"Substance" in Philosophical Discourse
Theres an important distinction that often gets glossed over in discussions of philosophy, especially when dealing with early modern or classical sources. That is, the difference between substance in the philosophical sense, and substance in everyday usage.
These meanings are quite different but easily conflatedwith unfortunate consequences. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, "substance entered modern languages as a philosophical term, and it is the everyday use that has drifted from the philosophical uses." This shift carries subtle but significant implications that are often overlooked.
So this post aims to make a start on analysing that distinction.
Origin of the Term
The philosophical term "substance" originates from Latin translations of Aristotle, especially The Categories, Physics, and Metaphysics. Aristotles original term was ousia (?????), which is closer in meaning to being than to stuff or matter.
The origin of "substance" in philosophical discourse was from Latin translations of the Greek texts:
[quote=Ouisia, Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousia]The term ????? is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb ????, 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 ?????, while Apuleius rendered ????? both as "essentia" or "substantia". In order to designate ?????, 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 ?????.[/quote]
Aristotles original term was ousia (?????), which is closer in meaning to being than to stuff or matter. One of the arguments I will often seek to defend is that this conception of being as "I Am" carries an implicit first-person perspectivea subjective dimension of being that much of modern philosophy, with its emphasis on objectivity, tends to suppress or bracket out. (For more on this, see Charles Kahns The Greek Verb To Be and the Concept of Being. I think this also maps against worldviewparticularly the turn from participatory knowing to a detached, third-person model grounded in objectivity - perhaps one of the reasons why this distinction is controversial.)
In this view, being is not merely a feature of things out there in objective space, but something intimately tied to the standpoint of the subjectlived, known, and experienced.
Another important point about "substance" in traditional use is that it describes the ultimate constituents of reality. But in traditional and early modern philosophy, these ultimate constituents were still regarded as subjects, emphatically not as the objective existents posited by early modern science (such as atoms. For this point, see 17th Century Theories of Substance.)
Much of the pre-modern writing about being, essence, substantia and essentia, was in the province of scholastic theology, most of which could nowadays be regarded as arcane - save for the shadow of René Descartes, whose "substance dualism" turns out to have taken, and radically transformed, the concept of "substance" as it had been previously understood in philosophical discourse, with considerable consequences for modern culture.
The Ghost in the Machine
It is practically common knowledge (something unusual in philosophy!) that René Descartes divided the world into two separate and incommensurable substances: that of
* matter (res extensa) which was extended, massive and utterly lacking in intelligence, and
* the soul (mind or psyche, res cogitans) which was rational, intelligent, and incorporeal.
Here is where the modern conception of substance begins to take root. Descartes' model treats res cogitans as a kind of "thinking thing"a ghostly, ethereal substancesomehow meant to interact with extended matter. It is this conception, I believe, which underwrites the famous criticism of Descartes' "res cogitans" as the "ghost in the machine" by Gilbert Ryle among others.
Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, also critiqued Descartes' res cogitans, but in a rather more perceptive way. Husserl admired Descartes and saw in him a founding genius of modern philosophy. But according to scholar Dermot Moran:
I think this is where the "flattening" that is so characteristic of modern ontology shows up. By treating the mind (res cogitans) as a "thinking thing" (which is the literal translation!), Descartes inadvertently situates the mind as kind of denizen of the natural world, rather than realising its transcendental nature as the ground of meaning (per Kant and later by Husserl.) This "flattening" is central to the process of "objectification" which characterises the shift in modern thinking. And here is where I think the confusion about "substance" begins to manifest, as the philosophical term becomes conflated with the everyday sense of "substance" as (1) "a particular kind of matter with uniform properties" and (2) "the real physical matter of which a person or thing consists and which has a tangible, solid presence".
Conclusion
So, when talking about "substances" in relation to such topics as "substance dualism" or "philosophical monism" it is important to bear in mind these historical shifts in meaning. We naturally nowadays tend to adopt a "thing ontology" rather than a "being ontology", as it were - whatever the fundamental constituents of reality are, they must be amenable to objective description (and quantification where possible). This tends to colour the way we think about "substance" in all these debates.
Has the confusion between philosophical and everyday meanings of substance something you've encountered in your own reading or forum conversations? How do you think it affects how we talk about mind, matter, or metaphysics more generally?
References and Sources
Substance Theory (Wikipedia)
Ouisia (Wikipedia)
Substance, SEP
Substance, IEP
17th Century Theories of Substance (relevant to early modern philosophy)
The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being, Charles H. Kahn
Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction, Dermot Moran
These meanings are quite different but easily conflatedwith unfortunate consequences. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, "substance entered modern languages as a philosophical term, and it is the everyday use that has drifted from the philosophical uses." This shift carries subtle but significant implications that are often overlooked.
So this post aims to make a start on analysing that distinction.
Origin of the Term
The philosophical term "substance" originates from Latin translations of Aristotle, especially The Categories, Physics, and Metaphysics. Aristotles original term was ousia (?????), which is closer in meaning to being than to stuff or matter.
The origin of "substance" in philosophical discourse was from Latin translations of the Greek texts:
[quote=Ouisia, Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousia]The term ????? is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb ????, 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 ?????, while Apuleius rendered ????? both as "essentia" or "substantia". In order to designate ?????, 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 ?????.[/quote]
Aristotles original term was ousia (?????), which is closer in meaning to being than to stuff or matter. One of the arguments I will often seek to defend is that this conception of being as "I Am" carries an implicit first-person perspectivea subjective dimension of being that much of modern philosophy, with its emphasis on objectivity, tends to suppress or bracket out. (For more on this, see Charles Kahns The Greek Verb To Be and the Concept of Being. I think this also maps against worldviewparticularly the turn from participatory knowing to a detached, third-person model grounded in objectivity - perhaps one of the reasons why this distinction is controversial.)
In this view, being is not merely a feature of things out there in objective space, but something intimately tied to the standpoint of the subjectlived, known, and experienced.
Another important point about "substance" in traditional use is that it describes the ultimate constituents of reality. But in traditional and early modern philosophy, these ultimate constituents were still regarded as subjects, emphatically not as the objective existents posited by early modern science (such as atoms. For this point, see 17th Century Theories of Substance.)
Much of the pre-modern writing about being, essence, substantia and essentia, was in the province of scholastic theology, most of which could nowadays be regarded as arcane - save for the shadow of René Descartes, whose "substance dualism" turns out to have taken, and radically transformed, the concept of "substance" as it had been previously understood in philosophical discourse, with considerable consequences for modern culture.
The Ghost in the Machine
It is practically common knowledge (something unusual in philosophy!) that René Descartes divided the world into two separate and incommensurable substances: that of
* matter (res extensa) which was extended, massive and utterly lacking in intelligence, and
* the soul (mind or psyche, res cogitans) which was rational, intelligent, and incorporeal.
Here is where the modern conception of substance begins to take root. Descartes' model treats res cogitans as a kind of "thinking thing"a ghostly, ethereal substancesomehow meant to interact with extended matter. It is this conception, I believe, which underwrites the famous criticism of Descartes' "res cogitans" as the "ghost in the machine" by Gilbert Ryle among others.
Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, also critiqued Descartes' res cogitans, but in a rather more perceptive way. Husserl admired Descartes and saw in him a founding genius of modern philosophy. But according to scholar Dermot Moran:
Husserl, both in Cartesian Meditations and later in The Crisis of the European Sciences, criticizes Descartes for treating the pure subject as a residuum of the world rather than as the basis of meaning. In Morans words, Descartes treated the ego as a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt CM §10, p. 24) a real entity rather than the condition for the possibility of unified experience and a domain of meaning-constitution
I think this is where the "flattening" that is so characteristic of modern ontology shows up. By treating the mind (res cogitans) as a "thinking thing" (which is the literal translation!), Descartes inadvertently situates the mind as kind of denizen of the natural world, rather than realising its transcendental nature as the ground of meaning (per Kant and later by Husserl.) This "flattening" is central to the process of "objectification" which characterises the shift in modern thinking. And here is where I think the confusion about "substance" begins to manifest, as the philosophical term becomes conflated with the everyday sense of "substance" as (1) "a particular kind of matter with uniform properties" and (2) "the real physical matter of which a person or thing consists and which has a tangible, solid presence".
Conclusion
So, when talking about "substances" in relation to such topics as "substance dualism" or "philosophical monism" it is important to bear in mind these historical shifts in meaning. We naturally nowadays tend to adopt a "thing ontology" rather than a "being ontology", as it were - whatever the fundamental constituents of reality are, they must be amenable to objective description (and quantification where possible). This tends to colour the way we think about "substance" in all these debates.
Has the confusion between philosophical and everyday meanings of substance something you've encountered in your own reading or forum conversations? How do you think it affects how we talk about mind, matter, or metaphysics more generally?
References and Sources
Substance Theory (Wikipedia)
Ouisia (Wikipedia)
Substance, SEP
Substance, IEP
17th Century Theories of Substance (relevant to early modern philosophy)
The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being, Charles H. Kahn
Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction, Dermot Moran
Comments (166)
A very good - and might I add substantial :wink: - OP!
Quoting Wayfarer
Personally, given its modern connotations, in my own writings I tend to reserve the term "substance" for "stuff" - be it mental (e.g., ideas, thoughts, paradigms, etc.) or else material. Whereas ouisia - being - I instead address via the term "essence".
I find that so doing allows me to specify awareness as being (as essence) and all that is non-aware (be it an idea one entertains or else a rock one sees) as a different type of being (a different type of essence) - and this without importing the baggage of "stuff", else of "thingness" (ideas are things as well), nowadays too often associated with the term "substance" into the concept of awareness's being.
