Martin Heidegger says that the initial interpretation of the word <ousia> was lost in its translation to the Latin. As a consequence it was also lost in its translations to modern languages. He says that <ousia> precisely means ‘being’ - not ‘substance’, that is not some ‘thing’ or some ‘being’ that “stands” (-stance) “under” (sub-).”

In Being and Time, Heidegger says that the term “substance,” derived from the Latin translation, is already an interpretation (as much as a translation) of the Greek ousia. He emphasizes that ousia designates “presence” and that translating it merely as “substance” imposes a static and material connotation that obfuscates the dynamic and existential nuances present in the original Greek.

Furthermore, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger elaborates on this point by asserting that the historical translation of ousia as “substance” has constrained philosophical inquiry. He argues that this translation has led to a conception of beings as static entities or things, thereby obscuring the more profound question of the reality of Being. Heidegger suggests that a more faithful translation of ousia would be “presence,” capturing the dynamic nature of Being rather than depicting it as a static entity.

we can't make any claim about how 'the world is' without any kind of reference to experience — boundless

That’s it. This is what I believe Kant means by the ‘in itself’, as distinct from ‘the phenomenal’. The issue is, empiricism tends to take what exists in the absence of any observer as the hallmark of what is real, but that entails an inherent contradiction.

Under idealism, perceived time is more fundamental than the time from any theory. — noAxioms

It's more the case that any theory ultimately depends on perception/measurement of time. And that shouldn't be taken as a 'falsifiable hypothesis', as it is not. The pre-theoretical experience of temporal succession and measurement is logically prior to any theoretical model of time. We could not arrive at any theory of time without already presupposing the ability to observe, record, and compare events in time.

So it's not a 'falsifiable hypothesis', because falsifiable hypotheses are propositions within a theoretical framework that make empirical predictions that could turn out to be incorrect. Rather, this is a meta-theoretical observation —a philosophical reflection on what must already be the case for any theory to arise or be tested. It is not as if one could simply 'swap out' this analysis for some alternative: it reflects the conditions of possibility for any empirical theorizing at all.

That dependency is what the 'blind spot of science' (Frank, Gleiser and Thompson) fails to recognise.

How do you map souls and spirits with what we understand scientifically? — Harry Hindu

‘Soul’ was one term used to translate the Greek ‘psuche’ which lives on as ‘psyche’. ‘Spirit’ originally comes from ‘pneuma’, meaning ‘breath’, or ‘animating principle’. Those terms belong to an earlier world of discourse, but the realities they denote are still real enough. Again, the point of the original post is that through Descartes ‘res cogitans’, ‘mind’ comes to be represented as ‘thinking thing’ or ‘thinking substance’ which I say is an incoherent concept.

Aristotle’s Fourfold Distinction
Aristotle already identifies a hierarchy of souls in De Anima:

• Inanimate (minerals, elements): no soul, mere material extension
• Nutritive Soul (plants): growth, nutrition, reproduction.
• Sensitive Soul (animals): sensation, appetite, locomotion.
• Rational Soul (humans): reason, self-reflection, intellect.

Neo-Platonism and the Great Chain of Being

Plotinus and later Christian Platonists (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius) described the "ladder of being", with:

• Matter (lowest, formless substratum)
• Life (plants, animals)
• Soul (animals, humans)
• Intellect or Spirit (humans, divine beings)
• The One or God (absolute unity)

More from the Sachs entry on Aristotle Metaphysics:

A table, a chair, a rock, a painting– each is a this, but a living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own this-ness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at all.

it is clear from this that Aristotle differentiates living beings from other kinds of objects.

In fact, I believe that it is you who is applying a lens of a modern world-view perspective. In his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle did not provide a clear distinction between living beings and inanimate things, as you are proposing, so "being" could refer to both — Metaphysician Undercover

It’s true that Aristotle uses being (to on) in a broad sense to include many kinds of things. But in Physics and Metaphysics, he also clearly distinguishes between natural beings—which have internal principles of movement and life—and artifacts or inert things, which do not.

