Hylomorphism in a Globalising World: Scholastic Debates on the Ontology of Nature across Europe, China, and New Spain (HYLOGLOB)

Implementation: University of Porto (PT), 2023-2025.

Funding Institution: European Union, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-IF)

Secondments: UCLouvain (BE), Sun Yat-sen University (CN).

While sailing from Portugal to Asia in 1578, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci could have never imagined that, for over three decades, he would use the philosophical training he had received in Europe to try and understand sophisticated metaphysical doctrines developed in China over thousands of years. Like his European contemporaries in Asia and America, he made sense of these novel, utterly different systems of thought by a process of philosophical accommodation and reinterpretation that often reshaped their meaning considerably. Textual traces and historical reconstructions of the first cultural exchanges between Europe, China, and New Spain show that such processes of accommodation and reinterpretation were based on 16th-c. Scholasticism.

Like Ricci, the European intellectual elites that moved to these “peripheries” (missionaries, teachers, explorers, state delegates, etc.) had received a Scholastic education and used its schemes to decode new cultural settings. HYLOGLOB’s main hypothesis expands on this reconstruction to maintains that, insofar as natural philosophy and metaphysics are considered, non-European philosophies and cultures were read through the lenses of the 16th-c. Scholastic debate on the constitution of physical substances.

By analysing this debate, the project reconstructs the interpretative tools that were employed in the processes of philosophical accommodation of non-European theories about nature and the universe. HYLOGLOB aims at disentangling the metaphysical theories about the constitution of physical substances that have been produced in the 16th-c. debate and used as interpretative lenses to understand metaphysical and physical doctrines formulated in China and New Spain.

The Scholastic debate on the constitution of physical substances originated from a complex question: How can we describe ontologically the natural things (res) we see in our world, like a squirrel or a lump of metal? 16th-c. Scholastic philosophers claimed that these bodies are metaphysically made of two entities, namely, prime matter and substantial form (an Aristotelian theory called “hylomorphism”). While harsh controversies accompanied its reception in Greek, Arabic, and Latin settings, hylomorphism was the cornerstone of the Scholastic interpretation of the universe.

For Scholastic thinkers, the world was structured hylomorphically: physical phenomena of all sorts could be explained according to the hylomorphic constitution of the bodies involved. Hylomorphism, however, was not the only explanatory tool that Scholastic philosophers had to understand the natural world. For them, natural substances are also physically composed of another kind of parts: uniform mixtures made of elements. Indeed, following a different line of Aristotle’s thought, Scholasticism also maintained that all physical bodies are ultimately composed of elements. These elements, too, are hylomorphic compounds, but they are only virtually present in the bodies. Indeed, neither matter nor the form or the elements are integral parts of the body, but rather metaphysical components working as its principles.

HYLOGLOB aims at disentangling the metaphysical theories about the constitution of physical substances that have been produced in the 16th-c. debate and used as interpretative lenses to understand metaphysical and physical doctrines formulated in China and New Spain. The Scholastic debate on the constitution of physical substances originated from a complex question: How can we describe ontologically the natural things (res) we see in our world, like a squirrel or a lump of metal?

16th-c. Scholastic philosophers claimed that these bodies are metaphysically made of two entities, namely, prime matter and substantial form (an Aristotelian theory called “hylomorphism”). While harsh controversies accompanied its reception in Greek, Arabic, and Latin settings, hylomorphism was the cornerstone of the Scholastic interpretation of the universe. For Scholastic thinkers, the world was structured hylomorphically: physical phenomena of all sorts could be explained according to the hylomorphic constitution of the bodies involved.

Hylomorphism, however, was not the only explanatory tool that Scholastic philosophers had to understand the natural world. For them, natural substances are also physically composed of another kind of parts: uniform mixtures made of elements. Indeed, following a different line of Aristotle’s thought, Scholasticism also maintained that all physical bodies are ultimately composed of elements. These elements, too, are hylomorphic compounds, but they are only virtually present in the bodies. Indeed, neither matter nor the form or the elements are integral parts of the body, but rather metaphysical components working as its principles.

The interrelation and opposite functionality of these two theories (hylomorphism and the theory of the elements) originated a vast array of controversies and debates that culminated chronologically in the 16th-c. debate on the constitution of physical substances. This debate was built upon questions and problems about the three main constituents of physical substances, which are also the three topical features (TF1-3) of that debate: prime matter, substantial forms, and elements. In the case of prime matter (TF1), crucial frictions originated from its functional duality as (1) enduring substrate of substantial change and (2) metaphysical potentiality intrinsic to the body. This friction led to a prioritisation of either one of these functions, with Scotistic and Thomistic trends that were equally open to philosophical liabilities. 16th-c. philosophers struggled to elaborate possible solutions, often maintaining that matter was endowed with some actuality, features, and/or accidents (esp. quantity). HYLOGLOB examines how historical actors engaged with this elusive entity, analysing the solutions they proposed to justify prime matter’s actuality/potentiality, quantity, and conceivability.