More and more these days, and thanks to you, I find myself quoting The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E A Burtt. This came to mind while I was reading your OP.
In particular it is difficult for the modern mind, accustomed to think so largely in terms of space and time, to realize how unimportant these entities were for scholastic science. Spatial and temporal relations were accidental, not essential characteristics. Instead of spatial connexions of things, men were seeking their logical connexions; instead of the onward march of time, men thought of the eternal passage of potentiality
Instead of treating things in terms of substance, accident, and causality, essence and idea, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions, and laws, changes of mass in space and time, and the like. Pick up the works of any modern philosopher, and note how complete the shift has been...
e.g.
[s]https://medium.com/thedialogues/spinoza-on-why-there-can-only-be-one-substance-f86842057158[/s]
https://iep.utm.edu/substanc/#H3
That only one subject rings truer to me. Its not exactly right but conveys a dimension of meaning that substance tends to occlude.
Being very much a resident of the 20th and 21st centuries and an engineer to boot, I find myself very much at home with Burtts understanding of modern science. I struggle with imagining the world in the terms of scholastic science, including substance has described in your OP.
In this way, matter or energy is commonly cited as the substance of physical objects, and the physical world in general, while meaning or mind, may be cited as the substance of ideas and concepts. Since these two supporting substances appear to be very different, I think that substance dualism is the best way to understand the reality of world.
It's less inconsistent and more parsimonious, it seems to me, to conceive of "physical" and "mental" as two properties ways of describing / modeling substance than positing them as "two substances" (which do not share a medium by which to interact with one another). Property dualism, for example, does not have "substance dualism's" interaction problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism#Arguments_against_dualism
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.
Quoting T Clark
I'm not that conversant with the intricacies of scholastic philosophy. And I don't think that there's any 'going back' to an earlier time. What interests me is the point about how we (unconsciously?) depict substance in objective terms, which in my view renders it oxymoronic (e.g. as 'thinking stuff'). Something very important has been lost in translation, as it were.
hmmm. I can see the sense of that. It's pretty much in line with the original meaning.
Quoting 180 Proof
However this begs the question 'properties of what', doesn't it? Some kind of reality that is neither physical nor mental, but exhibits both properties? So whatever that 'substance' is, is neither physical nor mental in nature. I think I can probably go along with some form of that.
The Wiki article you linked is also quite a good source.
:up: Spinoza's model also resonates with me. It allows us to think of substance as "fundamental stuff" which can be both extended stuff and thinking stuff. The idea that thinking stuff is a contradiction only stands on the basis of thinking of matter as incompatible with thought because the latter is understood as an "immaterial" activity. This thinking reflects an entrenched Cartesian/ Newtonian prejudice.
Thats exactly the kind of confusion I was pointing to in the OP. This kind of criticism of dualism misunderstands the category that mental causation belongs to. It assumes causation must be modeled on physical causationlike billiard balls transferring momentumso it looks for some kind of mental force that pushes the body in an analogous way. But thats already a misstep.
A mental eventlike the intention to cross the roomisnt analogous to a physical force in that sense. It doesnt cause motion by exerting force in space. Rather, it operates at the level of intentionality and subjective orientation. Treating mental events as if they must function like physical ones is a category mistake (as Ryle points out). The mind isnt a ghostly thing pushing on the body; its a way of being and acting in the world not reducible to physical mechanisms (and so not describable in purely physical terms).
To clarify further, Id refer back to the Aristotelian concept of psuch?often translated as soul, but better understood as the form or organising principle of the body. (The soul is the form of the body, in Aristotles famous phrase.) On this view, what we now call mental events are inherently intentional in a way that physical forces are not.
This sidesteps the Cartesian problem entirely. The psuch? isnt a ghost in the machineits what makes the organism a living being in the first place. Mental activity, from this perspective, doesnt stand out as a causal anomaly in a mechanical world, but emerges as the mode of intelligibility appropriate to beings like us.
That is a succinct illustration of the sense in which hylomorphic differs from Cartesian dualism, and one of the reasons for the so-called 'revival of Aristotelianism' in the biological sciences.
I remember thinking that the world is fundamentally human, or at least half human. Theoretically, there is a world out there, but our only access to it is through our interactions with it. We cant really separate ourselves and what we know from the world and we cant really separate the world from ourselves and what we know. I think thats why Taoism felt so familiar to me when I came across it.
Sure, totally get that. Taoism is after all non-dualist in some fundamental way (even if the term is generally more associated with Indian rather than Chinese philosophy.)
Quoting jgill
Right. That's more in keeping with the traditional use of the term. 'Substantial', as are 'men of substance' or 'matters of substance'. //And what's interesting about that is the connection with meaning (as in "import" or "significance"), which is absent from the normal meaning of "substance".
When you speak of principle it reminds me a little of Hegel for whom the spirit is an active principle or process of reality as opposed to the concept of substance as something immobile and static, codified and subsistent by itself.
The movement with respect to the scholastic philosophic is precisely the introduction of notions such as event, process, active principle, etc. From the static to the dynamic, from the cosified to the processual.
But I don't think it changes much about the hard problem of consciousness either. Because we want to be physicalists about something that seems to escape this kind of descriptions. The question is: if it is no longer dualism of subtances what is the ontology that best suits this difference between the mental and the physical?
Totally. But then, Hegel was a representative of the grand tradition of philosophy. That 'active principle' is again reminiscent of the original Aristotelian insight, which hardened into dogmatic scholasticism. Perhaps Hegel was re-capturing the spirit of the original! I'm sure he would have liked to think so.
Quoting JuanZu
Well, there's the million dollar question. Probably another whole thread, I think. I posted this one as a kind of reference topic, as the subject of 'substance' and 'substance dualism' comes up all the time, but without awareness of these double meanings.
I don't see the purpose of your proposal. Substance dualism does not deny a medium of interaction. The medium is the third element proposed by Plato in his "tripartite soul". This is the world we live in, the world of interaction between the two distinct forms of substance. The world we know, is the medium.
By claiming that the physical and the mental are two distinct types of properties, instead of two distinct substances interacting, you try to make the medium itself, into the substance. This is untenable by our current principles of knowledge and understanding. As demonstrated by the failure to detect the aether which supports electromagnetic waves, we do not have the required principles to understand both mental and physical as the properties of one underlying substance. Our knowledge does not substantiate that claimed substance.
Therefore until we have the elusive "theory of everything", we need to understand reality according to the principles which we do have. These principles support an understanding of two distinct substances which interact, rather than two distinct types of properties of one substance. All we have as evidence is the interaction, not the substance which ties the two together. The "ideal" of a single substance is just an unsubstantiated "pie-in-the-sky". And it's inherently self-contradictory to assume an unsubstantiated substance.
That's the point of "substance", it has to be what supports, gives reality to our principles, ideas, and logic, as what substantiates them. It cannot be a speculative ideal, which may or may not be true, because this cannot provide any true foundation for the reality of being. So we must assume the "substance" which actually supports our knowledge until it is demonstrated, proven, to be incorrect. Currently our knowledge is supported by two distinct and separate substances.
Sometimes I prefer the neutral term "item" when discussing a putative entity or event or property. This is perhaps the closest non-technical way of indicating "whatever it is that's capable of being talked about in this discourse." At least it avoids words like "thing" or "object", which have those materialistic connotations.
Quoting Wayfarer
Back to Kimhi and Rodl! I am more and more intrigued by this.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm almost sure we share the same philosophical picture here, but with respect, I think we have to get clearer about our ignorance. A mental event doesn't cause motion by exerting force in space -- very good. But it "operates"? What is that? Isn't this a placeholder term for something we don't yet know how to talk about? The mind doesn't push on the body -- right. But it's "a way of being and acting"? Well . . . OK, but are we really saying anything, by saying this?
As you perhaps can tell from other posts of mine, I think causality is the completely wrong model with which to understand the relation of the mental and the physical. There's only one "item" going on here, which is experienced differently depending on whether you're "it" or not!
Quoting Wayfarer
And so is the supervenience approach to the so-called mind/body dualism. But I'm in danger of taking back what I said a few paragraphs ago, and acting like we have some real understanding of how all this works! Not yet . . . but we will.
Given that substance dualism immediately supposes Descartes First Principles for philosophizing in an orderly way, 1644, is found the definitions by which such dualism is meant to be understood, re: 1, 7-9; 1, 51-54.
. Some philosophers dont see this, but thats because they havent done their philosophizing in an orderly way, and havent carefully enough distinguished the mind from the body. They may have been more certain of their own existence than of the existence of anything else, but they havent seen that this certainty required that they were minds. Instead of that, they thought that they were only bodiesthe bodies that they saw with their eyes and touched with their hands, the bodies that they wrongly credited with the power of sense-perception. Thats what prevented them from perceiving the nature of the mind .
(P. P., 1, 12)
Hence the partial qualifier** for the Kantian classification of problematical idealism attributed to him, insofar as if hed only thought to make it clear, that they were not only bodies (objects) but also subjects, rather than also minds, then his definition of substance itself would have been far easier to argue, that is to say, far easier left to itself as a mere category, while the idea of dualism would have been unaffected.
-
(**) another being .
At all events it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving (sentire), which is nothing else than thinking .
(Meditations, 2, 9, 1641)
the conclusion, of course, being disastrously false according to subsequent versions of idealism which retain their respective ground in a universal and necessary dualism.
-
Me, here and now, I think he infused into the notion of substance more, or other, than I would grant, but if I was a 1644 philosophy peer, I might not disagree so much. Terminology aside, in principle, logically, he wasnt that wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and I think we need to go back even a bit further.
