Aristotle metaphysics book 7-8.
What is substance?
The history of philosophy tells us the position of numerous philosophers prior to him, and the beliefs they have about substance. Aristotles details where the others go wrong.
First philosophy, the philosophy of things at their most fundamental, the study of being qua beings. The subject matter is being insofar as it is.
Primary and secondary substances, primary comes first. They are the fundamental objects of Aristotle’s ontology. Secondary substances have a direct relation to some primary substance.
Aristotle thinks these are essence, universal, genus.
Essence simple defined is a definition, the human’s essence being rational animal.
Universals extend to non-substance things.
The genus is the sort of thing that makes it so that things can have an essence.
The subject is that on which substance predicated. The compound of matter and form. That of which a substance is predicated.
The presocratics had an idea about substance. Most of them, except parmenides were material monists. These means that everything comes from a single physical element.
Substance is single and eternal for Parmenides.
The sophists began talking about language, thinking that man is the measure of all things. There is no fixed substance beyond appearance to the sophists. They have a general skepticism of being, and any objective substance, and blurred the line between essential and universal. Treating much as linguistic and social constructs.
The atomistic view is a response to the presocratics and the sophists. Everything is an invisible basic unit, and their different arrangements. Atoms is the combination of matter and void, but they lack the concept of form as in Aristotle. This fails to explain why the being takes its specific shape.
Plato proposed radical idealism between two levels of reality, the eternal forms, and the world of sensibles – which is imperfect shadows of the real forms. Substance is the universal form that the matter at hand reflects.
So what substance be?
Matter itself cannot be substance according to aristotle. Matter is only the possibility of substance. Matter alone cannot explain a things identity.
If the genus is substance, we have something that is too broad, so that we cannot even have a thing in front of us. There needs to be an individual. The genus lacks this as it only classifies things. If genus alone was substance it would lack definition.
Forms cannot exist seperate from the thing that actually takes on that form. Substance need to be an individual being, but these are pure universals, how can they then be substance? For aristotle, sensibles are easier to define as substances, whilst objects of mathematics a bit difficult.
Hyle and Morphe, hylomorphism. It allows him to avoid the pitfalls of all the prior approaches.
When Aristotle speaks of a bronze sphere, it has to have both those things to be that. So Aristotle introduces matter – the potentiality of an object. The form is prior to the matter, more real than the matter, but in practice in says this because we cannot conceptualise something without its form. You cannot picture something without a form as something.
Substance must be able to exist independently, it is not in a thing. Can matter exist without being predicated of anything else? For Aristotle no.
The substance must have a quiddity, you must be able to point at it as a particular object. Matter is not a this. The substance must always have a form.
Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent logical necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.
Fallcy of misplaced concreteness. We treat a point mass in mathematics as ultimate reality, when in fact they are high level abstractions. The solution is to view reality as process-like, a constant becoming and perishing.
In descartes philosophy there is no reason why there should not be a onesubstance owlrd, only corporeal, or a one substance world, only mental.
Conceivingreality as isolated substances with inherent properties leads to incoherene.
Whitehead makes a fundamental shift from being to becoming. Creativity is not one concept among many, but the core principle that governs all. The ontological foundaiton of the universe. The mode of existence of all things. The life history of every actual entity. The source of novelty. The mission of philosophy itself.
Being → becoming from thing → thining.
A thing is a noun denoting a self-contained enduring substances. This is a kind of illusion according to Whitehead. Thinging is a process describing a dynamic ongoing activity.
Whitehead speaks of the inadequacy of language. Being should be understood as a totality, or attempted to be such, and which language is incapable to express due to not really working with abstractions in a good way. Every facet of experience has to be in this totality. The project of speculative philosophy is to develop concepts that can explain literally everything due to their broadness. He explains why there needs to be a redesigning of language.
In attempting to presuppose a first principle, literal langugage cannot state facts of reality as they are, due to being eliptical in nature. One must tune the instrument of philosophy to reality, but philosophy is tuned to not-that Ig.
Makes a point against the tradition of metaphysics, because it constantly only uses its own language which is quite old. It has a false sense of accuracy and obviousness which can lead to certain first principles as having appearance of being true when in fact there are multiple possibilities of what it could mean.
Whitehead defines religion as the trasnlation of general ideas into particular. Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. He is not talking about institutional religion but of the fundamental insight of universal being understood particularly by oneself.
The ethical dimension is that religious consciousness expands somehow.
Science deals with the harmony and percepta, whilst religion deals with the harmony of thought and feelings. Both of them seek the same ideal which is harmony. Philosophy can make them coherent. Pure emotional religion for him becomes fanatic, superstitious and narrowsighted. But we cannot have a pure psychological approach to religion either, because then we are only interpreting history according to the present. Philosophy should find religion and refashion it. Religion can supply the mass of experience so that philosophy may be better.
Evil is the incompleteness of the world, and goodness is the continuation of the development it. God is both the primordial ordering of the world but also the consequent thing that feels the world.
The categoreal scheme. He does not want to talk about aristotle’s concept of substance, but would rather want to talk about an actual entity at an actual occasion. You cannot really parse it as a static object outside of it. Actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. An actual entity is of a composite nature and cannot be abstracted from the system of the universe.
This can be analysed into prehensions. A new word created by Whitehad.
This is a mode of analysis that tries to take the entities that we encounter and divide it into its most concrete elements. A prehension reproduces in itself the general characteristics of an actual entity: it is referrent to an external world. Emotion, purpose, valuation and causation.
There is a unity between the actual entity and the experiencing subject. Their point of contact is the prehension. Quite similar to Spinoza.
Actual entities involve each other through prehension. This is the nexus. There is a kind of togetherness of different entities. Their togetherness implies a prehension of longer or more intimate character and is described as a ’fact’. It is something along the lines of the thing that we can share as characteristic of an entity. In the process of creation, the reasons of an actual entity must be found in a real entity – everything has to be immanent to the universe. No actual entity, then no reason.
The definiteness of fact is due to its forms: but the individual fact is a creature, and creativity is the ultimate behind all forms.
Ellipitical character of language basically refers to the fact that the subject can never be described exhaustively by the fact of its name, or the predicates you apply to it.
There is a metaphysical system hiding behind the language we use, which is the metaphysics of substance. There is some subject in the world, onto which we predicate some facts. We cannot use the copula ’is’ to state a fact.