Matter
idea · 4 works · 6 mentions · 18 anchored passages
Hyle · matter · الهيولى · abstracted in matter · al-hayūlá · al-māddah · first principles · hayūlānī · in matter · the Matter of Hermogenes
in the texts
Adversus Hermogenem
Hermogenes' proposed eternal, uncreated substance out of which God is said to have made the world.
Further, if good was made neither out of Matter — because it was not in it, as in something evil — nor out of God, because nothing could be made out of God, as Hermogenes defines, then good is found to have been made out of nothing — as made out of no thing, as neither out of Matter nor out of God.
For even if it be said that, though from the occasion of Matter, yet by his own choice he brought forth good things, as though he had found the good of Matter — although this too is shameful — certainly, since out of the same Matter he brings forth evil things as well, in bringing forth these too, surely not by his own choice, he serves Matter, having nothing else to do than to bring forth out of …
Come now, let us believe Matter to be evil and worst — and that, of course, by nature, just as we believe God to be good and best, likewise by nature.
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
Hayūlá, both the mark of corruptibility used to prove the soul immortal and the condition from which intellect abstracts its objects.
For if one man reflects that what is receptive of corruption must be material (*hayūlānī*), and reflects along with this that the soul is not material, he knows at once that the soul does not (3) die;
As for the intellect (*ʻaql*), it apprehends things stripped bare of matter (*hayūlā*), and renders what is material immaterial by abstracting it from its individuating marks — as with Suqrāṭ and Aflāṭūn, whom it abstracts and apprehends under the form of humanity [25] stripped of matter.
the particulars universal things (1), stripped of matters, firmly rooted in the essence of the soul and acquired by it.
Stromata
The concept of unformed matter as a philosophical first principle, discussed and qualified by reference to Plato's term 'not-being'.
"Yes," they say, "but the philosophers lay down matter among the first principles — both the Stoics and Plato and Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic too — and not one principle.
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
Materiality, the principle by which the theoretical sciences are divided fourfold and by which the order of the books ascends from natural things to what is after nature.
And the last of the books are those on the matters abstracted in matter, since the natural things are sensible to us, and nearer to us, and we are more familiar with them and know them better, and from them we can ascend to what is after them.
He began among them with the books that are of those possessing matter, and these are of the natural matters.
and of the things that are not in matter, some are abstracted in matter, their existence being in the imagination (wahm) with no existence for them from outside, and some are not abstracted from matter but have an existence in their own essence, outside the imagination.