Jeremy Skrzypek

The problem of regret is the problem of reconciling the perfect bliss of the blessed in heaven with their desire or wish that things had somehow gone better for the damned. Leibniz’s superessentialism, according to which every event that occurs in the life of a person is essential to that person, provides a unique and robust solution to this problem. But it also entails that those who are damned are essentially damned. What could possibly justify God’s decision to create such persons? In this paper, I argue that Leibniz’s larger metaphysical system has the resources to provide a unique and robust solution to this problem as well.

In this paper, I introduce a unique response to tragedy that I call “fatal resignation”, according to which one resigns oneself to the tragic events that occur in one’s life upon coming to believe that they could not have been otherwise. I argue that the most plausible metaphysical foundation for fatal resignation is a view called superessentialism, according to which every event that occurs in the life of a person is essential to that person. I argue, further, that, as a response to tragedy, superessentialism-supported fatal resignation is both plausible and virtuous.

In my 2024 article, “Epicureanism and Euthanasia”, I argued that, inasmuch as Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death successfully show that death is not and cannot be a harm to the person who dies, they also thereby show that death is not and cannot be a benefit to that person, even if she is experiencing intense and prolonged suffering and has little to no chance of recovery. If death is not and cannot be a benefit to a person who dies, even someone experiencing intense and prolonged suffering and for whom there is little to no chance of recovery, then any justification for ending that person’s life early on the basis that it provides some good or benefit for that person is fundamentally mistaken. We cannot justify such actions with reference to any good or benefit accrued to the person whose life is ended early. Not even the cessation of that person’s suffering can be a good or benefit for that person, since, upon her death, she is no longer there to receive or enjoy it. In his thoughtful and well-crafted reply, Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues raises two main objections to my argument. In my reply to his reply, I respond to each in turn.

Following in the hylomorphic tradition of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that all material substances are composed of matter and form. Like Aristotle, Aquinas also recognizes two different types of forms that material substances can be said to possess: substantial forms and accidental forms. Of which form or forms, then, are material substances composed? This paper explores two competing models of Aquinas’s ontology of material substances, which diverge on precisely this issue. According to what the author refers to as the “Standard Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter and substantial form. According to the “Expanded Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of its accidental forms. After outlining the main claims of each of the two competing models and considering two arguments in favor of the Standard Model, the author offers two arguments in favor of the Expanded Model. He argues that, given the way in which Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity in question three of the _Prima pars_, and the way in which he consistently describes the difference between an essence and a suppositum, or individual substance, throughout his works, there is good reason to believe that Aquinas thinks that the accidental forms of a material substance are included among its metaphysical parts.

One of the main targets of Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics is structural hylomorphism, a recent variant of hylomorphism espoused by authors such as Kit Fine, William Jaworski, and Kathrin Koslicki. Fr. Rooney raises at least three, and perhaps as many as five, different objections against structural hylomorphism in the book. My aim in this essay is twofold. First, I try to draw out some of the implicit premises and assumptions found within several of these objections in order to make them more perspicuous to those readers wishing to understand them better. Second, I offer a variety of replies on behalf of the structural hylomorphist to what I see as the three main objections against that sort of view. For each of the objections that I cover, I argue either that it raises no serious concerns for structural hylomorphism, or that there are ways that structural hylomorphists might navigate around these objections which Rooney has not considered, or that the main thrust of the objection targets Rooney’s preferred hylomorphic theory of material objects just as much as it targets structural hylomorphism.

Animalism and Thomistic hylomorphism share a lot of common ground. The primary disagreement between the two is Thomistic hylomorphism’s claim that every human animal possesses an immaterial part, a rational soul, which serves as the metaphysical ground for her identity over time. In this paper, I argue that Thomistic hylomorphism’s commitment to a non-reductionist, further fact theory of personal identity over time allows it to avoid two major worries for animalism: the problem of indeterminacy and the problem of fission. This leaves animalists with a kind of dilemma: either forego reductionism and reconceptualize the continuity of a human organism’s life in non-reductionist terms, in which case animalism turns out to be not very different at all from a kind of hylomorphism, or continue to conceptualize the continuity of a human organism’s life in reductionist terms, in which case Thomistic hylomorphism has the advantage over animalism in that it avoids two major worries for its closest competitor.