In Physics II.1-2, he distinguishes between things that move or change by themselves (nature) and those that depend on external causes (artifacts). Likewise, in Metaphysics Zeta, he emphasizes that form and actuality, not mere particularity, make something a substance in the fullest sense—and his best examples are living beings, not static objects.

So while Aristotle speaks of many things as “beings,” (things that are) he clearly differentiates their modes of being, giving special significance to those beings that have their own internal principles of life and motion. To deny that there are different kinds being is, in effect, to collapse ontology into mere enumeration. But if ontology means the study of being as being, then it must also account for differences in kinds of beings —for example, the difference between what merely exists as a consequence of external causes and those beings that live, move, and self-organize. That is a fundamental distinction in Aristotle.

You better mind the details. The devil's in them, or so it is said.

That would be in accordance with Aristotle's understanding of a substance as an individual entity. Spinoza understood substance more in line with the modern way as "what is fundamental". So, for Spinoza God or Nature (which he considered to be synonymous) is fundamental and individual entities are modes of that fundamental reality. If you think about the etymology 'substance' suggests 'what stands under', which interestingly is related to the etymology of 'understanding'. — Janus

As the OP suggests, the term we translate as 'substance' originally comes from the Greek ousia, a form of the Greek verb 'to be'. There was no direct Latin equivalent, so 'substantia'—literally, "what stands under"—was chosen as a translation. But this shift has led to an unfortunate equivocation: on the one hand, substance as “a material or stuff with uniform properties” which is what we usually mean by it, and on the other, substance as “a category of being”. These are very different notions, but they’ve been conflated in translation.

Imagine if substance in Spinoza had instead been translated as subject—so that the whole of nature comprises a single subject, not a single substance. While not entirely accurate, this alternative captures something important that is often lost in translation. We would then say: "God or Nature is the only true subject, and all individual subjects are but modes of this one subject." (As it happens, this kind of expression is then quite compatible with many other forms of philosophical idealism.)

By contrast, the word 'substance' tends to suggest a kind of metaphysical materialism—the idea that the world consists of one universal "stuff" that shows up in many forms. But that isn’t quite what thinkers like Spinoza or Aristotle seem to have meant. Their concern was not with material stuff, but with what it means to be—whether as one ultimate being or as multiple beings participating in, or as expressions of, a higher unity. And that is a significant difference.

Degrees of Reality

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is. Given that there are only substances and modes, and that modes depend on substances for their existence, it follows that substances are the most real constituents of reality. — 17th Century Theories of Substance, IEP

this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition). — Apustimelogist

It’s a zen koan!

https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-peirce-was-americas-greatest-thinker

I don't think the Australian Greens are going to exercise much influence in this Parliament. I notice that Larrisa Waters said she intends to work constructively with Government, which is probably a better choice than the blatant obstructonism and grandstanding of the Greens in the previous Parliament. (I also think Hanson Young was quite happy to remain manager of business rather than leader, which is a far more taxing job.)

But unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, and substance (in the sense of being—verb—"a being") sort of exists on a sliding scale, with different things being more or less truly one and discrete (self-determing), just as man can be more or less unified and directed towards the Good. Aristotle, in a very clever way, is extending Plato's psychology into a metaphysical principle here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:100:

It's definitely idealistic leaning, but seems legit, no? Do you agree with it all? — noAxioms

Yes, I completely agree with it. It highlights the role of the mind in stitching together - synthesising - a set of otherwise disconnected facts into the unitary perception of space-time. You said you haven't read up on Kant, but he says something like this: space and time are not derived from experience (a posteriori), nor are they concepts, but rather they are the necessary, a priori conditions of experience. In other words, we cannot perceive or imagine anything without situating it in space and time. And they are not things or properties in themselves but are the conditions under which appearances are possible. Kant calls them "pure" because they are independent of any particular empirical content, and "intuitions" because they represent a singular, immediate framework for perception, not a general concept or category. Yet, also important to note that Kant is an empirical realist, i.e. he accepts that the objects of analysis are real as phenomena.

Proper time is still the same (invariant) in any interpretation, and is something meaningful to us. — noAxioms

In any interpretation, yes. But again, what it is outside any interpretation can only be inferred.

