ABSTRACT
Form is one of the most difficult and provocative ideas in the philosophic repertoire. In one sense it is extremely simple; in another, complex beyond comparison. It had a fascinating career in philosophy, where it took its bow, but it has been enriched and entangled during its subcareers in the multitude of arts and sciences and even in the perception, purposive activity, and planning of ordinary life. Aristotle provides a quite different career for form. Some notion of form is inescapable—Plato’s insights into the many disciplines and their structures are not to be gainsaid—but they add up in a different way in Aristotle’s philosophy. Form in Aristotle has thus, while remaining bound to matter, moved from being simply an organization or a structure to being a culminating design, achieved or maintained, in a world of continuity and repetition. The Platonic view of form is thus reversed.