Superessentialism is the view that every event that occurs in the life of a person, everything that happens to him or her and every decision and action that he or she performs, is essential to that person, is constitutive of that person’s identity. According to superessentialism, it is metaphysically impossible for a person’s life to have gone any differently than it in fact did. In this paper, I argue that, despite its initial implausibility, superessentialism opens up new solutions to three well-known problems in the philosophy of religion: the problem of freedom and creation, the grounding problem for Molinism, and the problem of eternal separation. As a result, while superessentialism might strike many of us as implausible, it possesses an impressive amount of utility. And, for that reason, I think that it might be worth a second look.

Numerous concerns have been raised for Hume's positive account of personal identity, his bundle theory of the human person. Some of these concerns are pitched as the very concerns that Hume has in mind when he later backs off from his earlier conclusions in the Appendix. Others are pitched as standalone concerns. In this paper, I focus on the latter. Here I discuss three lingering concerns for his bundle theory of the human person, which I call The Problem of Reference, The Problem of Persistence, and The Problem of Individuation. I argue that, despite recent attempts by various authors to address or dissolve these concerns for Hume's account, Hume's bundle theory of the human person remains, in at least three different ways, either inconsistent with his larger philosophical system or incapable of preserving some of our most important attitudes, expectations, and practices concerning the identity of human persons.

This book introduces a novel hylomorphic theory of material objects, according to which material objects are understood as comprised or composed of both matter and activity, where activity plays the role of form. This theory, "hyloenergeism", better captures the dynamic nature of many of the objects of our experience, such as living organisms, than other leading varieties of contemporary hylomorphism. Hylomorphism is the theory according to which material objects are understood as comprised or composed of two fundamental parts, components, aspects, or principles: matter and form. Many contemporary hylomorphists endorse a version according to which the form of a material object is understood as a certain kind of complex relation or structure realized in its material parts. Others endorse a version according to which the form of a material object is understood as a certain kind of power or disposition continuously activated in the object or in its material parts. This book argues against structural and dispositional varieties of hylomorphism in favor of a third approach: hyloenergeism. Drawing on various aspects of traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and other contemporary occurrence-based theories of material objects, it argues that hyloenergeism has the resources to successfully avoid or resolve several major concerns for other competing hylomorphic views. A Dynamic Theory of Hylomorphism will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and medieval philosophy.

If Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death are successful, then they also successfully undermine a common justification for physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the termination of hopeless pregnancies that I call the ‘Mercy Intuition', according to which, by ending the life of a suffering loved one for whom there is little to no chance of recovery, one is relieving that person of her suffering, and thus providing a great benefit to her. For, if death is not a harm to the person who dies, then it cannot be a benefit to her either, even in cases of intense and prolonged suffering. Along these lines, in this paper, I defend the claim that death cannot provide a benefit to those who are suffering. I begin by highlighting the Epicurean foundations of the argument, focusing on three main Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death and their no-benefit analogues. I then move on to explore several important limitations of the argument, which make available a number of strategies for avoiding its conclusion. Along the way, I respond to each of these avoidance strategies. I conclude that even granting several of its limitations, the argument still poses a serious challenge to the Mercy Intuition.

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican priest, philosopher, theologian, saint, and doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, famous for synthesizing the thought of Aristotle and Christian doctrine. His most important and well-known work is his Summa Theologiae. Here we will be reading from Aquinas’s other summa, the Summa Contra Gentiles. We will be taking a look at some of the early chapters of Book I in which he discusses the relationship between faith and reason. According to Aquinas, there are two ways of coming to know truths about God: by reason and by faith through revelation. Aquinas thinks that both reason and faith are reliable and authoritative. He thinks that there are good reasons to expect that there would be truths of both sorts. And, finally, he thinks that, as a matter of principle, the truths of one can never really contradict the truths of the other.

