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 Not his Physics, which is completely superseded.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.

For Aristotle, every individual, every particular, (what we call an object), consists of matter and form. The composite is an instance of primary substance. You'll notice that he doesn't only talk about living beings, but also things like bronze statues. I think you are applying unwarranted restrictions to Aristotle's hylomorphism

It's a bit confusing because Aristotle seems to say different things in different places, and because "ousia" might get translated as "substance," "being," or "essence" in different places. What anything is, the type of thing it is, is substance as logical category (in the Categories). However, Aristotle kicks off the Physics by narrowing down those things that exist according to their own nature (an intrinsic principle of self-determination and self-organizing) to organisms. This is in contrast to things that "exist according to causes," like a rock, which is largely just a heap of external causes with no (strong) principle of unity (e.g. if you break a rock in half you get two rocks, if you break a dog in half you don't have a dog anymore). 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.

I think it's fairly confusing. It's confusing because logic involves univocal predication and substance as a logical category is "the type of thing." But science involves analogical predication and we get this sort of sliding scale that gets turned by the great Muslim interpreters of Aristotle into the (often caricatured, rarely well presented) Great Chain of Being.



These terms definitely still get used in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, complexity studies, etc., but they are often used confusedly in different senses, with all the baggage they have accumulated. Of course, you're more likely to see them in theory heavy, conceptual work in the sciences. You see these employed very often in conversations of emergence (but here "substance metaphysics" uses substance more as "building block"). In their original usage, their so general that they don't really fit into any specific science, but more the prior categories for framing scientific theories.

"Species" is another similar one (still used, having acquired different senses over time), or "information" from "form," such that in complexity studies you sometimes see the etymological full circle where people claim that information is the ground of form (in something like the old sense of eidos).

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.

Lost a long post... :confused:

Basically I think Wayfarer is right in the discussion with Metaphysician Undercover. The Categories supports Wayfarer ('man', 'horse', but no mention of bronze) and Metaphysics Z does not bear on the question, which are the two central places where Aristotle discusses substance. Aristotle takes things like 'man' and 'horse' as the paradigmatic examples of primary substances.

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 confusing because logic involves univocal predication and substance as a logical category is "the type of thing." — Count Timothy von Icarus

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'.

However, Spinoza's "Nature" is not a scientific principle― it is like 'being' in that all it tells us is that everything is of the same substance. Modern physics searches for what is fundamental, what everything consists of. I don't think it will do to say it is 'being' because that is just an empty idea and tells us nothing about the nature of the fundamental. It would seem to be a question which could never be definitively answered, though, because how could we know we had reached the most fundamental level of reality?

It seems that the most coherent notion of substance, especially in that it accords with modern scientific understanding, is something like 'that which is constitutive'.

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

Do you really call other persons and animals objects? That’s precisely my point—the term object is misleading in this context. — Wayfarer

The context is "substance", and this is applicable to both living and inanimate things.

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. — Wayfarer

I don't believe you are correct in this assessment. I studied Plato and then Aristotle prior to studying modern philosophy, and understand Aristotle in that context. I admit that I later read Augustine and Aquinas, and then revisited Aristotle, to get a better understanding, but I do not think the your accusation of an "objectively-oriented lens" (though I don't really understand what that means) is correct.

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. This goes back to Parmenides, "being" refers to what is, as opposed to what is not. This is a reflection of the ancient way of seeing all "actual" things as being somehow animated with soul. The division Aristotle worked with. was between things made by art, and natural things. Natural things include both inanimate and living. Most of his examples of natural things are of living beings though, because those better serve the purpose of his teleological arguments. Ancient world views extended teleology into inanimate things where perhaps it doesn't belong.

The trend of making a division between living beings and inanimate objects came much later in Latin studies, with the field of "natural philosophy" being divided between biology and physics. Notice that along with this newer dichotomy between living and not living, the ancient dichotomy between natural and artificial gets lost. The modern scientific world view tends to think of human beings as natural, and this extends into human products as well, so that the division between natural and artificial is negated, leaving anything not natural as "supernatural". This is because if we have one principal category, existing entities, and try to dichotomize it in two ways, things get far to complicated. So what it appears like to me, is that you are taking the modern dichotomy of animate/inanimate and applying it to Aristotle's thought, when Aristotle worked with the dichotomy of natural/artificial, and this is inappropriate.

