homoeomerous (from Greek homoiomeres, ‘of like parts’), having parts, no matter how small, that share the constitutive properties of the whole. The derivative abstract noun is ‘homoeomery’. The Greek forms of the adjective and of its corresponding privative ‘anhomoeomerous’ are used by Aristotle to distinguish between (a) nonuniform parts of living things, e.g., limbs and organs, and (b) biological stuffs, e.g., blood, bone, sap. In spite of being composed of the four elements, each of the biological stuffs, when taken individually and without admixtures, is through-and-through F, where F represents the cluster of the constitutive properties of that stuff. Thus, if a certain physical volume qualifies as blood, all its mathematically possible subvolumes, regardless of size, also qualify as blood. Blood is thus homoeomerous. By contrast, a face or a stomach or a leaf are anhomoeomerous: the parts of a face are not a face, etc. In Aristotle’s system, the homoeomery of the biological stuffs is tied to his doctrine of the infinite divisibility of matter. The distinction is prefigured in Plato (Protagoras 329d).
The term ‘homoeomerous’ is stricter in its application than the ordinary terms ‘homogeneous’ and ‘uniform’. For we may speak of a homogeneous entity even if the properties at issue are identically present only in samples that fall above a certain size: the color of the sea can be homogeneously or uniformly blue; but it is not homoeomerously blue.
The adjective homoiomeres, -es, and the noun homoiomereia also occur – probably tendentiously, under the influence of Aristotle’s usage – in our ancient sources for a pre-Aristotelian philosopher, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, with reference to the constituent ‘things’ (chremata) involved in the latter’s scheme of universal mixture. Moreover, the concept of homoeomery has played a significant role outside ancient Greek philosophy, notably in twentieth-century accounts of the contrast between mass terms and count terms or sortals.
See also ANAXAGORAS , ARISTOTLE , COUNT NOUN , SORTAL PREDICAT. A.P.D.M.