In Heraclitian metaphysics, becoming is the only thing that 'is', or being is becoming.
If being is becoming, then being is a fiction because being implies something that does not become but stays the same. In our experience of becoming we cognize a thing, and then later re-cognize a similar thing that is not exactly the same and give it the same name. X=X, identity strips becoming of its duration... it freezes it in time.
Being as a product of cognition, implies 1) a being that has some motivation for splitting pieces of becoming, but also 2) a view from a certain point in becoming.
1)
2)
We necessarily view things from a certain perspective and valuations differ. That is not to say that we don't all point to the same reality of becoming. Our senses do not lie, in the sense of our perceptions being merely appearance and not the thing in itself. They are selective and partial, but real enough.
There is no thing in itself, and thus no appearances... only perspectives on the totality of the one becoming.
In this context, Descartes, Spinoza, and Deleuze's concerns over interaction just don't make sense. I have tried to trace the historical path by which Descartes ends up with his "substance," without much luck finding a good source. It seems very different from high scholasticism.
As IEP notes:
But how did this sea change occur? I can only suppose it has to do with nominalism, such that what makes a thing anything at all can no longer be its intelligible eidos (form), which maybe also explains how "matter" also transforms from "potency" to primarily "substrate." Of course, "matter" was always used to mean "substrate" to some degree, but the idea was that the substrate was a certain sort of substrate on account of its form (act), and things were "material" in that they had the potential for substantial change, local motion, etc. Prime matter, i.e. pure matter was nothing at all.
Obviously, the IEP quote shows how substance was being called in for the essence/existence distinction, and I suppose the univocity of being (also related to nominalism) is a relevant historical precedent here. Deleuze speaks of immanent/transcendent substance, which makes even less sense in the original context, although I suppose it has some precedent in the debates over ousia versus hypostasis for God.
My guess is, as universals became "names" some way to tie properties back to things had to be developed. The "names" come from us, but they have to have some cause in things, else we have no knowledge of them. No notion of participation or inherence could be called upon, so substrate has to expand beyond being mere potential (which would explain why substance and matter collapse towards meaning the same thing, when before they are almost opposites, a substance being what a thing is and matter its potential to be something else).
"Being" is however a verb, a process, that is treated as a noun conceptually, the same as "becoming" is in philosophical circles.
This cultural reification of being into something that is fixed and hence not process, I'll argue, may have something to do with the metaphysical notion of an ultimate goal or telos of being (as verb) which could, for one example, be equated with the Neoplatonic notion of the "the One" - which ceases to be a striving toward but instead is the ultimate and final actualization of all strivings.
One can note that the term "becoming" can also easily raise the question "becoming what?" And, unlike many a modern interpretation of the process theory of becoming - which, to my mind, again seems to in some way reify becoming at large into a static thing, or else "something that always stays the same" - becoming does not logically entail a completely permanent relativism wherein there is nothing for all of this becoming to eventually become.
Heraclitus, or at least his known fragments, are not very explicit about the philosophical working which Heraclitus espoused. Nevertheless, one will find in Heraclitus in quite explicit manners the notion of something which is - i.e., some being per se - which is not in duality with its opposite and hence is not in a state of perpetually changing:
Quoting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus#Fragment_32
Quoting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus#Fragment_41
It then seems plausible enough to infer from his total known fragments that for Heraclitus becoming has at its ultimate end this addressed "wisdom" which is "one only" and can go by the name of "Zeus" (although imperfectly).
I think it may have come from the transition of a predominantly oral tradition to writing. If something is written down it is not a person telling something to another person in a specific context anymore, but something that is abstracted from its original context to be read be someone who doesn't necessarily knows anything about that.
Quoting javra
Zeus is the totality of becoming, the one thing that is, the thing that cannot be named, the logos etc. I think he was using common used terminology of the time to convey to his contempories what he was getting at.
I think he saw this becoming, the universe as patterned to some extend, and cognition of man driven by desire or attachment as distorting. We are rational insofar we are part of it, and can intuit or sense it if we are not overly driven by desire (dry soul). This is very similar to how they see it in eastern traditions like Daoism for instance.
While I agree with the second sentence, I don't think Heraclitus can be pinned down to what you say in the first.
There are passages such as this:
... but, then, the "all things are one" motif is readily open to interpretation - it can be found in multiple traditions and can at least in some such be easily interpreted to stipulate a priority monism {... which thereby connects all otherwise disparate existent things - this so as to result in statements such as "everything is one" or else "we are all one"}.
Whereas fragments such as these following are harder to assimilate into this notion of "Zeus is the cosmic totality of becoming as the only thing that is one":
Especially when analyzing the last given fragment - and in assuming that Heraclitus was not an ignoramus in his aphorisms - in which way can one make sense of "and it is law, too, to obey the council of [the cosmic totality of all that is]"?
The totality of all that exists is itself fire, perpetual transformations of constant strife between opposites. It so far to me makes no sense to then affirm that it too is law/logos (itself here appearing unchanging) to obey the counsel of "dyadic opposites in strife in their cosmic totality" (in contrast to obeying some aspects of the total at expense of others - or, what still seems to me more likely, obeying "Zeus" / God (per the quotes above) as that only given which is nondualistic and hence one)
Can you then make sense of how one goes about obeying the council of "the cosmic totality of dyadic opposites in perpetual strife (of which one oneself is an aspect of)"?
------
At any rate, I don't see how my previously offered inference can be ruled out via Heraclitus's own fragments. Again, so far finding the inference offered plausible, albeit not the only one possible.
If so, what is it? (i.e.bad hoc substance(s) like e.g. aether? phlogiston? divine will?) Btw, "the third element" means something other than more than "substancce dualism". Multiply(ing) entities beyond necessity (Ockham). :roll:
It doesn't logically entail it no, but Heraclitus seems to have thought otherwise.
Quoting javra
Dy?us seems to reference the sky-father/God. What that exactly means for Heraclitus I'm not sure, but you may be right that it's not necessarily the totality of becoming.
Does the personification mean anything, in the sense of having agency or will? Or is it rather a naturalistic/pantheistic god?
"unwilling and yet willing"?
Excellent question. You're right to question "operates"it is a placeholder. But thats because our vocabulary is constrained by a model of causation that evolved to describe levers and collisions, not meaning and intention. To speak of "a way of being and acting" is to point to an integrated form of life, not a discrete event or causal vector.
I'll refer to Steve Talbott, a philosopher of biology with whom I became acquainted through his essays in The New Atlantis. He tackles this problem in an essay (or book chapter), From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning:
'Within a context of meaning' is the key term. Physics per se negates or brackets out context so as to arrive at an exact formulation describing the motions of bodies universally (regardless of context). That is why physicalism posits that the universe as 'devoid of inherent meaning' - it has set it aside or bracketed out context and meaning so as to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' which seeks explanations solely in terms of mechanical causes (which has been undermined by the 'observer problem' which is precisely one of context and meaning, but we'll leave that aside here.)
[quote=Michel Bitbol, On the Radical Self-Referentiality of Consciousness] (Galiliean) science was born from the decision to objectify, namely to select the elements of experience that are invariant across persons and situations. Its aim is to formulate universal truths, namely truths that can be accepted by anyone irrespective of ones situation. Therefrom, the kind of truths science can reach is quite peculiar : they take the form of universal and necessary connections between phenomena (the so-called scientific laws).[/quote]
And, as Wittgenstein observes (TLP 6.371), 'At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.'
That's the issue in a nutshell. But this 'separation' hasn't yet occured in Aristotle, for whom final causation provides another level of causal relationship, and precisely in the context of meaning-making In Aristotles schema, final causes are not mystical but intelligibleexplanations in terms of ends, purposes, or functions. The question What is it for? is a valid form of causation, but thats precisely what modern physics has trained itself not to ask.
What Im proposing is that reasons operate as causes, not by exerting force, but by shaping intentionality within a context of meaning. This kind of causation isnt mechanical but rational: it explains action by appeal to what makes sense to an agent, not what impinges on a body.
Hence the category mistake implied by wondering how res cogitans can, say, 'make my arm move'. It puts the mind on the same level as the objects of physics - reduces it, in other words.
In all references I so far know of (e.g. 1; and e.g. 2), the Heraclitus fragment you've mentioned is devoid of the hyphenation between "be" and "an". This can change tthe meaning of the fragment significantly - so that the fragment can indeed be aligned to a notion of priority monism: All that is is therefore not made by any man or god - both being aspects of the logos/fire - such that for as long as the universe/existence is "it always has been is and will be an ever-living fire (etc.)". This with the "one" previously mentioned yet referencing its ultimate origin in a priority monism fashion.
But please do reference the fragment with the given hyphenation inserted if you believe the hyphenation is original, or else essential, to Heraclitus's fragment.
I haven't read Heraclitus's fragments in full for some time, BTW, but I don't remember reading anything that would contradict this plausibility of him being a priority monist. That said, I might of course be wrong.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It's again speculative inference - a best conjecture based on his fragments - but if Heraclitus in fact did have in mind a priority monism, then this "God / Zeus' he addresses would not be any deity whatsoever but, instead, would be in general keeping with what the Neoplatonists addressed as the One as the source of all things.
Exactly as I said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are two distinct aspects of the world we know, one being known as material bodies, the other as mind and ideas. Each requires a distinct "substance" to support logically (justify), its reality. The world we know, as we know it, is the interaction, therefore the medium, between these two substances.
Upon further reading I think he may be using Zeus as a symbol for daylight, the other thing he commonly stands for.