It's a bit confusing because Aristotle seems to say different things in different places, and because "ousia" might get translated as "substance," "being," or "essence" in different places. — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are the hazards of translation. It is important that the translator has a good understanding of the material, in order to make an adequately representative translation. The modern understanding of Aristotle has mostly evolved through Latin translations. Since there was much study of Aristotle, discussion and argumentation, through the Latin medium, Latin I believe, provides the best approach toward understanding him, and therefore translating.

I've seen a variety of translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and some are so different from each other, that in some sections you can't even recognize it as the same paragraph.

This is in contrast to things that "exist according to causes," like a rock, which is largely just a heap of external causes with no (strong) principle of unity (e.g. if you break a rock in half you get two rocks, if you break a dog in half you don't have a dog anymore). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a blatant misrepresentation. Natural things are given the principle of motion, activity. The things which exist according to "other causes" are artificial things, and he gives examples, a bed, a coat. He goes on to say that these artificial things are composed of aspects of the other category, stones, earth, etc., and so they still have a tendency to be active. The division he sets up is clearly a division between natural and artificial.

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.

The distinction is not supposed to be merely natural versus artificial. This would severely truncate the role of aims as a principle of unity by which anything is truly anything at all, and the role of wholeness (unity) itself.

Book II or the Physics is where this is probably best laid out (and Sachs commentary and translation is good here). Aristotle progresses dialecticaly, so I could see how one might be left with this impression, since he opens with a fairly inclusive definition of those things that might exist by nature, and then throws out artifacts as the opposite extreme:

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes. "By nature' the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)-for we say that these and the like exist 'by nature'.

Here is Sachs' commentary from his translation:

Aristotle identifies nature as an "innate impulse of change" that not only sets things in motion but governs the course of those motions and brings them to rest. Only certain things have such inner sources of motion. A tentative list of natural beings is given in the first sentence of Book II, but it is corrected in the second paragraph. The parts of animals are not independent things, so while blood, say, or bone is natural, neither of them is that to which an inner source of motion belongs primarily, in virtue of itself. It is only the whole animal that has a nature, or a whole plant. Similarly, fire cannot properly be said to have a nature, since it is incapable of being a whole. Like blood and bone, fire, along with earth, air, and water, is only part of the whole being that has a nature.The ordered whole of the cosmos is the one independent thing in nature that is not an animal or plant.

Now, something like fire can still be said to act according to nature when it rises, because it is acting according to some prior actuality that determines its motion (change). Anything that is anything has some prior act shaping both its actions and its potency vis-á-vis its reception of interaction. This is true of artifacts as well. But they fail to meet the definition for sources of their own organization.

The view of nature as simply substratum (elements) or form (e.g. the bed example) are taken up because these are the dominant prior explanations of nature with which Aristotle has to contend. But he rejects both of them. The bed example is also there to reject the materialist position.

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 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. — Wayfarer

Where in the scientific explanation was the word, "stuff" used, or what makes you believe that "stuff" was implied when "substance" is used? It seems you are projecting a strawman into the description that isn't there.

You solve your own problem by incorporating other scientific knowledge that there is no real material ultimate in the sense of the material atom. If science also says that atoms are excitations in fields then it is not saying that substance is stuff. So your explanation only works if you compartmentalize scientific knowledge, like you just did. But as I said before, the conclusion in one domain of knowledge (or one field of science) should not contradict the conclusions reached in another. All knowledge must be integrated.

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)

These terms definitely still get used in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, complexity studies, etc., but they are often used confusedly in different senses, with all the baggage they have accumulated — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do we have the same problem with the term, "process"?

Any ontology that includes terms like "souls" and "spirits" to define different levels of "substance" does not map onto the world as we understand it scientifically. How do you map souls and spirits with what we understand scientifically?

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.

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. — Wayfarer

Right, but for him, and the ancient Greeks in general, all natural things, living as well as non-living, have internal principles of movement. Many (not Aristotle) assigned soul to all things. But Aristotle assigned internal movement to non-living things without assigning "soul" to them.. Internal motion is very evident in things like water, air, fire, and it was assumed to be even in rocks, just like we assume that fundamental particles are active. This is the point of the part of Physics BK2, which Count Timothy brings up, and I'll quote below.