You asked a rhetorical question in the thread title - 'Does anybody support a mind-independent reailty' - from what I'm seeing, the answer would be that you do. Would that be right?

I think it's fairly confusing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That was the point of the original post. I’m attempting to describe how the oxymoronic conception of ‘mental substance’ was arrived at.

I don't know if I would wholeheartedly endorse (C S Peirce). He is very concerned to make his thought consistent with science, which is indeed important, but 19th century science tended pretty hard towards reductionism and smallism, and sometimes his moves seem to be in line with this perhaps because of the quite dominant idea that to be "scientific" is to be reductive. He has a reductive account of essence and substantial form, or of natural kinds, but I don't think one actually needs to be reductive here and loses much if one is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's correct. He's an exceedingly complex writer with a vast corpus of work which is still being sorted and edited. But he (along with his contemporaries or near-contemporaries William James, Joshia Royce, Bordern Parker Bowne, et al) were all idealist in some sense - this was before the great rejection of idealism by Moore and Russell. In their day, idealism was mainstream.

I haven't yet really grasped Peirce's ideas of firstness-secondness-thirdness, nor his tripartite relation of sign, signified etc - but I think it's fair to describe it as an attempt at a fully-fledged metaphysic and one which is not at all friendly to materialism in any way shape or form. But he also spent decades as a working scientist and surveyor and was scrupulously empirical in such matters. So I don't think it's all fair to describe Peirce as reductionist.

(In many discussiones with Apokrisis, where I really first encountered Peirce, I would emphasise his idealist side, while Apo would deprecate it as due it being a 'man of his times', and lacking our more-sophisticated grasp of systems science. I never quite bought that, as I think that Peirce was a thoroughgoing idealist in his philosophical views. To this day, if you google the term 'objective idealism' C S Peirce is one of the top names on the returned list - 'matter is effette mind'.)

This is precisely why Aristotle can be plausibly claimed as an "idealist" while he might also plausibly be claimed as the father of empiricism and "objective science." It's really both and neither because the distinction makes no sense for him. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've tried to make the point before, that for Aristotle, and also for the Scholastics, 'idealism' wasn't necessary, because they had a completely different orientation or way-of-being in the world. Theirs was a 'participatory ontology', exemplified in Aristotle's maxim 'the soul is in a way all things'. So our sense of separateness, and the idea of the universe as a vast impersonal aggregation of material objects, wasn't real for them. The world was an expression of a higher intelligence, with which the individual had an 'I-Thou' relationship (per Martin Buber) rather than the 'me-it' relationship that characterises modernity. When that started to be called into question, about the time of the Renaissance, was when idealism began to make its appearance, as a kind of corrective to the emerging modern materialism.

(That incidentally is what makes the 'analytical thomists' so interesting, in their attempts are reconciling or comparing Aquinas and Kant, although it's a pretty recondite subject.)

What I'm asking is how does either notion of substance compliment what we currently know scientifically and vice versa. — Harry Hindu

'Complement' is a good way of putting it. There are some aspects of Aristotelian philosophy that have made a comeback in current science. Not his Physics, which is completely superseded. But there are other elements of Aristotle which retain relevance, especially in philosophy of biology (ref). His intuitive understanding of the way that organisms are self-organizing and governed by an internal telos, in particular.

And also the Platonic tradition, of which Aristotle is a part, is baked into the grammar of our culture in very deep ways. This OP is about the geneology of the idea of substance, which starts off being something completely different to how it's now understood.

In the scientific context, the term substance refers to pure matter alone, consisting of only one type of atom or one type of molecule. — Harry Hindu

That's the point of the OP - that using the term 'substance' mistakenly equates 'being' with 'stuff'. And in the current scientific context, there is no real material ultimate in the sense of a material atom. Atoms are nowadays understood as excitations in fields, the primitive idea of the atom as 'indivisible particle' (that's what the word means, 'not divisible') is long dead, in the age of wave-particle duality.

Do you really call other persons and animals objects? That’s precisely my point—the term object is misleading in this context. (And as a historical note, the first instances of the term 'objective' only begin to appear in the early 17th century, well after Aristotle.)

