On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal. And so are you. But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body. The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.) Assume that I die peacefully in my bed. I went to bed, but now I don't exist: what occupies my place in the bed is a (human) corpse. A dramatic change took place in the immediate vicinity of the bed. One and the same human body went from alive to dead. This suggests that dying is an accidental as opposed to a substantial change. If I understand it, this is roughly the Corpse Objection to animalism. The objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. Me and my body have different persistence conditions.
But there is another way to look at the situation. Me and my body have the same persistence conditions. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die, the animal body that I am ceases to exist and one or more new bodies begin to exist. (If my death is peaceful, as opposed to, say, 'Islamic,' then only one new body begins to exist.) So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Patrick Toner puts it:
Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. ("Hylemorphic Animalism" in Phil Stud, 155, 2011, pp. 65-81)
An Objection
This strikes me as problematic. Suppose dying is a substantial change and that Peter and Paul die peacefully at the same instant in the same place. Peter and Paul cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 begin to exist. Suppose C1 is Peter's corpse and C2 is Paul's corpse. What accounts metaphysically for C1's being Peter's corpse and opposed to Paul's, and vice versa? What makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's?
Why should there be a problem? Dying is a substantial change, but it is not annihilation. (At the other end, being born is a substantial change but it is not exnihilation: no animal is born ex nihilo.) Since dying is not annihilation, a corpse comes to be when Peter dies. And since the change is substantial, not accidental, the substance Peter ceases to exist and a numerically different substance, C1, begins to exist. Now every change is a change in a substratum or subject. So what is the subject of the change when Peter dies? Answer: prime matter, materia prima. This is what all the scholastic manuals tell me.
But if prime matter underlies substantial change, and provides the continuity between Peter and his corpse, then, given that prime matter is wholly indeterminate and bare of all forms, substantial and accidental, the continuity that prime matter allows does not distinguish between the change from Peter to Peter's corpse and the change from Paul to Paul's corpse. The substratum of these two changes is the same, namely, prime matter. If so, what makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's? That's my problem.
This problem does not arise if dying is an accidental change. For then we can say that Peter's designated matter (materia signata quantitate) which is numerically distinct from Paul's continues in existence as Peter's corpse. We have an accidental change, a change from being alive to being dead in a particular parcel of designated matter.
Toner's Reply
Patrick Toner's reply is that designated, not prime, matter accounts for the different continuities. Peter's corpse is continuous with Peter because the same designated matter is present in Peter and his corpse, but a different parcel of designated matter is present in Paul and his corpse. The fact that the matter underlying the two changes is prime, however, does not prevent the matter from also being designated. Toner in effect rejects my assumption that the substratum of a substantial change cannot be a particular parcel of designated matter.
What I had gathered from the manuals (e.g. Feser's, p. 171 et passim) was that (i) materia prima is the subject of substantial change; (ii) materia secunda is the subject of accidental change; (iii) every change is either substantial or accidental; (iv) no change is both; (v) no change is such that its subject or substrate is both materia prima and materia secunda.
But if Toner is right, I am wrong about (v).
Toner draws on Joseph Bobik's commentary on De Ente et Essentia:
When we talk about quantified matter ... we are not talking about anything other than the matter which is part of the intrinsic constitution of an individual composed substance, that matter which can also be described as prime, as designated, and as nondesignated... Thus, to talk about prime matter, quantified matter, nondesignated matter, and designated matter is to talk about the same thing, but to say four different things about it, to describe it in four different ways. To speak of quantified matter, or perhaps better of matter as quantified, is to speak of what the matters of all individual composed substances have in common, namely, that in their matters which accounts for the possibility of their matter's being divided from the matters of other individual substances; it is to speak of that which makes it possible for individual composed substances to have matter in common as part of their essence. Matter as designated presupposes, and adds to, matter as quantified; and what it adds is actual circumscription so as to be just so much. To say that matter is quantified is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out, and nothing else. To say that matter is designated is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out and circumscribed to be just so much, just so much as is in Jack or Paul or any given individual composed substance. (148, emphasis added)
Response to the Reply
The Bobik passage implies that some one thing can be described in two different ways, as designated matter and as prime matter. But then what is the one thing that can be described in these two ways? Presumably, it is a particular parcel of designated matter, the matter of precisely Peter, say, which is numerically distinct from the matter of precisely Paul. Materia signata is matter in the concrete, and prime matter would then be an abstraction from it and from every discrete parcel of designated matter.
If prime matter is but an abstraction, how can it serve as the real substratum of any such real change as is the dying of an animal? That is a real, concrete, change. If every change is a change in something, then the something must itself be real and concrete and particular. That's one problem.
A second is that if both substantial and accidental changes are changes in a concrete parcel of designated matter, then what becomes of the distinction between substantial and accidental changes? Can every change be viewed as one or the other? Is it just a matter of the same change being described in two different ways?
This requires further development and in any case it is just the beginning of the aporetics of prime matter, something to be pursued in subsequent entries.
Conclusion
Given the extreme difficulty of the notion of prime matter, a difficulty that transfers to the notion of substantial change, I don't see that the objection I raise above has yet been adequately answered.
A quick note on prime matter...
