This is a start, but I think it doesn’t do hylomorphism justice. Many of us (as I was, before I overcame the inculcated bias) suffer from a kind of unsophisticated atomism. This is what happens in the vacuum of intellectual discipline and formation characteristic of our education systems. It is important to distinguish between physical models and metaphysical theory. Now, metaphysics doesn’t ignore physical models, but it does view physical models through the lens of physical methodology so that they are interpreted in a sound and responsible way. A naive reading of physical theory can easily lead to a mechanistic metaphysics, because while the physical sciences are not inherently mechanistic, the tradition does insinuate mechanism. In a mechanistic metaphysics, the artifact becomes the paradigmatic object, and pretty soon, reality becomes nothing but a shifting aggregate of atoms. Gone is the world of human beings, trees, cats, and dogs. Gone is the very intelligibility of the world and the very powers of reason that sought to grasp it. To say that mechanism, and especially materialism, doesn’t even get off the ground is beating a dead horse at this point (the obstinate still hanging on have doubled down to the point of embracing the patent absurdity of eliminativism, for example).<p>The renewed interest in hylomorphism (or hylomorphic dualism) is it seems related to the perhaps relatively modest, but certainly discernible resurgence of interest in Aristotlean metaphysics in the last decade or two. Speaking from experience, it is not easy to break mechanistic habits of mind, but it is possible. One way out, I find, is to begin with the realization that even if we accept a naive atomism, the atom itself is a thing, and to be a thing is to be an instantiated form. For if you truly have many atoms, as an atomist believes, then you have a plurality of things that are of like kind (the “matter” in hylomorphism is, first and foremost, <i>prime matter</i>, not something determinate as a kind of stuff, which itself requires form to be a kind of stuff; form is what causes a thing to be <i>what</i> it is). And if you happen to fall into the reductive mechanistic trap, you should recall that the further you go down that road, the more you undermine the very capacity of reason to know reality, the less you can explain the very possibility of reason, and the less your position holds weight as a result. We do not begin with atoms, but the world we experience everyday, and it is within that world that we perform scientific investigations and reason philosophically. Get something wrong, draw the wrong conclusion, and you can face a retorsion argument, a paradox of the sort skepticism generally faces (“there is no truth!” type of stuff).<p>I recommend some of Edward Feser’s books on the subject. “The Last Superstition” is a light read in that respect, but “Scholastic Metaphysics” is more of a proper manual.