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Volume 5, Number 1 (Fall 2007)
What Killed Substantial Form?
David Banach
Saint Anselm College
ABSTRACT
What killed substantial form, and can it live again? Substantial form died at the beginning of the scientific revolution when a new method made it unnecessary and a new view of the senses revealed by this new method made it unknowable. Conway's Game of Life as a model for Mechanism reveals not only the problems that make it impossible for contemporary thinkers to take substantial form seriously, but also a way in which the idea might be revived in a different form. The proponent of substantial form in the modern world should not oppose mechanism, but should insist upon it. If a thoroughgoing mechanism is true, it implies its own limits and requires the resurrection of form in a way that even a mechanist could love. |