And daylight seems to refer to being awake or aware, being perceptive to the intelligble patterns of nature.
In other passage he contrast the waking with those that are asleep.
The waking have one world because they are attuned to the intelligibility of the one thing that is, i.e. becoming.
I don't see how it could be physical daylight since this is of itself an aspect of logos/fire, of the universe in total - with night/darkness as its dyadic opposite. I instead interpret his references to light (and dryness) to be metaphors for wisdom ... which is in keeping with a) traditional western metaphors of light being wisdom and b) with the fragments I've previously referenced. Again:
Quoting javra
This sole nondualistic one - addressed at different times as Zeus/God/wisdom/light - then being the source of (what I so far find to be) a plausible priority monism, thereby being that "one only" from which the universe in oppositional total as fire/logos takes its form and attributes and which, as wisdom which is one, "knows the thought/logos by which all things are steered through all things" (with knowledge here, to my mind, clearly not being declarative knowledge - which requires changes via argumentation/justification, to not mention declaration - but more in keeping with notions of a complete understanding).
Which has a clear precedent in The Phaedo in the passages about the separation of soul from body.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I was going to quote a passage by Sachs in the OP, but it made it too long. But I'll include it here, as it is relevant to the translation of 'ousia' (from the IEP entry on Aristotle's Metaphysics):
[hide="Reveal"][/hide]
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Spot on. I think youve identified something essential in showing how, once the participatory/inherence framework is lost (or becomes untenable), the explanatory burden shifts to "substance" in a different way. It has to account not only for what a thing is, but also why our concepts seem to refer to it at all.
That might explain why the substrate notion of substancesomething like an inert bearer of propertiesrises to prominence, while the richer Aristotelian idea of ousia as actualized form (not just potential matter) gets flattened out. The result is a metaphysical picture that looks more like proto-empiricism than classical realism (and indeed is the precursor to modern empiricism.)
And that also folds into the point about modern "thing ontology"where what a thing is becomes identified with what it is made of, rather than what it does or means within a larger context.
My own longstanding view is that much of this equivocation around "substance" arises from the loss of a hierarchical ontologythe kind that underpinned the classical and medieval idea of the great chain of being. In that schema, being was analogical and graduated; different levels of being were possible and meaningful (as beautifully articulated by Eriugena). But with Scotus' doctrine of the univocity of beingthe idea that "being " means the same whether said of God or a rockthis hierarchical distinction collapses. What results is a metaphysical "flattening," in which all beings are treated as ontologically equal (even if causally or epistemically different), and substance is increasingly thought of as inert substratum rather than act or form. It is precisely the loss of the vertical dimension, the axis of quality.
This contributes directly to the modern drift toward mechanistic and materialist metaphysics, where the rich account of form, finality, and analogy is replaced by homogenous "stuff" under mathematical laws.
Just checked. Couldn't find any fragments to the effect of light equating to the "only one" - wanted to say my bad for this - but there are fragments and interpretations such as this:
Quoting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus#Fragment_118
with the following footnote:
Which may or may not speak to the same thing? Don't know.
Yes I also saw it as a metaphor for wisdom and for those that are awake... as opposed to night, asleep, dream.
Quoting javra
I wouldn't rule it out, but intuitively it seems like monism or dualism isn't even the right way to talk about it, because substances are an afterthought of being, and there is only becoming. It more like some kind of energy/force process 'monism'. The thing that gives form and the thing that gives substance are one and the same.
I think this gets back to the OP. In the case of priority monism - such as can be found in "the One" of Neoplatonism - there is no substance involved in the definition of the monism addressed. Rather it is being itself - as being beyond both existence and nonexistence. The Ancient Greek "ousia". Which both "substance" and "essence" are Latin translations of, but with only the latter nowadays yet holding some clear semblance to what the Ancient Greek "ousia" most typically signified in philosophical discourse.
All this to say that in priority monism, the monism addressed does not specify any type of substance whatsoever but, instead, essence itself: the One in Neoplatonism being quite literally quintessential - the ultimate essence of all that is. If Heraclitus had in mind a priority monism prior to there being words for the concept, the only substance he would have specified would have been the logos/fire - this being "stuff" - but by "Zeus / wisdom which is one" he would have intended and done his best to express in this own time "a nondualistic being/ousia - such as the Neoplatonic "the One" - upon which all existence and hence substance is dependent". Or at least something to the like. Hence making sense of fragments such as this (as previously addressed):
Well put. I prefer keeping a boundary between reasons and causes, but I know what you mean. It's just a question of how far we're willing to stretch "cause" to cover what reasons do. Actually, using "cause" language in talking about rationality has at least one advantage, namely that you don't have to coin some new verb to describe how reasons affect intentionality. The downside, for me, is that we also want to preserve the Kantian notion of rationality as freedom, and here "cause" starts to get in the way. (Kant would say that causality only can apply in the "heteronomous" world, not the autonomous world of human action.). But this is all terminological -- I definitely concur with the need to stop trying to get mental and physical items to cause each other, under any description.
Spinoza already sorted this outby understanding the physical and the mental as the same thing under different descriptions.
I've always been a fan of Locke's discussion on substance, it's phenomenal:
"So that if any one will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what SUPPORT of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are commonly called accidents. If any one should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say, but the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded, what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer wasa great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, repliedSOMETHING, HE KNEW NOT WHAT. "
But to be clear, Locke did believe in substances, but he just says he doesn't know what they are. They are obscure to our understanding.
And as for the Ghost in the Machine, your right, that's the popularization. But I think careful consideration of the phenomena involved should lead us to conclude, that it's ghosts all the way down. Consciousness is surely more "ghostly" than "mechanical".
And if our best current physics is not "ghostly" ("spooky" as Einstein protested), then I don't know what is.
Thanks, interesting. Here you can see pre-figured Berkeley's rejection of 'material substance' altogether, can't you? Which I believe we discussed recently on my thread on that.
I think by the time Locke was writing, 'substance' has already been reconceptualised in material terms. The previously-mentioned IEP entry on Aristotle's Metaphysics says of the philosophical substantia that 'Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-dont-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor.' But this is because, according to the article, the original translation as 'substantia' was in many respects a mistranslation. The author (Joe Sachs) remarks 'It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends'.
Quoting Manuel
You might enjoy my recent essay on spooky action.
I don't think it's obvious to many, most, people that this is true. As I understand it, the implication would be there is no objective reality, only a mixture of our internal and external worlds. I endorse this view as a metaphysical position, a perspective.
What I meant is that the world, as experienced, is a cooperative reality involving the organism and the environment. I understand this world as experienced to be as objective as the world considered as it is absent any experience of it.
Probably. I think after Hume, substance became very problematic, Hume of course denied we had a concept of substance. Interesting arguments for sure, but, not persuasive.
Then we get Kant saying that substance is a category of the understanding and deflates the impact of the term a bit. In fact I don't see a massive difference between Locke and Kant in terms of Locke treating substance as kind of "things in themselves", whereas Kant does not. But I think, technicalities aside, it's a very similar idea, dressed differently.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks. Will take a look!
What like atoms? Or something along those lines? If so, that's a bit different from substance as Locke (and others) talks about it.
:up:
I think this is a good way to look at even the "substance" heavy high scholastic metaphysics of St. Thomas (and certainly of the more obviously "Neo-Platonic" Augustinianism of St. Bonaventure. Finite essence is a constraint in being, the being of things a particular constrained act of being. Fr. Norris Clarke refers to the "limiting essences" of things. God meanwhile, is not a thing, but being itself, and God alone is subsistent being (ipsum esse subsitens).
The difficulty is that the physical is contained within the mental, and only known or even conceivable within the mental. For "being" to mean anything at all (to have any content) if must be that which is given to thought. Hence, the Parmenidean adage "the same is for thinking as for being."
The difficulty I have with dual aspect theories (and not particularly Spinoza, who I am less familiar with) is twofold:
A. As Plotinus says, being and being known are two sides of the same coin. They do not seem like they can be totally distinct "aspects" but rather are conceptually interdependent and interpenetrating. Rather than maybe a more strict division of "something seen from two different aspects" a "unity conceivable in two modes."
B. More importantly, since A is just verbage, dual aspect theories need to explain why "the physical" is experienced by beings, by people, dogs, dolphins, etc., but presumably not by rocks, thunderstorms, or random ensembles that include half of a human brain, half of a dog brain, and the intervening space (or non-continuous ensembles for that matter).
If everything has a dual aspect, it seems that something like panpsychism should hold. Yet this doesn't seem to explain why our experiences have a particular loci in our body, why we experience our own, private experiences, and why rooms full of people and animals shouldn't be their own, higher level minds (i.e. "group mind" theories). We cannot appeal to "complexity" alone, because a room with five people in it is more complex and involves more information processing than a room with one person, and yet we seem to have powerful reasons to think the room with five people has five minds in it, not one. Yet if everything has a mental and physical aspect, then complex systems involving many beings seem like they should be in possession of a mental aspect, a mind, as well.
Psychophysical harmony is another issue. Evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and the study of our sense organs seems to do a good job explaining why we experience the world we do and why we shouldn't expect rocks or cars to possess minds or have a mental aspect to their being (except inasmuch as they are known). Yet under panpsychism, everything has an experiential element, so we have to explain why certain combinations of physical things bring forth different experiences, and also how they seem to produce unified minds (of course the "emergence of consciousness" is a similar problem, it's just that I don't think panpsychism actually solves the problem it is called in to solve).
I think this is what [Reply="J;980398"] is getting at. We would like a description of why consciousness is like it is, and this would include the apparent non-conciousness of some things, as well as how and why minds are discrete.