You also mention bronze statues. But Aristotle clearly distinguishes artifacts from organisms, noting that artifacts have external causes—they are shaped by something other than themselves—whereas living beings have internal principles of form and change. That’s why Aristotle’s paradigm cases of ousia are living beings, not mere products or constructions (or objects, as such).

You say I’m applying unwarranted restrictions to Aristotle’s hylomorphism. Fair enough. But I’d suggest that you may be reading Aristotle through a modern, objectively-oriented lens, one that did not obtain in his milieu, and does not do justice to the ontological depth conveyed by his original terminology.

What an individual object actually is, is a unique peculiar form, which is proper only to itself, (the law of identity). — Metaphysician Undercover

I appreciate the clarification about particularity, but I think this risks reading Aristotle through the modern, objective point of view to which we are encultured. In the Categories and Metaphysics, Aristotle’s paradigm examples of 'substance' are not objects like stones or marbles, but beings—plants, animals, and humans. They are beings that possess their own internal principles of organization, growth, and change—what Aristotle calls form and actuality. Hence again the fact that the original term was 'ouisia'. He's asking about what beings are - not what objects are.

This suggests that Aristotle’s notion of primary substance is not bare particularity or mere “thisness” in the sense of counting objects in space-time, but the actuality of a being as the kind that it is. In that sense living beings, not material objects, are Aristotle’s typical examples of 'subjects' (rather than 'substances'!)

Thank you. I'm continuing to learn how much philosophy feeds into politics and vice versa.

Yes, I have little exposure to Adorno, save some readings from his Dialectics of the Enlightenment, which overall I found congenial. So, one question that remark brings up for me is, is this 'emancipation' to be understood primarily in political terms?

This is where Wittgenstein agrees and says it's about our practices (language games and our form of life), but Adorno says it's sociohistorical, though not reducible to sociohistorical facts. — Jamal

Isn’t a lot of this just a tacit prohibition on anything that could be considered outside the scope of natural sciences, evolutionary biology, and so on? Don’t mention anything remotely platonic. Has to be something comfortably domesticated.

I'm kind of re-constructing all this from the debris of modern philosophy - rather like forensic pathology, working backwards from scattered remains to understand the cause of death.

More from Thomist psychology:

Everything in the universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.

For Aristotle, nous is the faculty that enables rational thought. It is distinct from sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals possess. Nous is the faculty that enables definitions so be set in a consistent and communicable way, and explains why humans are born with the innate ability to understand the same universal categories in the same ways (which enables language, that other animals lack.)

For empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).

Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is 'sugar' or what is 'intruder'. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.

Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize. — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

A lot of this conversation is bedevilled by the absence of any relationship with what used to be known as revealed truth. @Hanover's posts a few pages back touch on it, immediately shot down by@Banno as 'theological meanderings'. It is an article of Banno's faith than anything like religious faith has no place at the table of philosophical discourse. Yet without it, one is condemned to the sisyphean repitition of circular arguments.

In respect of 'why is there anything?', the question naturally arises in a culture which originally accepted the fact of divine creation. In the absence of divine creation, an alternative account is sought, presumably grounded in science. But that always seems to face an aporia of its own which is not surprising, as natural science presumes nature without needing to explain it. There are kinds of 'why' questions that science won't even ask, let alone seek an answer for.

Buddhism offers an alternative, as it starts not with the question 'why is there anything?' but 'why is there suffering?' - usually followed by a catalogue of the kinds of suffering which seem unavoidable for all of us, such as old age, illness and death, the loss of what one cherishes, being united with what one dislikes, and so forth. It then proceeds to analyse the deep psycho-physiological processes which give rise to the human condition, under the rubric of 'suffering and its cause'. But it still requires faith - faith that there is a cause, that it is something that can be understood, that release from it is a real possibility. But the salient point is, Buddhism still contains a kernel in religious revelation, insight into another realm of being, which I think is essential if faith is to have any meaning other than sentimentality or wishful thinking.

