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I’m testing submitting a post via my phone, and thought I may as well paste something I’ve been reading, which has idealism and realism far closer than they seem to be in modern philosophy (to me anyway);
.....Aristotle’s exposition of generation brings together the concept of potential with his metaphysical realism. As discussed above, in Aristotelian realism, formal properties are within the object: Sphericality is in the sphere.
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As for how spheri-cality comes to be in the sphere, Aristotle answers using the concept of potential, and here we discover his explanation of generation. Matter, Aristotle argues, is not atoms or particles but pure potential.
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Generation occurs when form manifests in matter, moving material potential from non-being (or not-yet-something) into be-ing (something).
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We might think of the form-matter relationship like the rela-tionship between fabric and a solid object. Fabric is amorphous, capable of taking on any number of shapes. Were we to wrap fabric around a ball, the fabric would become spherical. But spherically would not belong to the fabric per se; it would belong to the ball that communicates sphericality to the fabric. In the same way, matter, as potential or non-being, is without properties of its own, but it takes on properties when form enters it. The entrance of form into matter causes matter to become a concrete something—a rock, a plant, a dog, a human—and the stages through which matter moves as it becomes something is what we call generation
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Neither Basil nor Gregory argue that matter does not exist; their case is that matter, as a substratum of potential, has no properties of its own. It is
some-thing only because form is in it. To remove every property is to be left with nothing but the potential to be a thing. What sits in the crosshairs is not matter, but pre-existent matter (i.e., matter that exists prior to receiving form). The case against pre-existent matter reveals a Cappadocian commitment to hy-lomorphic metaphysics of the kind we find in Athanasius. Unlike some brands of Platonism, which grant to both matter and form independence existence, the Cap-padocians see matter and form as bilaterally dependent. And lest anyone suspect the dependence is unilateral—matter upon form, not vice versa—Gregory is clear that forms are just thoughts (logoi ) or concepts (noē mata ) in God’s mind apart from material instantiation.
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Likewise, Basil describes the generation of divine concepts as God’s first act toward creating,
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but he is also clear that these divine concepts have no concrete existence apart from matter. It is the combining of form and mat-ter that produces a being.
https://www.academia.edu/41586437/The_M ... =swp_share