The distinction is not supposed to be merely natural versus artificial. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes it is meant to be natural versus artificial, and this is very evident. Here, this is the very beginning of Physics BK2, Ch 1:

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes.
'By nature' the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)-for we say that these and the like exist 'by nature'. — 192b, 8-9

He clearly places earth, fire, air, and water in the same category as plants and animals.
Further:

All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations i.e. in so far as they are products of art-have no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse, and just to that extent which seems to indicate that nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute. — 192b,13-23

Notice how he says that artificial things, in as much as they are composed "of stone or of earth", have the internal impulse to change. These things are then said to "have a nature". Their "nature" refers to the movements which they are inclined to make, which we now call "the laws of nature". Fire goes up for example. And he proceeds in this way. Artificial things are those created by human beings, and natural things are those such as plants, animals, earth, fire, air, water.

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.

Yes, that's a provisional definition. Sach's translation/commentary, which is fairly widely used, is quoted in the post you are quoting from:

Aristotle identifies nature as an "innate impulse of change" that not only sets things in motion but governs the course of those motions and brings them to rest. Only certain things have such inner sources of motion. A tentative list of natural beings is given in the first sentence of Book II, but it is corrected in the second paragraph. The parts of animals are not independent things, so while blood, say, or bone is natural, neither of them is that to which an inner source of motion belongs primarily, in virtue of itself. It is only the whole animal that has a nature, or a whole plant. Similarly, fire cannot properly be said to have a nature, since it is incapable of being a whole [though is can be said to be "natural"]. Like blood and bone, fire, along with earth, air, and water, is only part of the whole being that has a nature.The ordered whole of the cosmos is the one independent thing in nature that is not an animal or plant.

I bolded the relevant part this time. This distinction is developed throughout the corpus. Aristotle is here begining with two prior definitions of nature. Things "are what they are made of," or "things are their form." He will, in a sense, reject both of these to some degree, while retaining elements of them.

"Man generates man," a bed does not generate a bed, but neither does a rock generate a rock. Some nonliving phenomena are more or less self-organizing, but Aristotle was not particularly familiar with these. These aren't really a challenge to his thought though, because it doesn't suppose a binary distinction.

Of course, Aristotle does have a distinction between artifacts and non-artifacts. Fire acts according to a prior actuality. Then again, so does a bronze ball, which rolls (moves/acts) on account of its artificial form, not on account of being made of bronze.

Here is a similar example: Aristotle offers "two-legged" as a definition of man in a number of places (e.g. the Categories , the Metaphysics). This does not mean he thinks this is a good definition of man or that the statement of the definition is the final word on the matter. Rocks possessing principles of motion and generation in the same way that things with souls do leads towards the caricature of Aristotlian physics as a sort of naive animism.

‘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. — Wayfarer

Well, yeah. The mind is a process. Atoms are processes, organisms are processes, galaxies are processes. No "substance", which is an antiquated term no matter which flavor you choose.

Again, Descartes is a product of his time. Maybe we should focus more on what we actually know now rather than how some ancient, long-dead philosophers thought when they would not think the same things if they were alive to day.

Sometimes. At times, theoretical work needs to take a more philosophical look at what is mean by change and motion, and so "process." This comes up a lot in work on time. I really like Richard Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics," which spends a lot of time defining process.

Some physicists, like David Bohm, carry out these sorts of primitive analyses (another example would be similarity and difference).



The soul is just the form by which living things are the sort of self-organizing, self-determining, self-generating proper wholes that they are. Some (philosophical) conceptions of science do away with any real distinction between living and non-living things (e.g. "everything is just collocations of atoms"), but most do not. "Soul" is broadly consistent with those that do not, and include some sort of principle of life. "Soul" is another one of those terms with tons of baggage though. Hardly any scientist is going to use "soul" because it tends to get associated with some sort of ontological dualism due to later uses, or, because the soul is said to be "immaterial" this is taken to mean something like "existing in a discrete spirit realm," instead of simply "being act/form."

At times, theoretical work needs to take a more philosophical look at what is mean by change and motion, and so "process." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It would seem to me that any change or motion would be a type of process. Is there any type of change or motion that would not count as a process?

