Hylomorphism — The Aristotelian doctrine according to which every sensible substance is a compound (synolon) of two inseparable principles: hyle, matter, and morphé, form. The term, coined later from these two Greek words, captures the core of Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, developed above all in the Physics, the Metaphysics, and De Anima. Matter is the indeterminate substrate, that out of which something is made; form is the principle of determination, organization, and intelligibility that makes a thing what it is. In natural things neither exists on its own: there is no matter without form, nor form without matter. The classic illustration is the bronze statue, in which the bronze is the matter and the figure imposed by the sculptor is the form; more decisively, in a living being the soul (psyché) is defined as the form or first actuality of an organized body, not as an entity that inhabits the body. Hylomorphism is tied to the theory of the four causes and to the pair potency and act (dynamis and energeia): matter is in potency to receive the form that actualizes it. In the Middle Ages the doctrine was assimilated and reworked by Scholasticism, especially by Thomas Aquinas, who joined it to the distinction between essence and existence. Because it opposes any dualism that radically separates soul and body, hylomorphism has returned to discussion in contemporary philosophy of mind as an alternative both to Cartesian dualism and to reductive physicalism.
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