Does either 'ousia' or 'substantia' map easily against reality as we now understand it (with relativity, QM, etc.), as opposed to how the Greeks understood reality? — Harry Hindu

Obviously, there are vast differences between ancient and modern, and we know an enormous amount more than did they, in a scientific sense. That is not at issue. The motivation for the original post, though, was a specific confusion arising from a misunderstanding of a key idea, which is still relevant despite all of that. That anyway is the argument spelled out in the OP.

Intuition is knowing without knowing how you know. That, anyway, is my intuition.

And my point is why use the term, "substance" — Harry Hindu

The term οὐσία (oiusia) is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, meaning "to be, I am", so similar grammatically to the English noun "being". There was no equivalent grammatical formation in Latin, and it was translated as 'essentia' or 'substantia'. Cicero coined "essentia" and the philosopher Seneca and rhetorician Quintilian used it as equivalent for οὐσία, while Apuleius rendered οὐσία both as "essentia" or "substantia". In order to designate οὐσία, early Christian theologian Tertullian favored the use of "substantia" over "essentia", while Augustine of Hippo and Boethius took the opposite stance, preferring the use of "essentia" as designation for οὐσία. — Ouisia, Wikipedia

In the long run, 'substantia' became the English 'substance', but again, it developed a different meaning over time, to denote 'a material with uniform properties'. It is that meaning which I claim in the OP is a very misleading translation for the original term, 'ousia', which is nearer in meaning to 'subject' that what we think of as 'substance'.

The use of 'process' as in 'process philosophy' is a much later arrival, associated with the philosopher Whitehead, in the early 20th century. However, 'process' doesn't really map easily against either 'ousia' or 'substantia'.

My own reasoning in regards to this matter is, if determinism is not true - which is to say, if there are events in the history of the universe which, if played back again under the exact same prior conditions, might happen differently - then it seems to me that those events didn't have "sufficient reason" to occur. — flannel jesus

There’s a lot I agree with in this OP, but I think the framing assumes a sharper 'either-or' than the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) really requires.

It’s easy to assume that PSR, if true, must entail strict determinism—that every event is fixed in advance by prior conditions in a fully specifying, Laplacean sense. But I think that’s based on a misunderstanding, both of what “sufficient reason” means, and of how complex systems actually behave.

The essay Karma and Chaos (which I've linked here because it’s well worth reading) offers a useful perspective. It shows how chaos theory and complexity science describe systems that are lawful but not rigidly deterministic. These systems operate according to real constraints—there are rules, boundaries, and patterns—but they do not unfold in a strictly predictable way.

A familiar example is the so-called butterfly effect in meteorology. Weather systems follow physical laws, but small changes in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes. The system is lawful, but not fully predictable in practice. It doesn’t mean “anything can happen”—the system tends to evolve within certain zones or attractors, but the path it takes can vary widely.

So, if PSR says that every event happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other.

In other words, the reason why something happens might be that the system is lawful but open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined.

This is close to the Buddhist doctrine of kamma (karma) - the context in which the essay was presented, in fact. Kamma doesn’t mean that every detail of life is predetermined. It does mean that actions have consequences, shaped by past conditions and tendencies, but these are still open to choice and change (which is why, incidentally, the interpretation of karma as fatalism is mistaken). Hence it's a model of lawful but open causality—a dynamic interplay of conditioning and freedom, order and variability. Chaos theory provides a contemporary scientific parallel to this view, describing how systems can be shaped by lawful structures while still allowing for spontaneous shifts and new outcomes. (Interestingly, C. S. Peirce argued for something similar, calling it 'tychism'—the idea that real spontaneity or chance plays a causal role in the universe, but in a way that doesn't undermine its lawful structure, and in fact may be essential for its ongoing development..)

So I’d say that PSR doesn’t necessarily imply determinism. It implies that there are real reasons and structures underlying what happens, but those reasons might allow for a range of lawful possibilities, not a single predetermined outcome.

In short, PSR may invite us to ask why this rather than that, but the answer might be: because the system allows for variation within lawful constraints. That’s not determinism in the classical sense, but it isn’t randomness either. It’s something more dynamic—a lawful openness.

