Form Theories: My New Book
I have a brand new book! It’s titled “Form Theories: From Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty.” I have the pdf available here on my blog’s bookstore.
PDF download of my book. 217 pages, written by Shea Stevens.
A journey through Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Goethe, Franz Brentano, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Goldstein, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on matter and form, essence and existence, emergent wholeness, and perception. A history of Aristotelian, gestalt, and phenomenological theories of wholeness.
Paperback and Kindle versions are available on Amazon
Paperback copies are printed and shipped by Amazon for 9.99 USD. It is also available to buy in the Kindle store, or here on this website in PDF format, for 5.99 USD.
I wrote it as someone in the psychotherapy field with an interest in philosophy, and who wants to bridge the divide between the two fields. I also wrote it because of a desire to trace the history of the concept of “gestalt” or the idea of a “form.” I wrote this for my own personal research, and I hope others might find it useful, whether you are interested in the history of hylomorphism, emergentism, phenomenology, or gestalt psychology.
I’ll tell you a little bit about the thinkers I chose for my book in this post, but you’ll have to buy it to get all the details.
Chapter 1: We start with a brisk look at the hylomorphism of Aristotle, according to the Metaphysics and De Anima primarily, acknowledging the confusion and unanswered questions his works raise, and the depth of the issues he tackled which are still relevant today.
Chapter 2: We look at the use of Aristotle’s concepts by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aquinas, and William of Ockham, including a little-known work of Ockham’s which reveals his own perspective on hylomorphism.
Chapter 3: Goethe and Franz Brentano. Goethe was interested in “morphology,” the shifting of biological forms, themes of holism, and questions of causality. He was influential on the thought of many German thinkers, one of whom was Kurt Goldstein who we look at in Chapter 5. After Goethe we look at the legacy of Franz Brentano, whose school of thought birthed both the phenomenologists and also the gestalt theorists. Brentano, a Thomist, also continues the Aristotelian legacy.
Chapter 4: I look at Max Wertheimer, the founder of gestalt theory who was a student of Stumpf (Brentano’s disciple), and whose philosophical writings are not as well-known and whose theory, while ultimately unsuccessful, was decidedly influential on Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty, as I demonstrate in chapters 5 and 6.
Chapters 5 and 6: In the last two chapters of the book, I show the strong parallels between Goldstein’s book “The Organism” and Merleau-Ponty’s first book, “The Structure of Behavior.” It is known that Merleau-Ponty was influenced by the gestalt psychology, and in particular by Goldstein’s developments of gestalt ideas which he applied to organismic wholeness. The gestalt concept of a “structured form” is a thread of connection between the Aristotelian beginnings and through Germany into the work of Merleau-Ponty, who raises the concept of gestalt, or “form” as the key to his thesis in his book. And this work of his is the most explicit (up there with Alexander of Aphrodisias) of all these works in discussing forms in a way that aligns with current concept of emergentism, or emergent levels/properties. Merleau-Ponty’s first work is an underrated presentation of many themes academics are interested in articulating today: the balance of objectivity and subjectivity and the descriptive usefulness of hylomorphic terms to describe the emergent levels or structures of our world. I find this lesser-known work of his to be a full-circle exploration of the same topics Aristotle explored in his Metaphysics and De anima; a hierarchy of forms and substrate, what causes the wholeness we perceive in the world, and the role of the soul/mind.
In the concluding remarks, and throughout the book, I also raise the topic of emergentism and share my thoughts and questions about how we use language of “top-down” and “bottom-up” to convey ideas about causality. I think there are many unanswered questions about how to best use the language of emergent phenomena to encapsulate the concepts these thinkers were trying to untangle in their work.