Giles of Rome on the Intensification of Forms

On the question of the intensio/remissio formarum, Giles, while sharing Thomas Aquinas’s view’s main tenets, develops a very different theory - in fact, a theory that is unique, and deeply “aegidian”: the increase or decrease does not take place in the essence of a qualitative form, but only in its esse, in function of the disposition of the subject that receives this form. Giles’s position, however, may be threatened by a risk of infinite regress in the conditions that explain the receptivity of a subject. He successfully addresses this issue, and, within the framework of Aristotelian physics, offers a very original response: qualitative changes in bodies are ultimately based, via condensation and rarefaction, on the spatial positions of their material parts.