Whereas, to return all the way to point A, this would nonetheless be an explanation given within consciousness, which can never go beyond the intellect into some realm or aspect that is actually free from the "mental." The reason we even posit a "physical" outside the "mental" is that not everything seems like it should participate in the "mental" as an experiencer or knower, only as a known(granted, the distinction is largely modern).
Indeed, or to its opposite, the rise of process metaphysics and the total denial of thinghoood. The idea that the universe is properly just one thing, a mathematical object, is not uncommon today. This is Parmenides, absolute unity. Or it is one ever-changing process, Heraclitus and the slide into the Many. The via media between the One and the Many has largely been lost, as well as an understanding of how there can be a Many unified in a One such that it is both One and Many.
But I think the rejection of thinghood is every bit as pernicious as the reduction of all things to a multiplicity of "building blocks." Both have serious epistemic and metaphysical problems. They lean too far into unity of multiplicity respectively. The most obvious (I would even say ostentatious) example of discrete thinghood comes from the privacy of our own minds, which is also tied to a particular body, and it seems a good metaphysics must explain this unity (and also that a good metaphysics will require nouns, not just verbs). Aristotle's insight that physics, a "philosophy of nature(s)," must deal with a cosmos of things that are nonetheless always changing (and thus processes), and interacting (and thus not wholly discrete), seems to get lost.
BTW, I get what Sachs is saying here, but I think it might be a bit misleading. Everything I know about St. Augustine suggests that we really don't have much of an idea of which "Platonists" he read, or if he was largely just taught their doctrines from notes. Yet as far as I know he almost certainly didn't read Aristotle directly, although he also definitely inherits some key ideas from him (in part because the Neoplatonists use him a lot, particularly Plotinus who did read Aristotle, and other Christians used him as well). As far as I know, the Peripatetics were already in decline by St. Augustine's day, at least in the West, and Aristotle was largely received as a Neoplatonist going forward.
It's worth recalling that even out East where people had Aristotle's texts, they genuinely confused the Book of Causes and the Theology of Aristotle (paraphrases of Plotinus and Proclus) with Aristotle's own work, which just shows how easy it is to interpret Aristotle in a Neo-Platonic lens (and indeed, that people reading him in their native tongue readily saw this connection makes me a bit skeptical of modern takes that try to advocate for "the real Aristotle, Aristotle the materialist empiricist," who doesn't seem to emerge until the 1800s).
Yes, that's the idea. With my usual caveats about how little we really know about consciousness as a biological phenomenon, I think some kind of dual-aspect/supervenience theory will carry the day. But to do so, it has to dissolve these apparent antinomies between what is physical and what is mental, and explain the enormous variation in how these aspects manifest in the world. We grope for terms like "materialism" or "panpsychism" but it's unclear -- to me at least -- whether these are even good words for the dual aspects.
Are you familiar with the work of Jaegwon Kim? He is largely seen as offering a "knock down" argument of emergence vis-a-vis consciousness, given the assumption of a substance/supervenience ontology. I'd tend to agree that this is convincing, given the assumptions (which are common). This led Kim eventually towards a sort of property dualism and epiphenomenalism.
Yet, as process philosophers are happy to point out (and as Kim admits), his findings wouldn't hold for a process metaphysics. Personally, I take this to be a great blow against supervenience and "building block" or "things are what they are made of" ontologies. Because, even if we pivot to epiphenomenalism, this still seems to require strong emergence. It's still the case that first-person subjective experience has to emerge as something new from what lacks it. Seemingly, the only way around this (while keeping to the supervenience framing) is panpsychism, which has all the problems noted above, and which also seems implausible. Yet it's a problem dire enough that people have been willing to bite the bullet on it. I would just as well drop the presumptions of supervenience/substance ontology instead.
For one, while quantum phenomena do not truck with preconceptions about "strong emergence," they also do not seem to agree with the presuppositions of reductionism either. This just suggests to me that the supervenience paradigm is somehow fatally flawed (as the need for "strong emergence" only shows up in the context of this paradigm in the first place).
As to epiphenomenalism, i.e., the idea that our volitions and how experience feels/is for us, plays no explanatory role in determining our behavior, it has major difficulties. If epiphenomenalism is true, then it follows that our sense of certainty, our logical intuitions, how we phenomenologically experience different things, etc. can never be selected for by natural selection. This follows because these things are said to never play an explanatory role in behavior, in which case they also can never affect survival and reproduction. Yet, if our logical intuitions, sense of certainty, etc. can thus drift arbitrarily far away from reality (because they are irrelevant to natural selection), then we have absolutely no grounds for trusting them! Thus, epiphenomenalism is self-undermining unless it can craft a just so story that explains why the contents of consciousness and our logical intuitions just so happen to line up with the world despite not determining behavior. They must "come along for the ride."
However, it seems to me that we have many good reasons to think that how the world appears to us does affect behavior. Donald Hoffman's idea of consciousness being shaped much like a "user-interface," while based on bad metaphysical assumptions, nonetheless seems to get something right. This would explain why high calorie foods are so attractive, why they taste good, why sex is pleasurable, why damage to the body is unpleasant, etc. These are a means of motivating us to survive and reproduce. But eating could just as well be torturous if the "mental aspect" of our being was irrelevant to behavior.
It's also worth noting that, to work at all, the social sciences need to presuppose that peoples thinking and experiences do affect behavior. Likewise, it would be impossible to do things like correlate different feelings with brain states if we didnt think that the way people feel determines the way they choose to talk about their internal states. Hence, much of the evidence that is used to theorize about reductionist explanations of the brains ends up being based on the implicit assumption that behavioral outputs relate to private internal sensations.
Plus, the track record for reductionism is quite poor (what's the example outside of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics?) Even the basics of molecular structure cannot be reduced, and chemistry is not an immature field. The major paradigm shift in the sciences in the last century has been the chaos/information/complexity studies revolution and these all rely on unifications (explanations of disparate phenomena through more general principles), not reductions.
Definitely. I'd urge anyone interested in supervenience and/or a reasonable version of physicalism to start with Kim.
Do you know Galen Strawson's work in this area? He put out a book called Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? that is quite brilliant. It includes dialogues with other philosophers, as Strawson defends his very unusual version of panpsychism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's fair, but check out Strawson. He makes it plausible, at least to me.
Thanks for this. I greatly like the terminology of "limiting essences" or else "finite essence" - this in contrast to what would then be pure ousia as "limitless, boundless, else infinite essence". Although I personally don't univocally associate the latter - this tmk being the quintessence of priority monism - to "God" for various reasons: one of these being that God is often construed to be a deity which, as a psyche, would itself then necessarily be in dualistic standing to all other occurring psyches (and hence not be limitless, etc.). But, yes, it's fully contingent on how the term "God" gets to be understood. To each their own. :smile:
Would an account of why a subjective description has the characteristics it does not simply be another subjective description?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The idea of the physical is contained within the mental, but it seems obvious that what the idea of the physical is the idea of is not contained within the mental.
Mental" can be understood to be just a word (and a misleading one at that) for a concept that signals that we cannot understand how experience, judgement abstraction and conceptualization, although always of physical things, are themselves physical processes. The only alternative is dualism, or the idea of a mental realm or substance which does not depend on the physical or idealism, which renders the physical as a mere idea.
Quoting Manuel
It might be atoms, or quantum fields, or something more fundamental. I was not suggesting we know what substance is, but that the idea of substance is not hard to understand.
A huge question, but it boils down to whether there's anything at all that can properly be called "objective." In the conversation about mental/physical, supervenience, the nature of consciousness, etc., I think it's generally assumed that an objective account of all this is possible. If it isn't, then a great deal else that we consider objective knowledge would also have to be given up. This might be the case, to be sure, but to consider it would immediately open a different conversation. For myself, I do think we can talk about subjectivity from a subjective point of view, and still discover truths about it that are general and open to reasonable investigation -- which is all the objectivity we're likely to get.
I count as objective that which is actually encountered or experienced. Say I feel sadness, then I would count the sadness as an objective fact or an objective feeling. You say it is generally assumed that an objective account of say the nature of consciousness is possible. I'd say that all accounts are objective in the sense that they are actual accounts, but it would seem that in the sense you probably mean an objective account of consciousness would be possible only insofar as it is encounterable as an object. Are so-called "quales" able to be encountered, experienced, or are they after the fact ideas of the subjective qualities of what we experience?
Some people say things like 'consciousness cannot be an object, it is like the eye that sees, nut cannot in the act of seeing see itself'. Of course, the cheeky response to that is 'go look in a mirror'. What parts of objective knowledge do you think would have to be given up if it were decided that an objective account of consciousness is impossible?
My thoughts also, as explained in the mind-created world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But hes talking specifically about the translation of ouisia, and how the meaning of that seminal term - being - was lost in translation, starting from ancient philosophy. Im not a Heidegger reader, but its a matter of general knowledge that the forgetting of being was his central concern.
Quoting J
Supervenience is, according to SEP, a philosophical term of art. It is deployed as defense against many criticisms of physicalism, as its meaning is vague enough to cover almost any eventuality. Supervenience has often functioned in philosophy of mind as a kind of magic word that promises metaphysical rigour but without any really explaining anything. Anyway lets not get into supervenience in a thread on substance (but it is a kind of trigger word for yours truly.)
:gasp:
Yeah, I see that! I think we need supervenience in our lexicon, but as you say, that's another thread.
Yes, and this was borne out in threads such as, "Philosophical jargon: Supervenience."
