What is "incorporeality"

Incorporeality \In`cor*po`re*al"i*ty\, n. The state or quality of being incorporeal or bodiless; immateriality; incorporealism.
--G. Eliot.

n. The state or characteristic of being incorporeal.

n. the quality of not being physical; not consisting of matter [syn: immateriality] [ant: materiality, materiality]

Incorporeal or uncarnate means without a physical body, presence or form. It is often used in reference to souls, spirits, and God in many religions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In ancient philosophy, any attenuated "thin" matter such as air, ether, fire or light was considered incorporeal. The ancient Greeks believed air, as opposed to solid earth, to be incorporeal, in so far as it is less resistant to movement; and the ancient Persians believed fire to be incorporeal in that every soul was said to be produced from it. In modern philosophy, a distinction between the incorporeal and immaterial is not necessarily maintained: a body is described as incorporeal if it is not made out of matter.

In the problem of universals, universals are separable from any particular embodiment in one sense, while in another, they seem inherent nonetheless. Aristotle offered a hylomorphic account of abstraction in contrast to Plato's world of Forms. Aristotle used the Greek terms soma (body) and hyle (matter, literally "wood").

The notion that a causally effective incorporeal body is even coherent requires the belief that something can affect what's material, without physically existing at the point of effect. A ball can directly affect another ball by coming in direct contact with it, and is visible because it reflects the light that directly reaches it. An incorporeal field of influence, or immaterial body could not perform these functions because they have no physical construction with which to perform these functions. Following Newton, it became customary to accept action at a distance as brute fact, and to overlook the philosophical problems involved in so doing: