In this paper, the author examines a neglected debate between Francisco Suarez and Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza about the unity of composite substances (that is,
hylomorphic compounds of matter and form).
Such is the
hylomorphic schema that Gilbert Simondon famously critiques (39-51).
A significant point is obvious from the
hylomorphic theory of Idowu.
In fact, they insist that this ultimate end for human actions--human flourishing/eudaimonia--is tied to our nature as rational animals, that is, beings who are composed of the
hylomorphic (5) union of a material body and a rational soul.
What possible 'ultimate concern' could an ordinary urinal picked up at a common hardware store and simply signed by the artist express?" (51) By invoking Paul Tillich's language of "ultimate concern," Garcia-Rivera points to the problem Duchamp's controversial readymade holds for traditional of theories of art, which, like Tillich's and Balthasar's, see art as a means of access to the transcendent dimensions of Being--the communication of spiritual and eternal truths through the
hylomorphic contours of form and style.
The second, coming from Ingold (2013), posits a phenomenologically inspired position on 'making' which replaces the
hylomorphic premise by a flowing generative process of form creation.
Fortunato, "
Hylomorphic solitons for the Benjamin-Ono and the fractional KdV equations," Nonlinear Analysis.
Simondon contests this
hylomorphic intuition, however, and proposes to understand this process as operative, meaning that it is best understood as the communication of information between different parts of the mould, the sand, the moisture, and so on, modulated by the hands of the craftsman, and later the heating process in the oven that produces the brick.
If, however, we follow the Greeks, and ancient and medieval
hylomorphic metaphysics more generally, in understanding the perception of truth as the seeing of a form (Dupre 18), it would seem impossible to deny Maritain's understanding of beauty as transcendental in fact, even though few authorities explicitly call it one.
(12) This is the
hylomorphic claim that matter is formed applied to individuation: the individual is first indeterminate and only later determined by the imposition of some principle, more as an application than a process.
(2) The primacy of substance from a
hylomorphic metaphysical standpoint within the Christian anthropological tradition has reinscribed an implicit androcentrism and the privileging of a certain male normativity, which feminist theologians have raised to greater consciousness.