I think the nature of consciousness is a largely scientific question, one that we're far from answering. If/when we do answer it, it will be in the same terms that any other scientific question is answered, and with the same degree of objectivity, whatever that may be. The fact that the object of our investigation is presented to us as subjectivity itself, shouldn't distract us from its amenability to being understood objectively. Consider dreams -- we wouldn't say that, just because no one but me will ever experience my dreams, all objective investigation of dreaming is at an end, would we?
So, if this entire model is wrong, it will be wrong on much larger and more troubling grounds. It will be the entire "objective" scientific project itself that turns out to be faulty; objective knowledge about consciousness won't be any harder or easier to achieve than knowledge of anything else, but the whole project may prove impossible. That's what I meant about having to give up a great deal of what we believe counts as objective knowledge. In short, consciousness doesn't present a special case of the failures of objectivity. If it fails, it fails tout court.
One last thing: The phenomenology of consciousness -- how we do experience subjectivity -- is an entirely different matter, one that science is powerless to speak about. For that we need philosophy.
I was going to object to your first two paragraphs, but when I read this final one, I realized we are largely in agreement.
Although I will point to a couple of things which presents some difficulties for scientific investigation and understanding of consciousnessthat is that with all the fMRI advances in understanding which parts of the brain do what, the investigators still rely on personal reports from the subjects as to what they are experiencing or thinking about and so onwhich means we haven't really gotten away from phenomenology in this investigation.
Also, the so-called hard problem of consciousness seems much more intractable, because it attempts to deal with the question of how processes in the brain, which can be understood in causal terms, can give rise to subjective experience, which, if we are to accept that subjective experience is just as it seems to us, and to phenomenological analysis, cannot be strictly understood in causal terms, but is better understood in terms of reasons.
Ah gotcha. Correct.
It's a good question. I'd start conservatively and argue, what do we know about substance? Well, for one thing it is a concept, and in this regard is mental.
Beyond that? Well, traditionally, it was argued that it that which binds things (properties) together, so that we don't have a kind of Humean world: just properties all over the place.
If we go down to the microscopic level, I think it's not coherent to say that say, atoms or fields are substances.
I suppose we should refine it a bit more. But there's a possibility it's just our commonsense way of viewing the world, and thus not literally true, that not something in the extra-mental world.
Hard to say.
Yes, 'substance' is an ideathe question is whether the idea refers to something real or is merely an idea. How could we find out?
Quoting Manuel
Yes properties were traditionally thought to inhere in something and that something would be substance. So, Aristotle thought individual entities as the bearers of properties are substancesI'm a substance, you're a substance and your cat is a substance and so on.
Quoting Manuel
We have the idea of chemical substances, which have different properties. But then microscopic and subatomic particles are thought to have properties too.
The other idea of substance, as I said earlier, is 'the ultimate constituent of things'. That could be energy, for example, or mind if you're an idealist.
Quoting Manuel
Right, it might just be our way of making sense of things, although it is hard not to think of the extramental world as consisting in something. The problem is how could we ever know we had found the most fundamental constituent of things when it is always possible that there could be something more fundamental that eludes our grasp.
Yes, good statement of the problem. When we have a scientific way of filling out the phrase "give rise to," we may be a lot closer to understanding all this. I suspect it'll involve supervenience rather than causality, but we just don't know.
One point: The processes of subjectivity are indeed not strictly causal, often involving reasons. That doesn't necessarily mean that whatever "gives rise to" consciousness itself has to be non-causal as well. Part of what makes all this so difficult and, for now, mysterious, is that we don't know how to describe the relations that might obtain between a (causally governed) physical level of description and a (reason-governed, often) mental level of description. Even trying to write that sentence gives me a headache because it's so terminologically awkward. It's like we're groping for a third mode of activity that is neither causal nor rational, that we can call upon as an explanation for how the first two modes relate. Just words, for now, I'm afraid, and I bet none of them will turn out to be good enough. Imagine trying to understand general relativity before Einstein.
Quoting J
To say this better: We can talk about what causes consciousness in toto, as a phenomenon, without committing ourselves to the thesis that every individual content of consciousness is caused by some one-for-one physical process. There's plenty of room for reasons.
Objectivity is the criterion for natural science and many other disciplines. Philosophy is different in the sense that in this subject, we are what we seek to know. Continental philosophy recognises this in a way that current Anglo philosophy rarely does.
If no evidence can be provided that makes the concept obsolete, then it could be an indication that is mental only.
Alternatively, if we cannot but help to think of the manifest world as being composed of things that have properties, and even if we break an object apart, we still think in terms of substance that's also a sign.
The question is how can we prove it isn't mental only? We'd have to all agree (as physicists would) one what counts as a substance. But I'm thinking out loud here.
Quoting Janus
This is me asking:
Is the self a substance? If so, then that's a very interesting connection. If we could provide evidence that selves exist (not apart from body), but as facts of the world, then that could be a hint of a substance.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but does it make sense to think of an atom as a substance? Despite it having other particles fundamental to it?
I do like the "ultimate constituent of things" - probably what Locke had in mind. Yes, maybe energy, maybe motion, maybe mind or I know not what.
Quoting Janus
But is this something remaining a substance or a thing? I'm not sure these terms are the same. Maybe the extra mental is made of X-"stuff", not things. Or maybe events.
As for the final question, my intuition is that we'll never reach it. It's of a different kind of knowledge than what we have. But that would be a very long digression.
Do you think it is plausible that we could entertain reasons without that being correlated with neural processes? Say on reason or reasoning leads to the next and say the first reasoning is correlated with some neural processes and the reasoning that follows is correlated with further neural processes. Do you think it is plausible that there are causal connections between the neural processes, just as there are logical connections between the reasonings?
Perhaps the understandings or lack of understandings of logical entailments are themselves correlated with neural networks. The idea doesn't seem implausible or problematic to me. Like Spinoza's idea that cogitans does not cause extensa and vice versa, it gets around the supposed conundrum that thoughts processes being causally connected neural processes rules out the rational /logical connections between ideas. They are just two different descriptions of the one set of phenomena..
Yes, all this is plausible, because we've allowed ourselves the placeholder term "correlated". But what else can we do? We don't know the right word yet.
The first question, if taken broadly, requires some qualification. I would find it implausible that there is no relation whatsoever between neural processes and reasons (or any other thoughts). But this conceives of a "reason" as a particular event that occurs in my mind at time T1. If the "same reason" occurs to you as well, it isn't actually the same reason, on this understanding, because it's in a different mind at a different time. But the more usual way to think about reasons puts them in a rational world of meanings or propositions, so that you and I do indeed share the "same reason" for X. Taken in that sense, it seems more plausible to me that reasons are not necessarily correlated with neural processes.
Very true. And part of what I think Continental phil is better at, is recognizing that the objective/subjective pair is not nearly as straightforward as we might like it to be. So I would take issue, slightly, with the assertion that philosophy has to have this self-reflexive character, which would remove us from objectivity as commonly understood. There are many ways of doing philosophy, with more, or less, reachable stopping points. Understood as logical or conceptual analysis (a forte of Anglo phil), we can ask for results that are as objective as anything in the natural sciences, I think. But of course philosophy is unique in that, having said this, we can't leave it alone; we have to go on to ask, But how objective is that? And if you want to say that, ultimately, the grounding questions of philosophy take us back to self-knowledge, I wouldn't disagree.
Well, that's how the physicalist likes to present it at least. It makes "all other options" seem to be, at the very least, at least as unappealing or problematic.
I would rather say though that physicalism is itself a sort of dualism. There are quite different varieties of physicalism, but each of the main forms introduce a sort a sort of metaphysical and epistemic dualism.
Physicalism with "strong emergence" is really not that different from substance dualism except with the added claim that the mental emerges from the physical (whether this solves the interaction problem is another question). With strong emergence, whatever is strongly emergent is in some sense fundamental. Consciousness is in nature fundamentally and potentially from the begining, even if it isn't actual.
Then you have something like property dualism, which normally needs to also posit epiphenomenalism because all the behavior of conscious things must still be explainable in wholly physical terms, without remainder. But property dualism is still a sort of dualism. It says that things can be explained in two different ways that cannot fully explain each other. It also still introduces all the problems of epistemic dualism, the Kantian question of how we can ever truly know this "physical" noumena which is said to cause phenomena. In any case, as noted above, I find epiphenomenalism has plausibility issues, but it also seems to still require panpsychism or some sort strong emergence (each with their own difficulties).
Finally, there is the denial of consciousness tout court, a sort of hyper empiricist behaviorism. This perhaps resolves the dualism problem, but at the cost of denying we exist. Very few among even those who accept the label of "eliminitive materialist" go this far. They tend to instead stay more towards the aforementioned "property dualism + epiphenomenalism" view, with some added caveats about the mental world being "much more impoverished" than we think it is.
Hence, I think it's fair to say that physicalism tends to be a dualism. In its common forms, it goes along with representationalism (and all the Humean and Kantian epistemic problems that brings). Representationalism is a sort of epistemic dualism as well. The mental is essentially a "representation" of the physical. And normally it is said to be an accidental representation of the physical; the representation (and intelligibility/quiddity) is not essential to physical being.