There is a historical relation too in that biosemiotics and the invocation of semiotics in physics almost always involves the tripartite semiotics received through Charles Sanders Peirce. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have read that Peirce held to realism concerning universals. There's a tantalising fragment in a review of a book about Peirce and the 'threat of nominalism':

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. — Peirce and the Thread of Nominalism (review)

That mention in passing of the distinction between reality and existence is one which I will guarantee you, nobody (or almost nobody) on this forum will recognise. (And I know this from long experience.)

But again, concepts can be explained in terms of brains ....the entire universe and everything in it is a physical system. — Apustimelogist

Can they? Is it? Those are assumptions - the central assumptions of scientific materialism. And you don't present arguments for it: you present it as a foregone conclusion, something that is 'of course' the case. I don't think it has seriously occured to you that it can be questioned, how it can be questioned, and who questions it.

I can still talk about art, literature, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology without mentioning physics or chemistry. — Apustimelogist

But here we're discussing philosophy, Plato's forms, universals, and nature of mind.

A 'stone' or a 'particle' is an abstract concept as much as 'money' or 'health', all inferred through how the brain interacts with the world, but at the very core and central place that makes this universe of stuff tick is physical concepts. — Apustimelogist

But I say that concepts are not physical - they're the relations of ideas. And the idea that concepts or rational inference can be understood as physical is the central myth of philosophical materialism, which by tying rational concepts to 'brain function' seeks to give them a physical grounding. But that is neural reductionism:

Neural reductionism asserts that psychological phenomena (like perception, cognition, and consciousness) can be explained in terms of the workings of the nervous system, particularly at the neural level. In essence, it argues that understanding the brain and its neural processes is sufficient to explain mental states and behaviors.

Proponents include Australian philosopher D M Armstrong, and also the recently deceased Daniel Dennett.

But I say that there is a vicious circularity in the reductionist view, because in order to interpret neural data, or to say how, or whether, 'the brain' is the source of reason (as distinct from an interpreter of it), we must rely on concepts. Not just the advanced concepts required to understand neurobiology (which is an astoundingly complex science), but those very basic conceptual structures such as 'same as', 'different to' and so on. You won't see anything in the kinds of data that can be observed through fMRI and so on, unless you're a highly trained specialist deeply versed in neuroscience. On which basis, you will then say 'well, this scan shows activity in this area of the brain, which means that....' So again, you're relying on the very faculty of rational inference (if: then) to establish the claim which you're wishing to demonstrate. And it's not something you can see 'from the outside'.

if we want to explain the actual reasons why we use the word 'round', you have to talk about an immensely complicated brain and how it interacts with the rest of a very complicated world in an intractable manner - from the perspective of our own intelligibility - to infer something about how it represents or embodies structure out in the world. — Apustimelogist

But we're not required to know that. It's not necessary to know anything of the complexities of neuroscience to understand the principle of intelligibility. Here, you're simply projecting the inherent limitations of materialist philosophy of mind onto the whole issue.

But anyone using the word 'round' is using it because they are engaging with the world around them and they see 'round' things. — Apustimelogist

That's the empiricist argument in a nutshell. The problem is, many animals other than h.sapiens see round things, but they never form a concept of 'round'. LIkewise with my quoted example of 'equals'. 'Equals' is obviously fundamental to rational argument, symbollically denoting 'the same as'. But how is equality discerned? When we say that two objects are of equal weight or length, we must already possess the concept 'equals' to make that judgement. And no amount of sensory experience will convey that to a subject incapable of grasping the concept. Hence the argument that 'equals' (and other universals') are discerned by reason and cannot be derived from experience alone (a point which Kant elaborated at tiresome length in his master work.)

It's worth repeating the quote from Eric Perl again:

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας, ouisia] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason. — Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p28

This applies to 'roundness' as much as any other universal. (Eric Perl's book, Thinking Being, is a well-regarded current textbook on classical metaphysics, unfortunately out-of-print, although I've managed to acquire a .pdf copy.)

Other than that, I quite agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus's post above, especially this:

Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein.