It is often argued that certain metaphysical complications surrounding the phenomenon of monozygotic twinning force us to conclude that, prior to the point at which twinning is no longer possible, the zygote or early embryo cannot be considered an individual human organism. In this essay, I argue, on the contrary, that there are in fact several ways of making sense of monozygotic twinning that uphold the humanity of the original zygote, but also that there is no easy answer to what happens when the human zygote twins. All of the options available carry with them one or more surprising, alarming, or otherwise counterintuitive implications. All things considered, I conclude that the “budding option,” according to which the original human organism present before twinning carries on as one of the resulting embryos but not the other, is the most plausible explanation of what happens when a human zygote twins.

There are two competing models for how to understand Aquinas’s hylomorphic theory of material substances: the Simple Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter and substantial form, and the Expanded Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of their accidental forms. In this paper, I first explain the main differences between these two models and show how they situate Aquinas’s theory of material substances in two different places within the contemporary debate on concrete particulars, highlighting several advantages that Aquinas’s approach has over other varieties of substratum and bundle theory along the way. I then offer some reasons to think that the Expanded Model, as a theory of concrete particulars, is preferable. I argue that the Expanded Model avoids two major concerns for the Simple Model: the problem of extrinsicality, and the problem of too-many-possessors.

It is now standard to interpret Aquinas as recognizing two main types of material objects: substances and artifacts, where substances are those material objects that result from some particular substantial form inhering in prime matter, and artifacts are those material objects that result from some particular accidental form inhering in one or more material substances. There are two problems with this standard interpretation. First, there are passages in which Aquinas states that accidental forms should be understood not as inhering in substances from the outside, but as entering into their composition so as to be included among their metaphysical parts. Second, there are passages in which Aquinas states that it is impossible for any accidental form to be shared by two or more substances. This article considers what implications these two observations might have for how we understand the metaphysical structure of artifacts in Aquinas’s ontology.

Issues pertaining to sex and gender continue to be some of the most hotly debated topics of our time. While many of the most heated disputes occur at the level of politics and public policy, metaphysics, too, has a crucial role to play in these debates. In this essay, I explore several key metaphysical debates concerning sex and gender through the lenses of two important areas in contemporary metaphysics: the metaphysics of essence and the ontology of the human person. The goal here is not to advocate any particular position on these issues, but to show how the tools of contemporary metaphysics can help to offer a more comprehensive map of the conceptual terrain, indicating where major areas of agreement can be found and where the most important disagreements really lie.

In this paper, I propose a theory of living organisms that captures the insights of both traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and John Dupré's “biological processualism”. Like traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism, the proposed theory understands material objects to be comprised of both matter and form. Unlike contemporary structural varieties of hylomorphism, however, it does not understand the form of a material object to be a relation, configuration, or structure exhibited by its parts but an activity or process in which its matter is continuously engaged. Following Mark Steen, I call the proposed theory “Hyloenergeism”. As a version of hylomorphism, hyloenergeism better captures the inherent dynamism of living organisms than contemporary structural approaches. And it does so not by abandoning the substantialist paradigm, as Dupré's biological processualism does, but by reconceptualizing the nature of material substances as possessing a processual core. Hyloenergeism, then, paves a middle way for those looking for a substance view of living organisms sensitive to the concerns raised by contemporary processualist philosophers of biology.

Many philosophers think that free will requires alternative possibilities. Other philosophers deny this. There are plenty of philosophical arguments on both sides of this debate, but here I want to highlight various theological pressures that might push Christians into rejecting the principle of alternative possibilities. In this paper, I explore six cases that might push Christians in that direction: the case of divine foreknowledge, the case of prophecy, the case of the blessed in heaven, the case of Christ's human freedom, the case of Mary's fiat in light of her immaculate conception, and the case of prayers for the past. As I will argue, in each of these cases, given certain other standard theological commitments, it seems that Christians are pushed to admit that the agent in question does indeed act freely but also that he or she did not possess alternative possibilities at the moment of decision.

