By Gary S. Rosenkrantz, Joshua Hoffman

Substance has been a number one inspiration within the heritage of Western philosophy. Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz clarify the character and lifestyles of person ingredients, together with either dwelling issues and inanimate gadgets. particularly written for college students new to this crucial and infrequently complicated topic, Substance presents either the old and modern assessment of the debate.
Great Philosophers of the previous, comparable to Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, and Berkeley have been profoundly attracted to the idea that of substance. And, the authors argue, a trust within the lifestyles of drugs is an essential component of our daily global view. yet what constitutes substance? was once Aristotle correct to indicate that artefacts like tables and ships don't rather exist?
Substance: Its Nature and lifestyles is likely one of the first non-technical, available publications to this vital challenge and may be of serious use to scholars of metaphysics and philosophy.

Show description

Read or Download Substance: Its Nature and Existence PDF

Best philosophy books

Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Trial of Socrates

This guidebook introduces and examines Plato's 3 dialogues that care for the dying of Socrates: Euthphryo, Apology and Crito. those dialogues are generally considered as the nearest exposition of Socrates' ideas.

Part of the Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks sequence.

Jean-François Lyotard (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Jean-François Lyotard is among the such a lot celebrated proponents of what has turn into often called the 'postmodern'. greater than virtually the other modern theorist, he has explored the family among wisdom, paintings, politics and heritage, in ways in which provide radical new probabilities for brooding about smooth tradition.

Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970

This paintings explores the bothered courting and unfinished highbrow discussion among Paul Celan, seemed by way of many because the most vital ecu poet after 1945, and Martin Heidegger, possibly the main influential determine in twentieth-century philosophy. It facilities at the continual ambivalence Celan, a Holocaust survivor, felt towards a philosopher who revered him and from time to time promoted his poetry.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (2nd Edition)

Isaiah Berlin was once deeply in demand in the course of his lifestyles, yet his complete contribution used to be maybe underestimated due to his choice for the lengthy essay shape. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's paintings and reintroduce it to a vast, keen readership have long past a ways to therapy this. Now, Princeton is happy to come to print, below one disguise, Berlin's essays on those celebrated and fascinating highbrow photographs: Vico, Hamann, and Herder.

Additional info for Substance: Its Nature and Existence

Sample text

Piii) There is a logically or metaphysically necessary connection among the parts of the collection. (Piv) The parts of the collection are unified by some combination of the foregoing criteria. (Pv) There is some other unifying relation among the parts of the collection. There are a number of problems confronting (Pi). First, (Pi) presupposes that a substance is located in space, and so is incompatible with the very possibility of a nonphysical soul. (Pi) explains the unity of a substance in terms of the spatial coincidence of its qualities.

This result suggests that what the inherence theory provides a definition of is not a substance, but a subject of predication, which, of course, every entity is. Thus, what the inherence theory defines is being an entity and not being a substance. 3 INDEPENDENCE THEORIES OF SUBSTANCE Another important type of theory about substance, examples of which are found in Aristotle, Descartes, and Spinoza, is that a substance is that which is uniquely independent of all other entities. We have already encountered Aristotle’s attempt to formulate an independence The concept of substance in history 21 theory of substance: it is the definition of substance as that which is neither said-of nor in a subject.

The implication that the shape of o is a part of o also conflicts with another datum for a theory of substance: that the parts of a material substance are either material substances or portions of matter. That collectionism has implications which conflict with these data is an indication of a category mistake in the identification of substances with collections. 47 In the foregoing argument, we appealed to certain data concerning the intuitive concept of an individual substance. An analysis of substance should, prima facie, be compatible with such data.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.31 of 5 – based on 38 votes