Kinds of Guise Bundles

Abstract

Unlike concepts, which are abstract, supra-temporal entities, guises are actual entities, budding, blooming and drying, as the flowers which instantiate them. Whether the usual things in the universe are to be construed as only bundles of such guises, or whether a material core, essentially foreign to guises in being indestructible and of itself ineffable, has to be posited as a substratum which keeps the guises together, has been hotly debated throughout the history of philosophy. Plato sided with the first alternative, while Aristotle expounded a doctrine closer to the second. In this article an effort is made to defend the first alternative through drawing attention to a platitude: not all guise bundles hold together their ingredient guises in the same way, there are various different modes of guise cohesion, yielding different kinds of guise bundles. In none of the diverse kinds does a material core appear to be indispensable for bearer identity to be displayed or retained. As a side-product a rough doctrine of guise-bundle categories is suggested.