Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics: The Inevitability of Hylomorphism by Rev. Dr. James Dominic Rooney

A persistent philosophical problem concern how things can be the same even when they change their parts over time. For example, your body will replace most of its cells over the course of its life. In a few years, all of your material parts could be new. Will you be the same person then as you are today? One classical answer explains that you are one thing because you have a structure, a “form,” that makes all those cells in your body parts of you. In this book, Rev. Dr. Rooney argues that this answer makes sense, is plausible in the light of contemporary science, and is (in fact) the only consistent way to explain the unity of material objects. It is therefore no coincidence that — as he shows — both Confucians like Zhu Xi and Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas came, independently, to the same conclusions about this problem.

Chinese Translation by :

WU Pui Yi (Department of English Language and Literature)

Extracted from <Arts Fanfare> Issue No. 11