What is Aristotle's Hylemorphism?

How can something change completely and still remain, in some sense, the same thing? It was to answer this that Aristotle created hylemorphism.

Matter and form

Aristotle was a student of Plato, but he took a different path: where Plato followed Parmenides towards the eternal and immaterial, Aristotle turned his eyes to the concrete, sensible, changeable world, and asked how change is possible without destroying the identity of things. The answer was hylemorphism: every material thing is composed of matter, the substrate that can change, and form, the principle that organizes and defines what the thing is.

The seed example

A seed changes and becomes a tree. Matter has completely transformed, almost nothing of what it was before remains visible. But there is a real continuity behind the transformation, a process driven by a form, by an internal purpose that was already present in the seed from the beginning. It is no coincidence that an oak seed grows into an oak, and not a pine.

Why does this resolve the impasse

Hylemorphism avoids both extremes of philosophy's oldest debate. It is not the total change of Heraclitus, where nothing remains. It is not the immobility of Parmenides, where nothing really changes. It is the third way: matter changes, but form guarantees real continuity, and it is this same reasoning that supports the concepts of act and power, the next piece of Aristotle's system.

Continue: Act and Potency, in Aristotle · What is Aristotle's Hexis · Heraclitus x Parmenides: does Being change or is it immobile?
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