The soul is just the form by which living things are the sort of self-organizing, self-determining, self-generating proper wholes that they are. Some (philosophical) conceptions of science do away with any real distinction between living and non-living things (e.g. "everything is just collocations of atoms"), but most do not. "Soul" is broadly consistent with those that do not, and include some sort of principle of life. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't it depend on what the current goal is? Is it useful to think of all living and non-living things as part of one group? If so, when is that the case? Is it useful to think of living things as separate from non-living things? If so, when is that the case?

It doesn't appear to me that the universe cares whether living things are categorized with non-living things or not. The universe just is a certain way and it is our present goal that makes certain distinctions more useful than others, not that the universe is contradictory or ill-defined.

All physical beings are changing and so arguably they all are processes, yes. Mark Bickhard had a good (if flawed) article on this that I've posted parts of before (since it's in one of those $250 academic tomes no one without library access will ever get to read).

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826617

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619

Terrance Deacon makes a similar appeal to a metaphysics of process as resolving key issues in our understanding of emergence (he also uses Aristotle a lot):

House of Cards?

The most influential critiques of ontological emergence theories target these notions of downward causality and the role that the emergent whole plays with respect to its parts. To the extent that the emergence of a supposedly novel higher - level phenomenon is thought to exert causal influence on the component processes that gave rise to it, we might worry that we risk double - counting the same causal influence, or even falling into a vicious regress error — with properties of parts explaining properties of wholes explaining properties of parts. Probably the most devastating critique of the emergentist enterprise explores these logical problems. This critique was provided by the contemporary American philosopher Jaegwon Kim in a series of articles and monographs in the 1980s and 1990s, and is often considered to be a refutation of ontological (or strong) emergence theories in general, that is, theories that argue that the causal properties of higher - order phenomena cannot be attributed to lower - level components and their interactions. However, as Kim himself points out, it is rather only a challenge to emergence theories that are based on the particular metaphysical assumptions of substance metaphysics (roughly, that the properties of things inhere in their material constitution), and as such it forces us to find another footing for a coherent conception of emergence.

The critique is subtle and complicated, and I would agree that it is devastating for the conception of emergence that it targets. It can be simplified and boiled down to something like this: Assuming that we live in a world without magic (i.e., the causal closure principle, discussed in chapter 1), and that all composite entities like organisms are made of simpler components without residue, down to some ultimate elementary particles, and assuming that physical interactions ultimately require that these constituents and their causal powers (i.e., physical properties) are the necessary substrate for any physical interaction, then whatever causal powers we ascribe to higher - order composite entities must ultimately be realized by these most basic physical interactions. If this is true, then to claim that the cause of some state or event arises at an emergent higher - order level is redundant. If all higher - order causal interactions are between objects constituted by relationships among these ultimate building blocks of matter, then assigning causal power to various higher - order relations is to do redundant bookkeeping. It’s all just quarks and gluons — or pick your favorite ultimate smallest unit — and everything else is a gloss or descriptive simplification of what goes on at that level. As Jerry Fodor describes it, Kim’s challenge to emergentists is: “why is there anything except physics?” 16

The concept at the center of this critique has been a core issue for emergentism since the British emergentists’ first efforts to precisely articulate it. This is the concept of supervenience...

Effectively, Kim’s critique utilizes one of the principal guidelines for mereological analysis: defining parts and wholes in such a way as to exclude the possibility of double - counting. Carefully mapping all causal powers to distinctive non - overlapping parts of things leaves no room to find them uniquely emergent in aggregates of these parts, no matter how they are organized...

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

[But there is a powerful argument against mereological substance metaphysics: such discrete parts only appear at the quantum scale through large scale statistical smoothing. In many cases, fundamental parts with static properties don't seem to exist and even those that are put forth can form into new, fundamental entities (e.g., Humphrey's notion of fusion).]

This is not meant to suggest that we should appeal to quantum strangeness in order to explain emergent properties, nor would I suggest that we draw quantum implications for processes at human scales. However, it does reflect a problem with simple mereological accounts of matter and causality that is relevant to the problem of emergence.

