refer to the Form.
Aristotle rejects the existence of Platonic Forms altogether. His view is that the essence of the object (which I and Feser incorrectly called 'form') is determined by its substance. The Platonic Forms have no place in his metaphysics. Further, as you say, Aristotle does consider substance to be the unity of form and matter - but the sense of the word 'form' here is very different from Forms. Here the 'form' means structure or shape. Ofcourse, the idea is not limited to material structure. For example, with regards to the substance of a sentence, Aritotle would consider letters to be the matter and grammer or words to be the form. Similarly with regards to a car he'd consider metal to be the matter and a running engine to be part of the form. With regards to humans, he regarded body as material and 'soul' as the form - and though he had little idea of what this soul is, he did consider it only to exist in conjunction with the body.