In this paper, I introduce a version of perdurantism called Priority Perdurantism, according to which perduring, four-dimensional objects are ontologically fundamental and the temporal parts of those objects are ontologically derivative, depending for their existence and their identity on the four-dimensional wholes of which they are parts. I argue that by switching the order of the priority relations this opens up new solutions to the too-many-thinkers problem and the personite problem – solutions that are more ontologically robust than standard maximality solutions. I then consider and respond to two initial objections to the view: that it no longer counts as a perdurantist theory and that it reintroduces the problem of temporary intrinsics. I conclude by offering two further advantages of priority perdurantism: that it is consistent with hunky time and with the existence of irreducibly temporally-extended actions, such as those pertaining to deliberative agency.

In Are We Bodies or Souls? Richard Swinburne presents an updated formulation and defense of his dualist theory of the human person. On this theory, human persons are compound substances, composed of both bodies and souls. The soul is the only essential component of the human person, however, and so each of us could, in principle, continue to exist without our bodies, composed of nothing more than our souls. As Swinburne himself points out, his theory of the human person shares many similarities with the hylomorphic theory of the human person espoused by Thomas Aquinas. Swinburne suggests at one point that the differences between the two theories are “almost entirely terminological,” pertaining chiefly to how each understands the term ‘substance’. In this essay, I aim to show that the differences between Swinburne’s Cartesian substance dualism and Thomistic hylomorphism are much more significant than that. I argue, moreover, that the distinctive claims of Thomistic hylomorphism allow it to successfully avoid some key concerns for Swinburne’s view.

Hylomorphism is the theory according to which the entities within a specified domain are best understood as composed of both matter and form. Contemporary discussions of hylomorphism have found philosophers revisiting classic points of contention concerning the theory’s scope, application, and utility, but it has also led philosophers to carefully reconsider how best to understand hylomorphism’s most basic claims. In this introduction, I begin by providing a brief overview of some of these main points of discussion in the contemporary literature on hylomorphism and some of the main hylomorphic views currently on offer. After that, I provide an overview of some of the main topics discussed in this special issue, offering a brief summary of each contribution.

The doctrine of the immaculate conception, which is a dogma binding on all Roman Catholics and also held by members of some other Christian denominations, holds that Mary the mother of Jesus Christ was conceived without the stain of original sin as a result of the redeeming effects of Christ’s later life, passion, death, and resurrection. In this paper I argue first that, even on an orthodox reading of this doctrine, the immaculate conception seems to result in a kind of causal time loop. I then consider several common philosophical objections to causal time loops, showing how each is either not a serious problem for causal time loops in general or is not a serious problem for the immaculate conception time loop in particular because of some particular features of that particular loop. The upshot of this discussion is that it shows that anyone who is committed to the dogma of the immaculate conception is also committed to the possibility, and, indeed, the actuality, of at least one causal time loop, but also that this is no reason to reject the dogma, since all of the major worries for causal time loops can be resolved in one way or another.

Following in the hylomorphic tradition of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that all material substances are composed of matter and form. Like Aristotle, Aquinas also recognizes two different types of forms that material substances can be said to possess: substantial forms and accidental forms. Of which form or forms, then, are material substances composed? This paper explores two competing models of Aquinas’s ontology of material substances, which diverge on precisely this issue. According to what the author refers to as the “Standard Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter and substantial form. According to the “Expanded Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of its accidental forms. After outlining the main claims of each of the two competing models and considering two arguments in favor of the Standard Model, the author offers two arguments in favor of the Expanded Model. He argues that, given the way in which Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity in question three of the Prima pars, and the way in which he consistently describes the difference between an essence and a suppositum, or individual substance, throughout his works, there is good reason to believe that Aquinas thinks that the accidental forms of a material substance are included among its metaphysical parts.

Animalism, the view that human persons are human animals in the most straightforward, non-derivative sense, is typically taken to conflict with the intuition that a human person would follow her functioning cerebrum were it to be transplanted into another living human body. Some animalists, however, have recently called into question the incompatibility between animalism and this “Transplant Intuition,” arguing that a human animal would be relocated with her transplanted cerebrum. In this paper, we consider the prospects for this cerebrum transplant-compatible variant of animalism, which we call “Transplanimalism.” After presenting its account of three related thought experiments, and outlining its key advantages over Standard Animalism, we raise two concerns for Transplanimalism. First, we argue that Transplanimalism, like other closest-continuer accounts of the human person, encounters difficulties with symmetrical fission cases. Second, we introduce a new thought experiment that pushes Transplanimalism into surprisingly counterintuitive results. As a result of these concerns, we conclude that, despite its attractiveness, animalists should not endorse Transplanimalism.