It's not too far of a stretch to see how this suggests biosemiosis (signs and sign relations) as fundamental to cognition (and indeed to organic processes generally.) So here we're encountering the metaphysics of meaning, to which Platonic and Aristotelian principles still have considerable relevance.

There is no substance - only process or relations — Harry Hindu

If you read the OP, the point is that the meaning of substance in philosophy is not 'an unchanging material', but that is how it has come to be (mis)interpreted.

“…. substance is the permanence of the real in time….” — Mww

'Some things will never change' ~ Steely Dan, 'Kid Charlemagne'.

Thanks for the reply, this conversation is requiring that I do some research on concepts of time in relativity and philosophy, which I'm learning from. So, to recap the debate thus far:

As for there being no time outside the awareness of it, that depends on your definition of time.
1) Proper time, which is very much physical and supposedly mind independent. This is what clocks measure.
2) Coordinate time, which is arguably abstract and thus mind dependent since coordinate systems are mental constructs. Coordinate time is that which dilates.
3) One's perception of the flow of time, which is very much only a product of awareness, pretty much by anything tasked with making predictions. — noAxioms

The Planck unit of time is one of proper time (type 1), not the third type (awareness of) time which you seem to have been referencing. Don't confuse the two. There's little point in utilizing Plank units for measuring a specific species' awareness of time. — noAxioms

Proper duration is invariant in both a relativistic and an absolute interpretation of the universe, and coordinate duration (including 'actual' duration in the absolute universe) is not invariant. Neither kind of time has a requirement to be noticed by any observer. Of course, that's different in any mind-dependent sort of ontology where being noticed is a requirement. — noAxioms

So, you are saying I am conflating different levels of analysis when I discussed Planck units in the context of a species' differing perceptions of time based on their planet's cycles. You are saying that Planck time is a fundamental unit of physical duration (proper time at a very small scale), while my thought experiment is about a species' subjective experience and culturally defined units of time (more akin to "awareness of time"). And I've learned from my research that these different "types" of time, with "type 1" (proper time) being the more fundamental (or "physical") concept, is recognised within the framework of relativity.

However, earlier in the discussion, I had introduced a quote from an essay on Bergson and Einstein's debate about the nature of time, which I present here again:

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time. — Clock Time Contra Lived Time, Evan Thompson, Aeon Magazine

My bolds. And my claim is that this is true even of so-called 'Type 1', supposedly mind-independent time. Bergson's analysis challenges the idea of a time that exists completely independently of any form of "experiencing" or "measuring" (in the broader sense that includes conscious awareness). Even physical clocks, which we might think of as objective measures, rely on physical processes unfolding in space, which we interpret as temporal intervals.

This suggests that time, insofar as it is meaningful to us, is inherently linked to how we perceive and interpret change and succession. (And if it's not meaningful to us, then what is there to discuss?) Even in the case of physical measurements, we are the ones who interpret the spatial movements as representing the passage of time. Without an observer (human or otherwise) to relate the spatial changes to the concept of time, the clock's movements are just that – movements in space. The distinction between the discrete moments measured by a clock and the continuous flow of lived duration aligns with the distinction of "physical" time (like Planck time or proper time) and "awareness of time." However, a Bergson would likely argue that even the "physical" time we measure with clocks is still dependent on a framework of spatial measurement and our interpretation of it which only an observer can provide.

So if we take Bergson's challenge seriously, we might ask: what does Planck time mean in the absence of any system (even a theoretical one) to "observe" or be affected by events at that scale? Is it a fundamental property of spacetime that exists independently of any interaction or measurement, or is its significance tied to its role within our theoretical frameworks of how the universe operates?

Bergson's analysis provides a philosophical argument for the idea that time, as we understand and experience it, is deeply intertwined with the process of observation and interpretation. While Planck time might represent a fundamental unit of physical duration at the smallest scale, Bergson's perspective suggests that even this concept is embedded within our theoretical framework of measurement and understanding. It reinforces the idea that time is not simply a pre-existing entity that we passively record, but something that emerges through our interaction with the world, whether that interaction is through conscious experience or through the construction and interpretation of physical measurements. (This, incidentally, is in keeping with the 'enactivist' philosophy of Evan Thompson who wrote the article being discussed.)

