Conceiving Prime Matter in the Middle Ages: Perception, Abstraction and Analogy

In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter can be known by human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter.

Hylomorphism

The chapter provides a discussion of hylomorphism, a doctrine associated with Aristotle and his medieval followers according to which objects are compounds of matter and form. Two strands of contemporary hylomorphism are examined, one of which invokes a kind of downward causation. Another ‘modest’ strand regards forms as essences, the what it is to be (what it takes to be) something of a particular kind: a tree, a rabbit, an electron. This leaves open the nature of matter. Aristotle might or might not have embraced ‘prime matter’, but his account of change appears to call for a material something underlying changes among the elemental stuffs. The upshot is a seamless ‘blancmange’ universe apparently inhospitable to motion and to causal interaction among distinct objects.

The Body in Jesus’ Tomb as a Hylemorphic Puzzle: a Response to Jaeger and Sienkiewicz and an Application for Christological Anthropology

In a recent paper, Andrew Jaeger and Jeremy Sienkiewicz attempt to provide an answer consistent with Thomistic hylemorphism for the following question: what was the ontological status of Christ’s dead body? Answering this question has christological anthropological import: whatever one says about Christ’s dead body, has implications for what one can say about any human’s dead body. Jaeger and Sienkiewicz answer the question this way: that Jesus’ corpse was prime matter lacking a substantial form; that it was existing form-less matter. I argue that their argument for this answer is unsound. I say, given Thomistic hylemorphism, there was no human body in Jesus’s tomb between his death and resurrection. Once I show their argument to be unsound, I provide a christological anthropological upshot: since there was no human body in Christ’s tomb, there are no human bodies in any tomb.

Is Matter the Same as Its Potency? Some Fourteenth-Century Answers

Is prime matter the same as its potency (potentia), its readiness to take on the entire gamut of corporeal substantial forms? This question, arising from a passage in Averroes, lies at the core of later medieval hylomorphism and was hotly debated. The present article looks at three answers to the question by figures from the first half of the fourteenth century: Gerald Ot who takes a Scotistic approach to the issue, John of Jandun and Peter Auriol taking an Averroan tack, and John Buridan with a nominalistic outlook. The discussion reveals a diversity of positions on the nature of potency and its relation to actuality, and in the case of Buridan an unusual view at the heart of his matter theory: the direct inherence of accidental forms in prime matter.

Reaching the Goal of Alchemy – or: What Happens When You Finally Have Created the Philosophers’ Stone?

Alchemy is the art of transforming base metals into precious ones, usually silver and/or gold. The most important method conceived to reach this goal was the creation of the elixir, also called the philosophers’ stone, which, applied to the prime-matter, would lead to an accelerated process of ripening of metals, eventually ending in gold. How did Arabo-Islamic alchemists suppose that the transmutation worked? What were the conditions the adept had to fulfil in order to succeed? And what did they think would happen when one finally has created the philosophers’ stone? Will the economy collapse because gold and silver will lose their validity? Will the alchemist simply lean back and enjoy? Or will the world end, because man has finally attained the knowledge that should be God’s only?

The Philosophia ad Athenienses in the Light of Genuine Paracelsian Cosmology

The pseudo-Paracelsian Philosophia ad Athenienses (1564) draws upon many of the ideas of Paracelsus but combines them with many other elements not found in the genuine works of the Swiss physician. After discussing the details of its edition, we summarize its content, then examine its possible sources, including the authentic texts of Paracelsus by which the unknown author will have taken inspiration. We discuss specifically the question of uncreated prime matter and provide a number of criteria allowing us to consider the treatise as spurious. Finally, we argue that the unknown author wrote this text and ascribed it to Paracelsus in order to produce a more Platonist Paracelsian cosmology than that of the genuine treatises of Paracelsus, which apparently disappointed the unknown author in this regard.

Metaphysics and Material Modes

This chapter concerns the metaphysical basis for Suárez’s account of the material world. It begins with his “analogical” metaphysics, which constitutes a distinctive contribution to the medieval scholastic debate over the applicability of the notion of “being” to God and creatures. Then there is a consideration of Suárez’s introduction into the scholastic theory of distinctions of a modal distinction intermediate between the real and rational distinctions. This new intermediate distinction yields the first clear instance of the early modern notion of a mode. The chapter ends with an examination of the two material modes that are most important for Suárez, namely, the substantial mode of union, which serves to unite substantial form and prime matter, and the accidental mode of inherence, which accounts for the connection between a material substance and its “real accidents.”