On the reciprocal translatability of the hylomorphic and instrumentalist descriptions of the living being

Recent scholarship seems to have lost interest in the issue of a possible phase of the philosophical development of Aristotle in which he had not developed his mature hylomorphism and entertained another theory, which Nuyens called “instrumentalism”. According to this version of Aristotle’s psychology, the soul would not be the form of the organic body, but an independent substance that uses the body in the same fashion in which a person uses an instrument. According to recent ways of facing the problem raised by Nuyens, the compatibility of the hylomorphic and instrumentalist languages would be secured by taking the cases of instrumentalist language as metaphorical usages of language. I will try to show that there is no need to presume that Aristotle indulged in such a metaphorical usage of language in his scientific treatises: I will try to show that the hylomorphic and the instrumentalist theory are one and the same theory, since the instrumentalist version and the hylomorphic version are two ways of describing the same theory: they are two descriptions that are equivalent, since they can be converted into each other.