Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2020
One of Aristotle’s major contributions to natural science was his development of an idea that he called hulê’, which we translate into English as ‘matter’. The notion of matter seems quite ordinary to us today, but Aristotle’s idea was new at the time. The word hulê’ originally meant forest, brushwood, or cut wood and, aside from a single occurrence in Plato’s Philebus (54c), Aristotle is the first (extant) author to use the term in a general account of things in the natural world. Our notion of matter is a descendant of his, but we should be careful not to assume that he thought of it the way we do today.
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