I also hold sympathies to idealism, to the point where ontology may well just be an ideal even if I'm not an idealist (mind being in any way fundamental). All sorts of traps on that road, but I think it is valid. Is there such a thing as ontic idealism? — noAxioms

Ontic or ontological idealism holds that the world is ultimately mental (or spiritual) in nature. I'm arguing for epistemological idealism which argues that whatever we know of the world has an ineliminably subjective pole. Whilst objectivity is pragmatically possible and useful, the objective stance ought not to loose sight of this broader point: reality is not something we're outside of, or apart from.

Ref: Who Really Won when Bergson and Einstein Debated Time, Evan Thompson, Aeon.

As Paul Keating would observe from time to time, 'the dogs bark. The caravan moves on.'

Rinehart's living in Trump la-la land. She's utterly besotted with the Donald, no idea of the Australian electorate per se. She and all the Sky News commentators will be all crying into their beers for a long time to come.

It's her obvious thirst for power that bugs me. My comment was made in respose to her saying yesterday that 'the Australian people would love to see her as PM.' (I was thinking of posting a gif of a pole-vaulter who's pole breaks in lift-off - does happen - as a comment on her sudden defection to the Liberal Party in the hope of becoming Deputy Leader of the Opposition. But couldn't be bothered.)

Geez this Albert Namatjira Price has tickets on herself. Glad her party is going to be in the wilderness for the next decade or so.

Since drafting this OP a month ago, I've re-visited some of the references I gave at the outset. Looking at the SEP and IEP entries again, it is clear that they exemplify the very philosophical 'flattening' (or reification) that the OP set out to address. Both articles frame substance largely in terms of object-like things or building blocks, reducing a metaphysical distinction to a kind of proto-materialism or object-property schema.

For example, the SEP entry describes Aristotle’s Categories as follows:

The primary substances are individual objects, and they can be contrasted with everything else – secondary substances and all other predicables – because they are not predicable of or attributable to anything else. Thus, Fido is a primary substance, and dog – the secondary substance – can be predicated of him.

This framing presents substance as nothing more than individual objects, like particular dogs - or even stones or marbles, we would be entitled to think —whic is an oversimplification that loses sight of the deeper point that 'substance' is not mere particularity, but what something is in virtue of its form and actuality. Again, it is nearer to think of it as what of being it is, than what kind of object. And there's a difference!

The IEP entry reinforces this flattening by presenting substance as either “object-like” or as the “building blocks of reality”:

In its first sense, ‘substance’ refers to those things that are object-like, rather than property-like. For example, an elephant is a substance in this sense, whereas the height or colour of the elephant is not. In its second sense, ‘substance’ refers to the fundamental building blocks of reality. An elephant might count as a substance in this sense. However, this depends on whether we accept the kind of metaphysical theory that treats biological organisms as fundamental.

Here, substance is again reduced to either discrete objects or material constituents, and offered as a theoretical choice between animals, their properties, or their particles. What is entirely missing is Aristotle’s insight of substance as the unity of form and matter, not just an object plus its properties, nor mere stuff underlying observable traits.

Both examples illustrate a deeper historical forgetting: the tendency to read ancient metaphysical concepts through the lens of modern object-oriented thinking, as if philosophy has always been about cataloguing things and their properties (although perhaps understandable, considering that the whole discipline of taxonomy arguably begins in Aristotle). But what this overlooks is the ontological weight of the original inquiry—the question of what it means to be at all, and the recognition that being appears in degrees, or has modes of actuality, not as interchangeable objects or parts.

This 'flattening' of metaphysical language reflects a broader historical drift in the understanding of philosophy itself. As Pierre Hadot has shown, ancient philosophy was not primarily the classification of entities or the cataloging of phenomena. Rather, it was tied to a transformative way of being—a way of orienting one’s life toward what truly is, through contemplative insight and existential practice. Theoria existed in support of praxis.

For Plato and Aristotle, metaphysics was not a matter of debating which kinds of objects “count” as substances, but inquiry into what it means for something to be—to become aware of the intelligible natures that make reality coherent and meaningful.