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To continue our discussion on the ways form and matter might be understood to apply to philosophical problems, there is another way you can see these abstract, technical theories undergird pop or folk philosophies of nature. One recent example is the dialogue between Prager and Biddle. (If you don't know who these people are, or are uninterested in them, the point I'm making isn't really about them. If you want to debate about different aspects of their interaction, please ignore this post.) There is something in political discourse called "horseshoe theory," according to which different versions are claiming different, mostly spurious, things, but there is a plausible version that says often times what are perceived as fundamentally opposing viewpoints actually share some more fundamental premises, and that these premises are what give rise to and motivate the opposition in the first place, which upon further inspection, turns out to be surface. An example from OPAR (146) that people might be familiar with is that subjectivism is ultimately intrinsicism and intrinsicism is ultimately subjectivism. An historical example is Nazi and Communists in Weimar Germany. There are various reasons to why this might be, but not important here. Next, we must understand the Prager Argument. Prager's method is to proceed as follows (all actual Prager-quotes at various times which I have done my best to reconstruct into a syllogism): If you're an atheist, you're a materialist. If we are only matter, I am the product, and everything I do is the product, of [the matter.] But where am I in this equation? That's just insane! Therefore god exists. Biddle's unfortunate response was to not reply that there are material and formal causes, but there is matter and consciousness (and that's not something even that materialists necessarily have to deny), and to juxtapose those two as "separate things," which can lead one to assume he is endorsing (or that Ayn Rand endorsed) substance dualism. Later Prager makes an intelligent design-type argument appealing to "complexity." He is amazed that animals urinate. He is amazed about the universe and life and the planets. How can you not believe in God? Do you think this all just happens randomly? No of course not, that's inconceivable. This is his primary "evidence" (as opposed to proof.) This type of argument is ancient, but most influentially the watchmaker analogy of William Paley is employed to argue that design implies a designer. So we have two primary means of moving forward: materialism bad, intelligent design good. But notice the problem here. In this whole scheme of things, in both materialism and theistic design-type arguments, there is the underlying notion that whatever whole were talking about is always emerging just from the parts. The relationship between the parts and whole is that the parts give rise to the whole (reductionism) particularly their position and motion (mechanism.) Take this paradigmatic quote from Carl Sagan, a noted atheist and materialist: "I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan." This is not very different from the watchmaker analogy of Paley, who was trying to invoke God as the cause of the universe on the basis of the complexity of the beings arranged therein. If you were to stumble upon a watch in the forest, you would have to say oh clearly there's a watchmaker, look at this complex assembly of parts into a functioning system. The main difference between Sagan and Paley is who is whether there is a conscious being that is a watchmaker, or is the watch assembled "randomly" (in Prager's words), thus obviously the clear deduction is theism. But in both cases, from the standpoint of Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, as we were discussing at the beginning of this thread, the notion of an artifact is there. For Paley/Prager, the world to include the "I" that is Prager himself, is an Aristotelian artifact assembled by God, and to Sagan it is not (perhaps operating through the "blind watchmaker" of evolution.) For Descartes, similarly, the laws imparting motion to the corpuscles were provided by Divine providence. The Paley-style appeal to complexity and intelligent design is a theistic reductionistic mechanism, but a reductionistic mechanism nonetheless, with the main point that nature is viewed as an artifact. Both the materialist and mechanistic theist share a commitment to concerning natural substances. All natural substances are mechanical things whose parts ultimately explain the whole. The objection of the theist is not any of these things, but that "randomness" is too inadequate to explain the matter in motion. But the Aristotelian would not think this way, and Aristotelian hylemorphic theists do not endorse these kinds of arguments for theism. Under this type of view, there is a lot to say, and a lot more than just in this post, but the bottom line is the distinction between an artifact and a substance. An artifact has "accidental form," whereas a genuine natural substance like a bacterium, or a giraffe, or a person has "substantial form" and the latter is the principle of unity. The substantial form actualizes the whole, including each part of the whole, and so explains the unity of the substance. Aristotle starts using these concepts to explain change, but in Physics 1.7-8 he employs the concepts of form and matter also in explaining how we are able to distinguish a mere aggregates of parts from a unified whole, like living organisms.

That's awesome. I'd like to think my reference to the other stink juice inspired it.