What is Incorporeal?
Incorporeality is “the state or quality of being insubstantial or without a body; immateriality; incorporeality.” A word in Greek that means “not made of matter; not having a material existence” is “incorporeal.” In many religions, souls, spirits, and God don’t have bodies. This includes the major denominations and schools of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In ancient thought, any “thin” matter, like air, aether, fire, or light, was thought to be “invisible.” The ancient Greeks thought air, as opposed to solid earth, was a kind of thing because it isn’t as hard to move. The ancient Persians thought fire was a kind of thing because every soul was said to be made from it. In modern philosophy, the distinction between the incorporeal and the immaterial isn’t always kept. If a body isn’t made of matter, it’s called “incorporeal.” Problem of universals: In the problem of universals, universals can be taken apart from any specific embodiment in one sense, but in another sense, they seem to be there. In contrast to Plato’s world of Forms, Aristotle gave a hylomorphic account of abstraction, which is how it works. When Aristotle talked about the body, he used the Greek words soma, which means “body” (matter, literally “wood”). The idea that a causally effective intangible body is even coherent requires the belief that something can have an effect on something that’s real even though it doesn’t actually exist at the point of effect. In this case, the light that hits the ball makes the ball visible. A ball can directly affect another one by coming into direct contact with the other one. A field of influence or immaterial body could not do these things because they don’t have a physical body to do them with. Following Newton, it became common to accept action at a distance as a simple fact and not think about the philosophical issues that come with it.