That Bobik passage regarding prime matter seems fundamentally wrong to me. No individual thing can be considered (intelligibly) as prime matter. That's because prime matter isn't an individual thing--it's not a substance. Prime matter (I think) is STUFF. For Aquinas--who uses the form/matter conceptual apparatus for things like numbers and God (God's essence, e.g., plays the role of matter/the 3 persons the role of form)--prime matter is matter in the PRIMARY sense; stuff by which there are things that are 3-dimensional and take up space. But prime matter has no definite form--if (per impossible) it did, it would be a hylomorphic compound. Prime matter is, thus, pure potentiality. On Aquinas's view, though, not even God could create prime matter that is not the prime matter of some hylomporphic compound (Scotus disagrees). It's not like there can be a hunk of prime matter existing in its own right as if it were a substance.
Personally, I think that if one adopts the form/matter, act/potency conceptual framework, prime matter makes a good deal of sense. I look forward to the aporia.
Posted by: Tully Borland | Saturday, June 07, 2014 at 07:20 AM
Right, Tully.
Prime matter is pure potency, wholly indeterminate, bare of every form whether accidental or substantial. As you say, it is not a substance. It is a 'principle' invoked in the analysis of substances.
Hylomorphic analysis has an upper limit and a lower limit. The upper limit is pure form, form without matter. Aquinas speaks of God as the *forma formarum,* the form of all forms. The lower limit is prime matter.
If you drive DOWN the hylomorphic road to the bitter end, you arrive at the dead-end: prime matter. So there is a certain 'logic' to the positing of prime matter. It is similar (but not the same) as the 'logic' of the positing of bare particulars, as in Gustav Bergmann.
I hope to exfoliate the aporias in separate posts. But for now we can notice the following tension: On the one hand prime matter, as a principle involved in the analysis of primary substances, must be a real ontological factor in things, especially since it is supposed to underlie real substantial change, as when an animal dies or is born. But on the other hand, it is the emptiest of empty abstractions. How?
As you say, PM is stuff. I add: the ultimate stuff out of which everything is made. So it must be something real (extramental). But nothing bare of all form can be real. So it's an abstraction created by the mind. But then it cannot be the ultimate real stuff of all real things.
Do you agree that there is a problem here?
Posted by: BV | Saturday, June 07, 2014 at 10:21 AM
I add: the ultimate stuff out of which everything is made. So it must be something real (extramental). But nothing bare of all form can be real. So it's an abstraction created by the mind. But then it cannot be the ultimate real stuff of all real things.
Do you agree that there is a problem here?
I agree that there are some bullets to bite if one holds that there is prime matter, but I don't know that they are bigger bullets than one has to bite in denying prime matter.
I'd need to go back and look at Aquinas (I haven't thought much about this in 8 or 9 years), but the view might be something like this:
Prime matter is not an abstraction (for one, when one abstracts one considers the form of a thing). Prime matter is stuff. We mght posit that there is such stuff for a couple reasons: (1) There is substantial change, (2) There are material things (it ain't just bundles of forms all the way down to the basement and there is a basement). Still, some prime matter can be distinct from other prime matter. I have prime matter and you have other prime matter. But those distinct hunks of stuff are not such that they can account for an individual substance. Though distinct hunks of prime matter from each other, of themselves they lack determinate dimensions and are not individuals or particulars. My prime matter might be sufficient to account for my being distinct from you, but it can't account for why I am this particular individual and you are this particular individual.
But, again, we shouldn't think of prime matter as existing in its own right. It has to be part of some substance. The prime matter can be characterized as having determinate dimension, not intrinsically, but because it's the prime matter of a substance with determinate dimension (dimensions it has as accidents perhaps?...though for Aquinas the determinate dimensions of origin are perhaps essential for the substance).
There are lots of complications I'm glossing over and there are many (prime matter is that in virtue of which a substance is a material substance; but the material substance is that in virtue of which the prime matter exists; but that which individuates the material substance...) I'd need to think more about this to say anything more helpful. But I have remodeling to do.
Posted by: Tully Borland | Saturday, June 07, 2014 at 11:42 AM
I'll take a shot at this.
In any substantial change there is always a change in species, but not always a change in genus. At the very least, it is never the case that some body leaves the genus of body in undergoing a substantial change. (As you said, we are speaking of substantial change and not annihilation.) Now some accidents belong to a substance in virtue of its specific form (such thinking and willing for man) and some belong to it generically and are not necessarily lost when a substance undergoes a substantial change according to species (such as quantity, weight, shape).
An example: Jake jumps off of a building. Before reaching the ground, he has a heart attack and dies. And then after some more falling, the corpse hits the ground. If you're using an equation to determine when the body will hit the ground, you don't have to do two separate calculations for before and after the heart attack. The laws of gravity are to with respect to bodies generally, so as long as a body remains within the genus "body", the laws of gravity can ignore this change entirely. This holds good for quantity and its accidents, and any accidents that belong to bodies as such.
So, with respect to the continuity question: the accidents of quantity and where-it-is remain with the body through death (for at no point does it cease to be a body). So how can you say which corpse was Peter's body? Why, it's the one that is in the place where Peter's body was!
I'm not sure what others will say about this response, but it's important to say that quantity and so on don't belong to prime matter because prime matter is not a thing, but a principle of thing. It is certainly real (for if the principle of a thing does not exist, neither does that thing), but it does not exist as a thing (a substance) and so does not have accidents.
Posted by: Nightingale | Saturday, June 07, 2014 at 04:07 PM
Can I ask if prime matter has mass? Tully, I think, will say Yes, Nightingale will say No, and Bill will see this as aporetic.
Posted by: David Brightly | Sunday, June 08, 2014 at 02:01 PM
David,
If only philosophy could be like mathematics. . . .
Posted by: BV | Sunday, June 08, 2014 at 06:30 PM