Form, Matter, Substance
ISBN: 9780198823803
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy Philosophy of Language;

Aristotle showed that there is more to an object besides its matter or material parts. According to such thinking, objects are compounds of matter (hule) and form (morphe or eidos) and a living organism is not exhausted by the body, cells, organs, and tissue that compose it. In addition, each object also contains an organizational principle, a form, which accounts for its structure, identity and unity. In Form, Matter,Substance, Kathrin Koslicki develops a contemporary defence of the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism. Most significantly, she argues that matter-form compounds, despite their complexity, deserve to be classified as substances due to theirhigh degree of unity.


Kathrin Koslicki is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel. Koslicki is originally from Munich, Germany, and moved to the United States when she was twenty. She completed her B.A. in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook in 1990 and her Ph.D at MIT in 1995. Prior to returning to Europe in 2020 to join the University of Neuchâtel's Institute of Philosophy, she held faculty positions in many parts of the United States and in Canada.Most recently, she was Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and Metaphysics at the University of Alberta. Koslicki's research interests in philosophy lie mainly in metaphysics, the philosophy of languageand ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle. In her two books (The Structure of Objects, Oxford University Press, 2008; and Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford University Press, 2018), she defends a neo-Aristotelian analysis of concrete particular objects as compounds of matter (hul=e) and form (morph=e).
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