A Crazy Idea: Ibn Sīnā on Hylomorphism, the Elements, Mixture and Evolutionary Processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Ibn Sīnā (c. 973‐1037), the Avicenna of Latin fame, developed a unique theory of the elements and their status in mixtures that severely challenged the views of earlier natural philosophers and in its turn was severely challenged by later Latin Schoolmen in the West. At its core, Ibn Sīnā argues that the elemental forms remain actual, not merely potential, in mixtures. His elemental theory profoundly affected his own understanding of hylomorphic composition, has ramifications on his theory of essentialism and even limits empirical methods to investigating only the material conditions and not the essences of things. In this study, I present the background to Ibn Sīnā's new theory of the elements and mixtures together with its implications for hylomorphism, Avicennan essentialism and the limitations on empirical investigation. I conclude with a ‘crazy idea.’ The idea is that Ibn Sīnā's brand of hylomorphism and essentialism can accommodate the Theory of Evolution in ways that other accounts of essentialism have trouble doing. Specifically, I conclude with three critiques of essentialism found among contemporary philosophers of biology and argue that Ibn Sīnā provides the resources to handle these critiques in relatively natural ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".