A straightforward framing of this challenge to a mereological conception of emergence is provided by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Mark Bickhard. His response to this critique of emergence is that the substance metaphysics assumption requires that at base, “particles participate in organization, but do not themselves have organization.” But, he argues, point particles without organization do not exist (and in any case would lead to other absurd consequences) because real particles are the somewhat indeterminate loci of inherently oscillatory quantum fields. These are irreducibly processlike and thus are by definition organized. But if process organization is the irreducible source of the causal properties at this level, then it “cannot be delegitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world.” 20 It follows that if the organization of a process is the fundamental source of its causal power, then fundamental reorganizations of process, at whatever level this occurs, should be associated with a reorganization of causal power as well.

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

The problem though, is that the old issue of the One and the Many rears its head here. If everything is a process, in virtue of what is anything also a discrete thing? How is anything any thing at all? Process metaphysics tends towards a singular universal monoprocess.

Anyhow, these sorts of questions remain important to a number areas in science. Science isn't presuppositionless. In many areas, it has tended to carry on with a 19th century metaphysics of "everything is little balls of stuff touching and arranged such and such." I used to think this was just inertia, that this view stuck around (with children continuing to be indoctrinated in it for the first decades of their lives) merely because it was "good enough." However, I have come around to the conclusion that such a metaphysics is still embraced, despite good evidence to the contrary (and it no longer being popular in physics itself) because it helps to support a number of ethical and political positions, and "personal philosophies" popular in the academy/middle class (philosophies which fulfill something like the role of religion for their adherents). The old metaphysics makes the world either properly absurd for existentialist or properly inscrutable for both volanturist theology and a "pragmatic" hedonism. It makes man's telos inaccessible/non-existent ("science says this"), which is useful for liberal political theory, since it justifies entirely privatizing concerns about ultimate goods.


Every age has its own dogmas and older eras helpfully shed light on them while suggesting alternative paths.

Doesn't it depend on what the current goal is? Is it useful to think of all living and non-living things as part of one group? If so, when is that the case? Is it useful to think of living things as separate from non-living things? If so, when is that the case?

Try applying this logic to other questions. Does Iraq really have or not have WMD, or does it depend on what is useful to us? Are there truly substances, things, or does the existence of any thing at all (even the human person) merely depend on our goals? How can we have goals if our existence is itself a question of usefulness?

Basically, are there facts about the world (e.g. that something is living or not), or do these just depend on what our goals are?

Here is the problem with trying to ground epistemology in "usefulness:" either there are facts about what is useful or there aren't. If nothing is "truly useful," but instead is "useful because we feel it is so," then we have relativism. For the fundamentalist, it is useful to deny evolution for instance. In 1984, it is useful for both citizens and the Party to live by "whatever Big Brother says is true is true."

Whereas, if things are truly useful or not, then such usefulness has a cause. It can be explained. But then this explanation will lead back to questions like "are living things truly (relatively) discrete substances, organic wholes?"

So, while I am all for a constrained form of pragmatism, I think pragmatism is incoherent as a basic epistemic principle and leads towards an infinite regress: See the OP: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15308/pragmatism-without-goodness/p1

This does not mean that all correct descriptions of reality have to be "one way," or that such distinction involve discrete binaries (contradictory opposition). Many will involve contrary opposition (a sliding scale) and analogy. But I don't think "cats are real or not depending on what we are trying to do," leads anywhere good (granted that it may make sense to bracket such questions at times, or make simplifying assumptions). It ultimately ends up putting the will before the intellect, potency before actuality.

not that the universe is contradictory or ill-defined.

Exactly. The reduction of reality to quantity was originally a sort of methodological bracketing. I guess the difficulty is that, when such a bracketing is useful, this usefulness is then used as justification for inflating it into a full blown metaphysics.

Try applying this logic to other questions. Does Iraq really have or not have WMD, or does it depend on what is useful to us? Are there truly substances, things, or does the existence of any thing at all (even the human person) merely depend on our goals? How can we have goals if our existence is itself a question of usefulness? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem though, is that the old issue of the One and the Many rears its head here. If everything is a process, in virtue of what is anything also a discrete thing? How is anything any thing at all? Process metaphysics tends towards a singular universal monoprocess. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I mean is are the boundaries between things real or dependent upon our goals? When is it useful to imagine a boundary between living and non-living and when is it useful to merge them into one category? If some scientists do not see a distinction between living and non-living they must have a reason to do so, right? And when we ask the scientists that view a distinction between living and non-living they have a reason to do so. My point is that they have different goals and if they were to change goals they would end up agreeing. If we were to explore their reasons I think we would find that their ideas are not contradictory, just different views based on different goals. Sometimes it is useful to think of living and non-living as separate and sometimes it is useful to think of them in the same category.

