- Hyle
In
philosophy , hyle (ύλη) (pronEng|ˈhaɪli) refers to matter or stuff. It can also be thematerial cause underlying a change inAristotelian philosophy. The Greeks originally had no word for matter in general, as opposed to raw material suitable for some specific purpose or other, so Aristotle adapted the word for "lumber" for this purpose. The idea that everything physical is made of the same basic substance holds up well under modernscience , although it may be thought of more in terms ofenergy or matter/energy.Controversy
The idea of hyle is closely related to that of substance, 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 ofKant '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 "directly" 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.
On the other hand, we may need to postulate a substance that endures through change in order to explain the nature of change -- without an enduring factor that persists through change, there is no change but only as succession of unrelated events. (See
hylomorphism ). The existence of change is hard to deny, and if we have to postulate something "unobserved" in order to explain what "is" observed, that is a valid "indirect" demonstration (byabductive reasoning ). Morevoer, something like a prime substance is posited byphysics in the form ofmatter /energy .ee also
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Aristotle
*Aristotelianism
*Hylomorphism
*Hylopathism
*Hylozoism
*Matter
*Materialism
*Noumenon
*Substance theory ources
* [http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?hyle Definition]
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