Disproving The Soul

[Neo-Scholastic]

It seems kinda silly to me to say one is a materialist or that materialism is true without first having a substantive (pun) idea about what this stuff, matter is and what kinds of properties it has.

I should also add that any definition of matter is going to some degree be a tautology; we could define matter in terms of particles and their charges but then you might rightly ask me to define particles and charges; at some point we're forced to admit that beyond questions regarding our perception of composition, classification, and functionality, objects as they are to themselves remain elusive to complete understanding.

This is why, from the Aristotle to the Schoolmen, 'primal' matter was considered a first principle. They came to this conclusion by abstracting away all the accidental or contingent properties until all that remained was a fundamental that could not be removed. In the case of primal matter, you get a single property, the propensity to be, which is logically prior to any particular form the stuff takes.

What makes pure materialism wrong is that it lacks a fundamental principle that informs the propensity to be.

The same approach worked in the opposite direction takes you to that informing principle. If you abstract away all the material components of things and specific manifestations of forms you get to this other first principle.

This position has some affinity with aspect dualism since neither primal matter nor the informing principle occur one apart from the other.