The distinctions seems to be what level of reality they are focused on - reality at the atomic level where non-living and living look the same, or at the macro-level where living and non-living are more distinct. Both views do not contradict each other. They are just different levels of reality that we are focusing our attention on. Does reality have attention, or intention? I doubt it. So are the levels of reality real or products/projections of our limited views of reality?

Here is the problem with trying to ground epistemology in "usefulness:" either there are facts about what is useful or there aren't. If nothing is "truly useful," but instead is "useful because we feel it is so," then we have relativism. For the fundamentalist, it is useful to deny evolution for instance. In 1984, it is useful for both citizens and the Party to live by "whatever Big Brother says is true is true." — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I'm saying is that just because we might find some knowledge useful for certain things does not necessarily mean that knowledge contradicts or does not complement other knowledge about other parts of reality. Does genetics contradict biology? Does atomic theory contradict astrophysics? No. They are just descriptions of different levels of reality depending on what it is we are focused on at the moment. Our minds do not have an infinite amount of memory and our senses can only access certain levels of reality (there is a level or reality where lightwaves are to big compared to the objects at the atomic level so the waves never reflect off the objects for us to see them so we use devices like electron microscopes to view the atomic level of reality.)

I wanted to go back to this exchange:

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.
— Wayfarer
Where in the scientific explanation was the word, "stuff" used, or what makes you believe that "stuff" was implied when "substance" is used? It seems you are projecting a strawman into the description that isn't there.

You solve your own problem by incorporating other scientific knowledge that there is no real material ultimate in the sense of the material atom. If science also says that atoms are excitations in fields then it is not saying that substance is stuff. So your explanation only works if you compartmentalize scientific knowledge, like you just did. But as I said before, the conclusion in one domain of knowledge (or one field of science) should not contradict the conclusions reached in another. All knowledge must be integrated. — Harry Hindu

It appears that it is a common way of thinking of "substance" as being something fundamental. According to the above descriptions, substance would not be fundamental but would simply be what we call a thing that consists of only type of atom or molecule, and atoms are not stuff but are excitations in fields. We abandoned this view of atoms being little billiard balls bouncing around in favor of quantum mechanics that talks about wave functions and superposition. So it appears that science at least has abandoned the idea that substance is something fundamental, in favor of a view that process appears to be fundamental and substances are just a type of process, or relation between certain types of atoms.

Whereas ouisia - being - I instead address via the term "essence". — javra
Good choice. I didn't really notice, until composing this post, the interchangeability of 'essence' and 'substance', but I think the former is far less prone to equivocation. We still use 'essence' (as in, 'the essence of the matter') in a way that is more in line with the earlier use. — Wayfarer

proposed that we use Spinoza's definition of Substance*1, which seems to describe God as the ultimate Essence : all possible modes of being. If so, then the modern sense of material Substance applies to only a subset of all possible modes. Logical Essence (attributes & modes) is another category of God Stuff that Descartes labelled res cogitans. :smile:


*1. In Spinoza's philosophy, God is defined as the one and only substance, possessing infinite attributes and modes. This God is not a separate being from the universe but is the universe itself. Everything that exists is a mode of God, meaning it's a way God expresses itself. . . .
God possesses an infinite number of attributes, each expressing a different aspect of God's essence.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=spinoza+god+substance

Right, but there is a difference between methodological bracketing and simplifying assumptions and allowing that bracketing to become a sort of metaphysics that defines things like black holes, birds, and trees in terms of "usefulness."

And a lot of times these assumptions do lead to contradictory claims about reality; that's an ongoing tension in the sciences. The physics of atoms does not comport with the physics of relativistic scales. Explanations of biological function do not comport with "everything is blind mechanism." The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis controversy centers around this disconnect. Eliminitive materialism does not comport with pretty much the whole of the social sciences, which have a role for conscious agency. The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" centers around this seeming contradiction. A lot of contradictions arise from this bracketing, which is fine if it is just a methodological tool for simplifying models and predictions, but problematic if the model is inflated into a metaphysics.

