Can Accidents Alone Generate Substantial Forms? Twists and Turns of a Late Medieval Debate

Abstract

This paper investigates the late medieval controversy over the causal role of substantial forms in the generation of new substances. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when there were two basic positions in this debate (section II), an original position was defended by Walter Burley and Peter Auriol, according to which accidents alone—by their own power—can generate substantial forms (section III). The paper presents how this view was received by the next generation of philosophers, i.e., around 1350 (section IV), and how, even though some of the initial theoretical motivations for this view were quickly abandoned, the view was still defended by several philosophers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (section V). It is finally shown that this theory, still discussed by Suárez and early modern scholastics, and despite being generally rejected, contributed in its own way to the evolution of hylomorphism in the late Middle Ages and, to a certain extent, its gradual decline (section VI).