Abstract
In Physics I, Aristotle introduces matter as the substratum of substantial change. Since it satisfies the Categories criterion of a subject not said of something else, it seems a candidate for a basic constituent. De Anima’s taking form to be the cause of being of an individual candidate makes it another candidate for a basic constituent. Since everything else depends on individual composites, everything else will now depend on substantial forms for its being. Individual composites can also seem to be compounds that depend for their existence on one or more their components, matter, and form. None of this is decisive. But a reexamination of substance is in order, and Zeta can be understood to undertake it.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be clear from what follows that my account of Plato’s arguments in the Sophist takes him to respond to a Parmenides who held the sort of view attributed to Parmenides by Furth (1968). Whether this was Parmenides’ view, this is how I take Plato to have understood Parmenides.
- 2.
There is a complication here. If one takes the Categories’ individuals present in a primary substance to be present in one and only one primary substance, as I did in Chap. 3, then it looks as if when, for example, Socrates changes from pale to dark, an individual pale goes out of existence and is replaced by an individual dark that comes into existence. Here, one still seems committed to talk about things that don’t exist. For the time being, I ignore this complication. I return to it in section ‘III. The Introduction of Matter’.
- 3.
Unless otherwise specified, all translations in this chapter will be those of the Revised Oxford translation.
- 4.
I defend this as a reason in section ‘V. Physics I and Aristotelian Dialectic’.
- 5.
One can imagine him responding to it in the way he responds in Fr. 6 to those who talk about things that are and are not, being the same and not the same, dismissing them in the sharpest terms. Things that are potentially are likely candidates for things that are and are not, being the same and not the same.
- 6.
For a discussion of accidental compounds or unities and their connection with Aristotle’s basic ontology, see Cohen (2013), Lewis (1982), and Matthews (1982). According to Lewis, an accidental compound involves two items and a compounding relation (‘plus’)—for example, the compound of a particular man plus pale. According to Cohen, the relation between items in an accidental unity is instantiation—for example, pale as it is instantiated in a particular man. Indeed, according to Cohen individuals in categories other than substance are best understood as such accidental unities. If he’s right, then adopting this second response won’t involve a departure from the doctrines of the Categories.
- 7.
This question will be addressed briefly in section ‘VII. Substantial Change Is Not Alteration’.
- 8.
That some sensible objects appear to come to be and pass away is a phainomenon that needs to be saved, and the objections Parmenides raises against change are puzzles associated with this phainomenon. Aristotle’s use of alteration as a model for substantial change is then his attempt to save this phainomenon and solve these puzzles.
- 9.
In the rest of this chapter, reference to parts of Bolton (1991) will simply be by page numbers of this article.
- 10.
For a defense of this way of understanding 1143a35–b5, see Dahl (1994, 41–45 and Appendix I). For an account that marks out the similarity between the way in which certain first principles are arrived at by this kind of perception and the way in which first principles are arrived at in an Aristotelian science, see Dahl (2009, 504–505).
- 11.
- 12.
That the NE makes use of dialectic is something Bolton grants (e.g., 1987, 128–129).
- 13.
Aristotle says that Parmenides treats hot and cold as these contraries under the names, fire and earth.
- 14.
He says of them, ‘…giving no reason indeed for the theory, but constrained as it were by the truth itself’ (188b29–30).
- 15.
See, for example, On Generation and Corruption II.1 329a24–35.
- 16.
I owe this way of understanding the nature of prime matter to Frank Lewis. See Lewis (2008).
- 17.
Lewis (2013a, Appendix) points out that since an individual composite depends for its being on its form, the former dependency is stronger than the latter one. This might lead one to think that this is the dependency relation that should determine which things are basic constituents. However, in the Categories, Aristotle took the weaker dependency relation to make its primary substances basic constituents even though given the essentialism of the Categories, a stronger dependency relation held between primary substances and secondary substances. Thus, the stronger of these two dependency relations need not determine which things are basic constituents.
- 18.
- 19.
Also, see Whiting (1992) for a discussion of these two kinds of matter.
- 20.
There does seem to be a comparable entity that comes to be when an artifact is created. If the parts of an ax such as an ax handle are described functionally, then they can’t exist apart from the form of an ax. An ax handle that is no longer part of an ax won’t have the function it has when it is the handle of an ax.
- 21.
See Whiting (1992) for further discussion of this issue.
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Dahl, N.O. (2019). Two New Candidates for Basic Constituents. In: Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics Zeta. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22161-4_4
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