hylozoism (from Greek hyle, ‘matter’, and zoe, ‘life’), the doctrine that matter is intrinsically alive, or that all bodies, from the world as a whole down to the smallest corpuscle, have some degree or some kind of life. It differs from panpsychism though the distinction is sometimes blurred – in upholding the universal presence of life per se, rather than of soul or of psychic attributes. Inasmuch as it may also hold that there are no living entities not constituted of matter, hylozoism is often criticized by theistic philosophers as a form of atheism. The term was introduced polemically by Ralph Cudworth, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist, to help define a position that is significantly in contrast to soul–body dualism (Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes), reductive materialism (Democritus, Hobbes), and Aristotelian hylomorphism. So understood, hylozoism had many advocates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among both scientists and naturalistically minded philosophers. In the twentieth century, the term has come to be used, rather unhelpfully, to characterize the animistic and naive-vitalist views of the early Greek philosophers, especially Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Empedocles – who could hardly count as hylozoists in Cudworth’s sophisticated sense. See also ARTIFICIAL LIFE, CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS , HYLOMORPHISM , PANPSYCHIS. A.P.D.M.