It appears that it is a common way of thinking of "substance" as being something fundamental. According to the above descriptions, substance would not be fundamental but would simply be what we call a thing that consists of only type of atom or molecule, and atoms are not stuff but are excitations in fields. We abandoned this view of atoms being little billiard balls bouncing around in favor of quantum mechanics that talks about wave functions and superposition. So it appears that science at least has abandoned the idea that substance is something fundamental, in favor of a view that process appears to be fundamental and substances are just a type of process, or relation between certain types of atoms.

With the rejection of the "billiard ball model" has tended to come a rejection of "smallism" the claim that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. Prima facie, there is no reason why "smaller" should entail "more fundamental." Nor is it clear that wholes should always be definable in terms of their parts. The opposite appears to be the case in some instances.

But this can, and has, led to a flip to a sort of bigism. Only fields are fundamental because they are truly universal. Bigger is more fundamental.

Yet one might think that what is needed is a via media here between bigism and smallism. That's what the idea of substance (in some usages at least) is called in to do, to explain how there are wholes (nouns) and not just verbs (interactions), and to explain the intrinsic intelligibility by which things are things (as opposed to all things being a product of a sort of bare human will—"bare" because the will cannot be informed by the intellect re things if things' existence is itself a product of the will).

In discussions of emergence, it's often said that whatever is "strongly emergent" would have to also be "fundamental." After all, it isn't reducible. This means that a rejection of reductionism is a rejection of the idea that "fundamental = small."

However, "strong emergence" starts to look like sorcery in many framings. At the same time, reductionism has its own problems, not the least of which is a pretty terrible empirical track record. What's the big reduction outside of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics? Chemistry is not an immature field and yet a century on the basics of molecular structure have yet to be reduced. Unifications seem far more common than reductions (which suggests bigism more than smallism). Reductionism starts to look more like a hopeful metaphysical presupposition, a hunch, than an empirical theory (and no doubt, it is partly popular because it is such an intuition, since the basic idea is older than Socrates and crops up throughout history).

Hence, principles and their role in form (and defining beings-plural): :smile:

The epistemic issues raised by multiplicity and ceaseless change are addressed by Aristotle’s distinction between principles and causes. Aristotle presents this distinction early in the Physics through a criticism of Anaxagoras.1 Anaxagoras posits an infinite number of principles at work in the world. Were Anaxagoras correct, discursive knowledge would be impossible. For instance, if we wanted to know “how bows work,” we would have to come to know each individual instance of a bow shooting an arrow, since there would be no unifying principle through which all bows work. Yet we cannot come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time.2

However, an infinite (or practically infinite) number of causes does not preclude meaningful knowledge if we allow that many causes might be known through a single principle (a One), which manifests at many times and in many places (the Many). Further, such principles do seem to be knowable. For instance, the principle of lift allows us to explain many instances of flight, both as respects animals and flying machines. Moreover, a single unifying principle might be relevant to many distinct sciences, just as the principle of lift informs both our understanding of flying organisms (biology) and flying machines (engineering). 

For Aristotle, what are “better known to us” are the concrete particulars experienced directly by the senses. By contrast, what are “better known in themselves” are the more general principles at work in the world.3,i Since every effect is a sign of its causes, we can move from the unmanageable multiplicity of concrete particulars to a deeper understanding of the world.ii

For instance, individual insects are what are best known to us. In most parts of the world, we can directly experience vast multitudes of them simply by stepping outside our homes. However, there are 200 million insects for each human on the planet, and perhaps 30 million insect species.4 If knowledge could only be acquired through the experience of particulars, it seems that we could only ever come to know an infinitesimally small amount of what there is to know about insects. However, the entomologist is able to understand much about insects because they understand the principles that are unequally realized in individual species and particular members of those species.iii

Some principles are more general than others. For example, one of the most consequential paradigm shifts across the sciences in the past fifty years has been the broad application of the methods of information theory, complexity studies, and cybernetics to a wide array of sciences. This has allowed scientists to explain disparate phenomena across the natural and social sciences using the same principles. For instance, the same principles can be used to explain both how heart cells synchronize and why Asian fireflies blink in unison.1 The same is true for how the body’s production of lymphocytes (a white blood cell) takes advantage of the same goal-direct “parallel terraced scan” technique developed independently by computer programmers and used by ants in foraging.2

Notably, such unifications are not reductions. Clearly, firefly behavior is not reducible to heart cell behavior or vice versa. Indeed, such unifications tend to be “top-down” explanations, focusing on similarities between systems taken as wholes, as opposed to “bottom-up” explanations that attempts to explain wholes in terms of their parts.i...

