Hah. My first read was that this way of looking at the world sounds object-oriented (an instance of a class being state encapsulated with function). Just goes to show how quickly any philosophy can lead to a schism ;)
Yes: the class is the form; the data values are the matter. A superclass is a genus and a subclass is a species. I have long suspected that the creators of Simula had a grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics.
It is true that particular interpretations of Aristotle have led to the construction of our modern world, and that the text is constantly in tension with the material it is grounded in, and vica versa--like Heidegger's notion of World and Earth in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (a great introduction to Heidegger, if you're curious).