Of those who defend a Thomistic hylomorphic account of human persons, “survivalists” hold that the persistence of the human person’s rational soul between death and the resurrection is sufficient to maintain the persistence of the human person herself throughout that interim. According to survivalists, at death, and until the resurrection, a human person comes to be temporarily composed of, but not identical to, her rational soul. One of the major objections to survivalism is that it is committed to a rejection of a widely accepted mereological principle called the weak-supplementation principle, according to which any composite whole must, at any moment of its existence, possess more than one proper part. In this paper, I argue that by recognizing the existence of certain other metaphysical parts of a human person beyond her prime matter and her rational soul, hylomorphists can adhere to survivalism without violating the weak-supplementation principle.

Descartes famously states that God could have made any and all of the “eternal truths” that are now in place false. This has led scholars to attribute to Descartes’s God a radical sort of power: the power to do the logically impossible. While Descartes does claim that God could have made any of the eternal truths that are now in place false, I do not think that this commits him to the view that God could have made twice four equal to nine, or anything of that sort. In this paper I show how, by placing Descartes’s doctrine of the eternal truths in its proper historical context, a new and more charitable interpretation of that doctrine becomes available. On this interpretation, Descartes’s God could have made the eternal truths false by choosing not to create the eternal essences to which these truths refer.

Many contemporary proponents of hylomorphism endorse a version of hylomorphism according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of complex relation or structure. Structural approaches to form, however, seem not to capture form’s traditional role as the guarantor of diachronic identity, since more “dynamically complex” material objects, such as living organisms, seem to undergo, and survive, various structural changes over the course of their existence. As a result, some contemporary hylomorphists have looked to alternative, non-structural approaches to form. One of the leading non-structural approaches is the powers approach, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of power continuously activated in the object or in its material parts. In this paper, I begin by offering an overview and assessment of this powers approach to form. I argue that while the powers approach captures some crucial elements for understanding the nature of more dynamically complex material objects, when we press on the details of the view we find that it actually points to a related, but importantly distinct, third approach to understanding form, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of activity or process in which the material object or its parts are continuously engaged. I call this third approach “Hyloenergeism”. In the second half of the paper, I consider what such a view of material objects might look like and what its principal virtues might be.

Many contemporary proponents of hylomorphism, the view that at least some material objects are comprised of both matter and form, endorse a version of hylomorphism according to which the form of a material object is a certain complex relation or structure. In this paper, I introduce three sorts of concerns for this “structural” approach. First, I argue that, in countenancing an abundance of overlapping yet numerically distinct material objects, “structural hylomorphists” are committed to a certain sort of systematic causal overdetermination. Second, I argue that, because of its relatively thin conception of form, the view risks collapsing into some already well-entrenched metaphysical account of material objects. Finally, I argue that because the view emphasizes the more static structural features of composite material objects, structural hylomorphists seem unable to explain how it is that those objects might be said to persist over time through changes in such features.

According to Jeffrey Brower’s hylomorphic account of material substances, prime matter and substantial forms together compose material substances, and material substances and accidental forms together compose accidental unities. In a recent article, Andrew Bailey has argued that Brower’s account has the counter-intuitive implication that no human person is ever the primary possessor, the primary thinker, of her own thoughts. In this paper, I consider various ways in which Brower might reply to this objection. I first consider several “invariant strategies”, solutions that do not require any significant alteration to Brower’s account. I argue that these strategies are unsuccessful. I then introduce two ways of modifying Brower’s hylomorphic account of material substances so as to avoid Bailey’s objection. I argue that these “variant strategies” are successful, but they require that Brower significantly alter one or more of the main features of his account.