Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
While actuality is linked by Aristotle to his concept of a formal cause, potentiality (or potency) on the other hand, is linked by Aristotle to his concepts of hylomorphic matter and material cause. Aristotle wrote for example that "matter exists potentially, because it may attain to the form; but when it exists actually, it is then in the form."
Aristotelian views of (cardinal or counting) numbers begin with Aristotle's observation that the number of a heap or collection is relative to the unit or measure chosen: "'number' means a measured plurality and a plurality of measures ... the measure must always be some identical thing predicable of all the things it measures, e.g. if the things are horses, the measure is 'horse'."
It leads to a method whereby Aristotle analyses causation and motion in terms of the potentialities and actualities of all things, whereby all matter possesses various possibilities or potentialities of form and end, and these possibilities become more fully real as their potential forms become actual or active reality (something they will do ...
Hylomorphism is a philosophical doctrine developed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, which conceives every physical entity or being as a compound of matter (potency) and immaterial form (act), with the generic form as immanently real within the individual. [1]
In Process and Reality: Corrected Edition (1978), [31] the editors elaborate upon Whitehead's view of the concept: He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation.
Process and Reality The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927–28. We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions.
For Aristotle, both matter and form belong to the individual thing (hylomorphism). Aristotle's theory of universals is Aristotle's classical solution to the problem of universals, sometimes known as the hylomorphic theory of immanent realism. universals are the characteristics or qualities that ordinary objects or things have in common.
Mereology (/ m ɪər i ˈ ɒ l ə dʒ i /; from Greek μέρος 'part' (root: μερε-, mere-) and the suffix -logy, 'study, discussion, science') is the philosophical study of part-whole relationships, also called parthood relationships.