Hence, I would rather draw a distinction instead between monism and dualism. Idealism normally gets presented as the idea that things are somehow "composed of mental substance " or "in the mind." This is fair for some idealisms, not really for others. For instance, Hegel and Plato, often called idealists (or Aristotle, who is occasionally called one as well) in no way deny the reality of "external objects," of "rocks and stars," etc. What they deny instead is the accidental relationship between things and their quiddity, or the epistemic dualism of representationalism. Plato might rightly be called a "dualist" in another sense, but this is in terms of "degrees of reality," i.e., in terms of self-sufficiency (something shared by Aristotle and Hegel). One need not read Plato as a dualist in this sense, but many do, and it doesn't seem wholly unfair (the "two worlds Platonism.") In general though, I think what defines "idealism" tends to be its monism. It is a sort of unfortunate (and perhaps unintended) smear of physicalist to instead associate this "monism" with an "idealism" that is defined by its least palatable varieties (e.g. Berkeley).
So for instance, for Hegel the "truth is the whole," and this cannot leave out the process of Spirit, of being knowing itself as being and as its self, which is not accidental representation, but part of the core of what being must be to be anything at all. But he certainly wasn't anti-scientific or an anti-realist, quite the opposite.
St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus Eriugena, St. Maximus the Confessor, or St. Thomas Aquinas all believed in the creation of a corporeal, physical world ex nihilo, and also a sort of idealism in this way as well.
Subject/object dualism is another sort of dualism that tends to dominate physicalism. Whereas in many philosophies the highest form of knowledge is always a sort of reflexive self-knowledge (Gereson's article on Neoplatonist epistemology is a good one here).
There is a distinction, as is well known, between causation and correlation. If two things are necessarily correlated I don't think it necessarily follows that one is the efficient cause of the other. There are also distinctions between difference kinds of causes. For me the basic distinction is between efficient (local) causation and (environmental or global) conditions.
I think it is implausible that any thought occurs without accompanying physical (neural) process. Spinoza's solution allows the unproblematic idea that the mental does not cause physical processes, and vice versa. The two run in parallel, so to speak. No epiphenomenalism is then required
Quoting J
I'd say that 'reason' is a generalization like any other. A particular act of reasoning is an event that occurs in your mind at a particular time. So even if i have the same reason for doing or thinking something that you do, my attendant acts of reasoning will never be exactly the same as yours.
So I agree with you that reasons (as distinct from reasonings) are not necessarily correlated with neural processes.
That's a good way of making the distinction -- "reasonings" for the particular mental events, "reasons" for the content of those events. And yeah, "content" is terrible but let's not get into full-Frege mode. I think we both know what we mean.
"Running in parallel" is close to what I mean by supervenience, though the phrase does suggest that there are two separate processes. I think the truth will turn out to be even weirder than that, but I'm just guessing. If we come to understand the hard problem, we will have some new concepts for understanding what we now call "mental" and "physical," concepts that will probably make us laugh at the idea of "dual aspects".
Again, words like "correlated with" or "accompanying" are OK for now, because they help us be clear that this is not a causal model. As I said in a previous post, the phenomenon of consciousness itself, as a biological thing, may well be caused -- in fact, I'd be surprised it if weren't. But that doesn't mean that an individual thought (or "reasoning") is caused by the brain's wetware. Likewise, we don't have to postulate mental causation as somehow closing the loop and making changes in the neurons.
If by "wetware" you mean neural activity, I'd say individual thoughts just are neural processes, and that the brain provides the conditions under which both neural activity and individual thoughts are possible. So I wouldn't say that mental states cause changes in the neurons. I would say that mental states just are neural processes (taking 'states' here not in a 'static' sense but as signifying process).
We are 'blind' to neural processes in vivo, so of course mental processes don't seem to us to be neural processes. I think this "seeming" is what causes all the difficulties.
" You've written a lot there Timothy and I'll have to some back to try to address it when I have more time.
Two things which "seem" to be different must be proven to be the same before they can be accepted as being the same. Otherwise you're just making an unsubstantiated assumption.
Perhaps you're not entirely compelled to agree, that's fine, but we're far far away at this point from it being an entirely unsubstantiated assumption. We have plenty of fantastic reasons to think mental processes might be neural processes.
I think I know what you're getting at, but . . . if you use a word like "seeming," you're inevitably faced with the question, "Then what is it really?" Do you want to reply, "Neural processes"? Why is the "seeming" of a mental process less actual than the "reality" of a neural process? This sounds like another version of physical reductionism.
Or put it this way: Could we equally well say that mental processes seem to be neural processes when they are examined from the outside, scientifically, but are really mental? If so, then I think we're back on the right track. We need to separate the idea of "seeming" from its cousins such as "illusion" or "appearance." Neither the mental nor the physical is any more actual or fundamental than the other.
This is the same distinction we were making between "reasonings" and "reasons" -- between some individual, hence psychological, instance of thinking, and the rational or objective content that it may represent. Kisiel is mainly explicating Husserl here, so we're in good company. (It's also the Fregean difference between "utterance" and "propositional content," I think, translated into thought-talk rather than assertions.)
Just a quick fly-by here:
Surely you realize the contradiction. To do anything scientifically is merely to do something in a certain way, but no matter what way it is done, it is still only a human that does it.
If the human never within himself attends to the natural laws he has already mandated as legislating his relation to all material substance, and he is scientifically investigating the machinations of a particular kind of material substance ..how is he ever going to relate what he claims to know, with what is never within his conscious attention?
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Quoting J
It isnt. Each is actual in its own domain; it is the interaction between those domains, that seems to be a problem. Hell why not just say the problem seems to be that there are two domains.
Lets not sugar-coat it: the brain is at bottom what allows the intellect to discover natural laws by which it understands its world, and, at the same time, it is the brain that prohibits the application of the very same natural laws, by the intellect attempting to understand how the brain allows the discovery of laws.
Hence AI. We cant fix the irreconcilable problem of our own intelligence, so we just create a different one, which in fact doesn't fix anything at all, but instead, merely reverses the problem.
Sure, but it's a fallacy to conclude from this premise, that mental processes consist only of brain activity. If a thing is composed of multiple components, affecting one of the components will have an effect on the composite thing, but that does not imply that the composite thing consists only of that one component.
Quoting flannel jesus
As i said, it is completely unsubstantiated, and your assumption that it is close to being substantiated, and this means that it is not completely unsubstantiated, indicates nothing except that you are lacking in skills of critical thinking.
What faculty other than reason might be deployed in pursuit of an answer to that question?
Quoting flannel jesus
And vice versa. If I say something that annoys you, it will affect your adrenal glands, even though nothing physical has passed between us. The entire effect is grounded in your interpretation of symbolic meaning.
This would only be a contradiction if we accept a very stringent definition of "objective" as meaning something like "untouched by human perception and thought." Which would pretty much rule out the concept. If you're saying that there's no such thing as objectivity, that's certainly discussable. But then we'll need a different word for whatever is the stance that science takes -- for there's a marked and important difference between the methods and discourses of science and those of, say, music criticism. Likewise, when we study neural processes, we're trying to do something very different from phenomenology. I'm not super-concerned about validating a particular use of "objective" or "scientific" -- we can even deny objectivity completely, if you really want to -- but the problem of how science is different from phenomenology will remain. "Doing something in a certain way" is, sorry, not nearly enough of a description, nor is it enough merely to notice that everything we do is done in a certain way by us. That doesn't necessarily make the point of view subjective.
Right. As I said, this is just physical reductionism. There's no required way to reduce either the mental or the neural to each other.
I'm not denying that what things seem are part of it. As I said earlier in this thread (I think) I count experiences of things as being as real or objective as the things are absent their being experienced. Remember Spinoza's idea that extensa and cogitans are two modes of the one substance or in our modern parlance, two descriptions of or perpsectives on the one thing. So what I'm saying doesn't amount to reductionism.
:up:
Uh, no. The best we can do, in such situations is not accept the claims. Why would you think that its good to accept unsubstantiated claims just because they seem plausible? That, as I said, demonstrates a lack of critical thinking.
I don't see why you're bringing insults into it, I'm not calling you stupid.
From a Bayesian perspective, evidence for a belief Q is information that increases the probability assigned to Q. Keep in mind that evidence isn't proof, evidence is just a shift in probabilities.
So take Q to be the statement "mental processes are physical processes". Now, the two pieces of information I listed before - the chemical effect on mental processes, and the early foray into AI that we're witnessing - I think pretty reasonably raise the probability of Q, compared to what Q would be given the opposite observations. Opposite observations being, a hypothetical world in which chemically altering the neuronal environment DOESN'T affect thinking, and in which simulating neurons in a computer DOESN'T produce a machine that can solve problems, pass the turing test, and generate internal models of the data it interacts with.
I don't think I'm lacking in anything intellectually when I say, the observations we have are evidence. I welcome you to disagree with me and tell me why, but I request that you leave the insults out next time.
I was taken it to mean "evidenced". An unsubstantiated claim is a claim without any evidence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"proven" there is in the loose sense of the word, because I think we both agree that it's not within the jurisdiction of evidence to "prove" things in the strong sense of the word proof - the strong sense like is employed in classic logic.
Evidence supports things, or it doesn't. And sometimes, you can have evidence on both sides of a question, right? Did Bob kill this person, or someone else? Well here's some evidence Bob killed her, here's some evidence Bob didn't.
So yeah, when it comes to evidence, "proof" is... kind of beside the point, which is why I like to think about it in bayesian terms.
Scientific theories are proven through experimentation. To "substantiate" is to provide solid grounds for a claim. All science is proven (substantiated) in that way, or else it does not qualify as "science". Ideas which "seem plausible" do not qualify as science because these ideas are unsubstantiated, not proven by experimentation. The phrase "seem plausible" refers to an individual's attitudinal approach to the ideas rather than the soundness of the ideas. Therefore to accept such ideas, because they "seem plausible", is to demonstrate a lack of the philosophical skill known as critical thinking. To scoff at critical thinking, characterizing it as "absolute skepticism" demonstrates a significant attitudinal problem.
