Comments on Daniel De Haan’s Essay (2018) "Hylomorphism and the New Mechanist Philosophy"

By Razie Mah

Professor Daniel D. De Haan, at the University of Cambridge, contributes an essay to an edited volume, titled Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science. The collection is edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons and Nicholas Teh and published by Routledge in 2018.
The article is tidy. De Haan first discusses hylomorphism, then the new mechanist philosophy. He considers how they get along. He reflects on objections.
The developing mechanistic philosophy concerns biology, neuroscience and psychology. These sciences investigate things that are machine-like, because they have working components, and yet are single entities, with their own characteristic behaviors. The problem is that characteristic behaviors of the whole do not reduce to the component parts. A non-reductionist mechanistic philosophy is called for.
De Haan suggests that hylomorphism may help.
These comments propose that Aristotle’s hylomorphism fits Peirce’s category of secondness. Secondness consists of two contiguous real elements. Hylomorphism offers two: matter and form. So, what is the contiguity between them?
These comments also propose that mechanical philosophies may be diagrammed as two intercalated judgments, the Positivist’s and the empirio-schematic. The positivist intellect relates the empirio-schematic judgment, as ‘what ought to be’, and phenomena, as ‘what is’. The fly in this ointment is that phenomena are not all there is. There is also the thing itself, the noumenon. The noumenon cannot be objectified as its phenomena.
These proposals both disarticulate and rearticulate De Haan’s suggestion and show how hylomorphism is surprisingly relevant the new mechanistic philosophy for biology, neuroscience and psychology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942824718

Razie Mah

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Comments on Daniel De Haan’s Essay (2018) Hylomorphism and the New Mechanist Philosophy

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2020

Notes on Text

This work comments on an article by Professor Daniel De Haan, appearing 2018 as chapter 12 in Neo-Aristotelean Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons and Nicholas Teh and published by Routledge (pages 293-326). The essay’s title is Hylomorphism and the New Mechanist Philosophy in Biology, Neuroscience and Psychology. My goal is to comment on this work using a diagram of Peirce’s secondness and a model of science developed from reading Jacques Maritain.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Social and Sensible Construction, Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy

Recommended: Comments on Nicholas Berdyaev’s Book (1939) Spirit and Reality, Comments on John Brungardt’s Post (2019) Those Two Roads

Table of Contents

An Exploration

Neo-Aristotelian Hylomorphism

New Mechanist Philosophy

Points of Agreement between NMP and Hylomorphism

What About Points of Disagreement?

Example

An Exploration

0001 Daniel De Haan publishes an exploration on the compatibility between Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism and a New Mechanist Philosophy (NMP). He begins with the fundamentals of hylomorphism, then introduces the basics of NMP. He argues for their compatibility and confronts objections.

In these comments, I follow the first three steps of De Haan’s well-organized path, while continually guessing how his ideas associate to triadic structures, such as judgment and the category-based nested form. Then, I go off the rails.

No, I don’t derail.

I go off the rails. Imagine a train (of thought) levitating off its tracks.

Or maybe, imagine a train of moths flying towards a flame.

Neo-Aristotelian Hylomorphism

0002 Right at the start, I put pencil to paper, crossing out the word, substance, and inserting the term, thing.

Why do I do this?

Moderns call things, things, while scholastics call things, substances. To me, Aristotle has an account of things. To Aristotelians, things are physical substances.

I suppose that the Latin term, substantia, loses its charm around the 17th century (Anno Domini). The term is