Hyle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.
 |
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since August 2006. |
|
This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since August 2006. (help, talk) |
In philosophy, hyle refers to matter or stuff. It can also be the material cause underlying a change in Aristotelian philosophy.
The idea of hyle is closely related to that of quintessence, in that both are that which remains unchanged during any process of change. There is cause for criticism of the very postulation of its existence, for many of the reasons that Nietzsche was critical of Kant's "Ding an sich", or "thing in itself", which is generally described as whatever is its own cause, or alternately as a thing whose only property is that it is that thing (or, in other words, that it has only that property). There is currently no way to prove the existence of any thing which has no properties, since such a thing could not possibly interact with other things and thus would be unobservable and indeterminate. It is worth noting, as obvious as it may seem, that if hyle, quintessence, or any other "thing in itself" were to be observed, demonstrated, or proven, it would necessarily cease to be a thing in itself. If anyone could observe a fundamental particle which was completely unchangeable, such as the original notion of the atom, for example, then one would have proven that something can interact with another thing specifically by not interacting with it; this is a clear logical impossibility if one considers that to exist a thing must be either directly perceptible or deductible from empirical data, and that for perception to occur there must either be change or a memory of change, which itself constitutes change in that the fact that we remember it, as opposed to immediately perceiving it, demonstrates that our world has changed since it happened.
Some aspects of the notion find their roots in alchemy and atomism, both of which purported to work with immutable substances or at least proposed their existence. Interestingly, the word "hyle" comes from a Greek word also often translated "wood", while "quintessence" is "fifth essence" in Latin since it originally meant the fifth "natural element", or aether, which later was said to "permeate all things". The first recorded use of the term in philosophical discussion was by Aristotle, according to A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names.
The concept of hyle relates to the philosophy of the mind via hylopathism. Hylopathism can be criticised in the same way that hyle can, by reductio ad absurdum, since a thing with no properties cannot interact with any other thing and thus cannot be said to exist. Alternately, one might use Occam's Razor to show that any explanation of a phenomenon which includes hyle, or any other thing in itself, can be made more succinctly without it and still explain something correctly.
In modern periodicals, Hyle is a journal with ISSN 1433-5158 which describes itself as a journal for philosophy of chemistry.
