Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Hylozoism
Summary
Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which all matter is alive or animated, either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the world-soul (anima mundi). The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity. The word is a 17th-century term formed from the Greek words ὕλη (hyle: "wood, matter") and ζωή (zoē: "life"), which was coined by the English Platonist philosopher Ralph Cudworth in 1678.
Ancient Greek philosophy
Hylozoism in Western philosophy can be traced back to ancient Greece. The Milesian philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, can be described as hylozoists. Philosopher David Skrbina states that hylozoism was implicit in early Greek philosophy, and was not a doctrine that was typically challenged. "For the Milesians, matter (hyle) possessed life (zoe) as an essential quality. Something like hylozoism was simply accepted as a brute condition of reality." Though hylozoism was implicit in early Greek thought, the philosopher Heraclitus specifically used the term zoe, making him explicitly hylozoist. The hylozoism of the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales and Heraclitus influenced later Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
Though hylozoism was common in ancient Greek thought, the term had not been coined yet. In modern literature, hylozoism has tended to carry a negative connotation, and labeling a Greek philosopher as a hylozoist might be a vague dispargement of their thought.
Renaissance philosophy
During the Renaissance period in Western Europe, humanist scholars and philosophers such as Bernardino Telesio, Paracelsus, Cardanus, and Giordano Bruno revived the doctrine of hylozoism. The latter, for example, held a form of Christian pantheism wherein God is conceived as the source, cause, medium, and end of all things, and therefore all things are participatory in the ongoing Godhead.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.