At the outset of the second book of the Physics, Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production. (i.e. “possessing a nature”). Beings make up a whole—a whole which is oriented towards some end. This definition would seem to exclude mere parts of an organism. For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole.
On this view, living things would most fully represent “beings.” By contrast, something like a rock is not a proper being. A rock is a mere bundle of external causes. Moreover, if one breaks a rock in half, one simply has two smaller rocks (i.e., an accidental change). Whereas, if one cuts a cat in half, the cat—as a being—will lose its unity and cease to exist (i.e. death, a substantial change).

There are gradations in the level of unity something can have. Aristotle maintains that substantial change (i.e., the change by which one type of thing becomes another type of thing, e.g. a man becoming a corpse) involves contradictory opposition. That is, a thing is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish. It would not make sense for anything to be “half-man.”i

By contrast, unity involves contrary opposition.1 Things might be more or less unified, and more or less divisible. For instance, a volume of water in a jar is very easy to divide. A water molecule less so. We can think of the living organism as achieving a higher sort of unity, such that its diverse multitude of parts come to be truly unified into a whole through an aim.ii

For Aristotle, unity, “oneness” is the ground for saying that there are any discrete things at all. To say that there is “one duck” requires an ability to recognize a duck as a whole, to have “duck” as a measure. Likewise, to say that there are “three ducks” requires the measure “duck” by which a multitude of wholes is demarcated. Magnitude is likewise defined by unity, since it would not make sense to refer to a “half-foot” or a “quarter-note” without a measure by which a whole foot or note is known.2...


[Organisms are most properly wholes because they are unified by aims. Life is goal-directed.] What then can we say about the ways in which non-living things can be more or less unified? Here, the research on complexity and self-organizing, dissipative systems might be helpful. Consider very large objects such as, stars, nebulae, planets, and galaxies as an example. These are so large that the relatively weak force of gravity allows them to possess a sort of unity. Even if a planet is hit by another planet (our best hypothesis for how our own moon formed), it will reform due to the attractive power of gravity. Likewise, stars, galaxies, etc. have definable “life-cycles,” and represent a sort of “self-organizing system,” even though they are far less self-organizing than organisms. By contrast, a rock has a sort of arbitrary unity (although it does not lack all unity! We can clearly distinguish discrete rocks in a non-arbitrary fashion).

I think you miss two critically important points in your etymologically based purported potted history of the idea of substance.

First the inquiry into the fundamental constituents of the world began with the Pre-Socratics, and being itself was not the explanation but what they wished to explain since being just means 'existence' or 'to exist', and it was precisely what constituted existence that they were concerned to investigate. None of the Pre-Socratics proposed ousia to be the fundamental substance or nature of existence.

Second substance was never "subject" for Spinoza―for Spinoza God was not an experiencing subject, not transcendent but immanent, and was the nature of nature itself, and you would know that if you had actually read his works. I doubt you have read or understood Aristotle either, but I can't correct you on that since I have not studied his work. i don't presume to comment on what I have not studied in depth.

i don't presume to comment on what I have not studied in depth. — Janus

Yet you presume to tell others that you know what they have or haven't read.

for Spinoza God was not an experiencing subject, not transcendent but immanent, and was the nature of nature itself, — Janus

I’d put it like this: In the Ethics (which I did study as an undergraduate) Spinoza finds lasting happiness in the intellectual love of God, which is the vision of the one infinite Substance (which could equally well be understood as Being) underlying everything and everyone. This is not the love of a subject in the personal sense, but the joyous recognition that all finite things, including our own minds, are expressions of the one infinite reality that is.

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-).” — Wayfarer

You might prefer Heidegger's interpretation over that drawn out by centuries of study by the scholastics, but I've read some of each, and I find that the scholastic interpretation makes a lot more sense. In the end, that's the only way we can each judge something like this, by what seems to make the most sense.