Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30
The persistence of a philosophical or scientific term does not guarantee the stability of the concept it denotes. Throughout the history of ideas, words have often remained unchanged while their meanings, explanatory functions, and theoretical contexts have undergone profound transformation.
Bacon’s own treatment of Form illustrates this phenomenon. Rejecting the classical conception of Forms as Platonic archetypes or Aristotelian intrinsic causes, he redefined Forma as the law governing a body’s operation or transformation in nature. This redefinition served his empirical program, yet the term itself remained inseparably associated with its earlier metaphysical heritage. Bacon’s new meaning therefore never entirely displaced the old one.
The history of dialectic exhibits a similar pattern. Originally denoting, in Aristotle and the scholastic tradition, a method of logical inquiry proceeding from accepted premises, the term was transformed by Hegel into a principle of historical and conceptual development. Later philosophers—including Adorno, Jameson, and Žižek—introduced further reinterpretations, producing a succession of meanings increasingly removed from both Hegel’s own conception and the term’s classical origin. The continuity of terminology thus concealed a gradual transformation of the underlying concept.
Comparable developments occur in the natural sciences. The concept of mass, for example, has undergone repeated reinterpretation. For Newton it denoted the quantity of matter and determined a body’s inertial and gravitational properties. Einstein fundamentally altered its relation to energy and motion, while contemporary particle physics explains the origin of the rest masses of elementary particles through their interaction with the Higgs field. Although the word mass has remained unchanged, the theoretical content associated with it has been successively redefined as physics itself has advanced.
These examples illustrate a general methodological principle: conceptual continuity cannot be inferred from linguistic continuity. Terms often survive while the concepts they denote undergo gradual transformation, sometimes to the point that the later concept is no longer equivalent to the earlier one. Historical interpretation therefore requires attention not merely to terminology but also to the evolving theoretical framework within which that terminology acquires its meaning.
Hossein Jorjani 