Hylomorphism
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Hylomorphism (Greek υλο- hylo-, "wood, matter" + -morphism < Greek -μορφη, morph, "form") is a philosophical concept that highlights the significance of matter in the composition of being, regarding matter to be as essential to a being as its form. In laymen's terms, hylomorphism is the view that a substance is defined by a combination of the matter from which it is made and the form which that matter takes.
Hylomorphism served as a useful tool in medieval philosophy from (at least) Avicebron to (at least) Thomas Aquinas.
Hylomorphic compounds first became prominent in philosophy in Aristotle's conception of change offered in the Physics.
[edit] What is change
Hylomorphism can be seen as the alternative of atomism as an explanation of how change happens. While the atomist theory claims that change is the rearrangement of the fundamental bricks (what changes is the form and not the matter), hylomorphism claims that what changes is the form while the matter remains invariant.
The argument is that without an enduring substrate, like matter, or hyle, there would be no change as such. According to a non-hylomorphic view, such as bundle theory, the history of an object would be a series of temporal parts strung out along the fourth dimension. Such parts would have no real connection with each other, and would not constitute a single changing object. (This view is called perdurance).
The most important challenge faced by hylomorphism, which Aristotle tried to solve, is the difficulty of defining the form without accepting the idea of fundamental bricks (atoms).
Some modern philosophers, such as Patrick Suppes in Probabilistic Metaphysics, argue that hylomorphism offers a better conceptual framework than atomism for the Standard Model of elementary particles.
