Comments on Robert Koons’s Essay (2018) "Hylomorphic Escalation"

By Razie Mah

Robert C. Koons publishes an article in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (volume 92(1), pages 159-178). The complete title is “Hylomorphic Escalation: An Aristotelian Interpretation of Quantum Thermodynamics and Chemistry”.
Koons claims that statistical mechanics does not emerge from quantum mechanics.
Instead, the thermodynamic properties of chemicals are hylomorphic escalations of quantum physics.
Quantum physics describes the parts. Thermodynamics depicts the whole.
He proposes that the parts hylomorphically escalate into the whole.
There is a specific, mathematical basis for this assertion.
The number of degrees of freedom for quantum mechanical models differs from thermodynamic systems. The former use a finite number. The latter require an infinite number. The process of going from proximate matter to thermal form involves going to a continuum limit. This is the nature of hylomorphic escalation, the contiguity between the quantized matter and thermodynamic form.
Koons then offers six applications and responds to four objections.
These comments diagram Koons’s arguments using the dyadic structure of secondness and the triadic category-based nested form. They propose an alternate way to appreciate Koons’s central claim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Apr 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942824695

Razie Mah

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