Aristotle’s Rejection of the Coincidental Nature of Substantial Forms - Paper by Stephen Beach

EXCERPT:

Aristotle’s Rejection of the Coincidental Nature of Substantial Forms 

"In a recent lecture, contemporary philosopher Ed Feser commented, tongue in cheek, that, “...Whenever you have a new idea, read Aristotle, and find out if he already thought of it.” Interestingly, this is even true of the modern theory of evolution in some ways. Many tenets of this idea were already present in the world in which Aristotle lived. Some men of Aristotle’s time, too, claimed that everything in nature was just a simple arrangement of fundamental elements into shapes or numbers, others that chance and luck were the causes of helpful mutations that stuck around, and were passed on. Aristotle, though, saw nature too clearly as being “for something” to be just products of blind chance occurrences, and so he challenged the viewpoints of his day. The goal of the essay is to show that Aristotle held that the existence of the complex and ordered substantial forms in nature could not come about through coincidental occurrences and evolution because: (1) Everything that exists has an end inextricably part of its nature and therefore nothing is truly random, (2) because that end is a “felicitous” end and so well designed it is analogous to the production of a human craftsman, and (3) because chance causes do not have the consistent power to produce these meaningful ends."