Quoting flannel jesus
This is irrelevant, and fails as an argument. Probabilities are only meaningful when there are assigned values, and there are no values assigned in this case. Take the probability of Q to be .0000001%, and the information you provided raises the probability of Q to .0000002%. Do you honestly believe that we ought to accept Q as true, now that the probability of Q being true has been doubled?
Quoting flannel jesus
"Substantiated" implies solid evidence, well-grounded reliable evidence. "Evidence" is fundamentally subjective, as the result of judgement, and the evidence must be judged as credible. There is no such thing as "a claim without any evidence" because the claim itself is evidence. What is important is how the evidence is judged. In the preceding example, the .0000001% probability of Q must be based in some type of real evidence or else it would just be a case of arbitrarily claimed evidence. If further evidence raises the probability to .0000002%, this does not constitute credible evidence of the truth of Q. Therefore despite there being at least two bits of evidence for the claim of Q, the judgements of flannel and Janus, Q remains as unsubstantiated because these two lack in the capacity of critical thinking.
I literally said you don't have to accept it as true. It has evidence, whether you accept it as true or not.
I meant the contradiction to refer to examining from outside. No examination by a human is ever done from the outside, but always and only from the inside, re: himself. We examine the outside; we do not examine from the outside. Hence the contradiction.
Quoting J
Agreed. The point being, it is we that does whatever it is thats being done.
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Quoting J
True, but the problem .problem here indicating reasons aptitude for putting itself between a rock and a hard place .being there is, as yet, no possible way to reduce either to each other.
Imagine, if you will (in best Rod Serling impersonation) .the guys Nobel acceptance speech, after proving mental events are reducible to brain states in universal one-to-one correspondence (you know, scientifically speaking), concluding with the fact that for all recorded history of human thought .there never was exactly any such thing.
(Sigh)
I might be missing the deeper point here. Couldn't we just as well say that every examination by a human (of anything external) must be done from the outside? "Inside/outside" is relative to whichever point of view we adopt. I can say, "I'm examining this turtle from the outside" meaning "outside the turtle," or "I'm examining this turtle from the inside" meaning "inside myself." Both are true, though the latter is far less common. But perhaps you could say more about why this seems important.
All I meant, in this context, was that it takes more than "being inside a human being" or "whatever we do is done by us" to establish a meaningful sense of subjectivity.
Quoting Mww
Right. I know I make this analogy a lot, but imagine trying, pre-Einstein, to explain how energy and mass are related. If the concepts you need just haven't been discovered yet, you can't get very far.
Isnt there only one point of view, when examining, scientifically?
Quoting J
If there was one, its that the subject, having always been first and foremost, isnt anymore.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You contradict yourself, so nothing more need be said.
I'd like to see that claimed contradiction. Where can I find it?
For example, the SEP entry describes Aristotles Categories as follows:
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:
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 Aristotles 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 inquirythe 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 beinga way of orienting ones 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 beto become aware of the intelligible natures that make reality coherent and meaningful.
. substance is the permanence of the real in time .
Sight regained?
The only permanent thing is change. There is no substance - only process or relations. Things only appear to persist in time because of our limited perception of time. We cannot perceive change happening over millions or billions of years but it is happening. The universe is expanding last time I checked. What is it that is expanding? Is space a substance?
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.
Quoting Mww
'Some things will never change' ~ Steely Dan, 'Kid Charlemagne'.
And my point is why use the term, "substance" when there is a better term to use - "process"? If what you really mean is "process" when using the term, "substance" then just use "process".
Quoting 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'.
Is there a difference between process in the philosophical sense and process in the everyday sense?
Quoting Wayfarer
Sounds to me like our understanding has evolved since the Greeks, and some terms are no longer relevant. 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?
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.
I think the point Aristotle was making is that particularity is what substance is, in the primary sense. What an individual object actually is, is a unique peculiar form, which is proper only to itself, (the law of identity). This uniqueness, which is a feature of spatial temporal existence, is what constitutes "substance" in the primary sense. In the secondary sense, "substance" is the primary species, what kind of thing it is. Commonly, in modern philosophy Aristotle's primary substance, along with the law of identity, are overlooked as superfluous, and identity is assigned to what we say about the thing (secondary substance), rather than what the thing actually is, in itself, a unique individual with a form of its very own.
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, Aristotles paradigm examples of 'substance' are not objects like stones or marbles, but beingsplants, animals, and humans. They are beings that possess their own internal principles of organization, growth, and changewhat 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 Aristotles 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 Aristotles typical examples of 'subjects' (rather than 'substances'!)
What I'm asking is how does either notion of substance compliment what we currently know scientifically and vice versa. The conclusions we reach in all domains of knowledge (philosophy and science) should not contradict each other. Is there a difference between the way we describe a substance philosophically and how we might describe it scientifically?
In the scientific context, the term substance refers to pure matter alone, consisting of only one type of atom or one type of molecule.
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.
You also mention bronze statues. But Aristotle clearly distinguishes artifacts from organisms, noting that artifacts have external causesthey are shaped by something other than themselveswhereas living beings have internal principles of form and change. Thats why Aristotles paradigm cases of ousia are living beings, not mere products or constructions (or objects, as such).
You say Im applying unwarranted restrictions to Aristotles hylomorphism. Fair enough. But Id 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.
'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.
Quoting 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.
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 beingverb"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).
That was the point of the original post. Im attempting to describe how the oxymoronic conception of mental substance was arrived at.
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.
:100:
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'.
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 theyve been conflated in translation.
Imagine if substance in Spinoza had instead been translated as subjectso 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 materialismthe idea that the world consists of one universal "stuff" that shows up in many forms. But that isnt quite what thinkers like Spinoza or Aristotle seem to have meant. Their concern was not with material stuff, but with what it means to bewhether as one ultimate being or as multiple beings participating in, or as expressions of, a higher unity. And that is a significant difference.
[quote=17th Century Theories of Substance, IEP] Degrees of Reality
In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degreesthat some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a beings 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.[/quote]
The context is "substance", and this is applicable to both living and inanimate things.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Its 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 beingswhich have internal principles of movement and lifeand 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 senseand 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:
Here is Sachs' commentary from his translation:
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.
it is clear from this that Aristotle differentiates living beings from other kinds of objects.
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 already identifies a hierarchy of souls in De Anima:
Neo-Platonism and the Great Chain of Being
Plotinus and later Christian Platonists (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius) described the "ladder of being", with:
Do we have the same problem with the term, "process"?
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.
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.
Quoting 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:
[quote=192b, 8-9]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'.[/quote]
He clearly places earth, fire, air, and water in the same category as plants and animals.
Further:
[quote=192b,13-23]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.[/quote]
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.
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:
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.
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."
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?
Quoting 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):
[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).]
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.
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.
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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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:
Quoting 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.
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. [i]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.[/i]
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 [I]function[/I] 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.
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:
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.
Yet you presume to tell others that you know what they have or haven't read.
Quoting Janus
Id 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.
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.
I don't prefer it, I cited it because he makes a similar point to that made in the OP, in respect of the geneology of the idea of 'substance' in the modern philosophical sense.
I've read the relevant excerpts and understand what he's saying. And don't overlook that Heidegger originally trained for the Catholic priesthood before taking up philosophy, I'm sure he was thoroughly conversant with scholastic philosophy.
I seem to remember that you said you had not studied Spinoza, and were not familiar with his work. You have never quoted him directly as far as I recall. If my assumption that you haven't read his works is incorrect then I'll own that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps Spinoza's substance could be understood as being if being were understood to be natura naturans or nature naturing. In the Ethics Spinoza writes: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence. Now 'being' in its basic meaning simply refers to existence or the attribute of existing, so you would need to qualify the concept as Spinoza does in that sentence in order to make it fit.
And the other point is that Spinoza's God is not separate from nature or transcendent of it, but is wholly immanent. There is no transcendence for Spinoza, no eternal life for mortals, no afterlife and no personal or caring God. Spinoza was a determinist: he believed free will to be an illusion and even denied that God has free will. If God is being for Spinoza it is infinite, eternal, necessary being, and it is only mortal creatures who experience anything, and the only immortality to be hoped for is to be an idea in the eternal substance.
What you wrote could just as well apply to a materialist (and I believe Spinoza was a materialist). It is not a being underlying everything or everyone in the sense of being separate from or greater than materiality (as I read Spinoza at least), but a being immanent in everything and everyone, and that is an important difference. If we say that 'substance' means to stand under, I think that should be read as referring to the hidden constitution, otherwise transcendence might be evoked since to be what is understood to separately beneath might equally be understood to be separately above, and I don't believe that was Spinoza's intention at all.
Spinoza is not a materialist in the modern reductionist sense. He held that reality expresses itself equally through both Thought and Extension, so rejecting reduction of mind to matter. His God-or-Nature is not a personal deity, but neither is it mere physical substance. Spinozas philosophy is closer to what we would now call neutral monism or double-aspect theory, where mind and body are modes of one infinite Being. Substance in Spinoza is not something measurable by way of objective analysis, in the way that material substance is (or at least, was) thought to be.
Recall the original intent of this thread. It is to argue that the philosophical term substance derived from Aristotles Metaphysics, is often confused with the everyday meaning of substance as a material with uniform properties. What Im saying is that, mainly due to Descartes description of mind as res cogitans, this leads to the oxymoronic conceptions of thinking thing or spiritual substance. And a lot of confusion, and much bad philosophising, hangs off that equivocation.
So perhaps you might find a passage in Spinoza which supports that contention.
Spinoza is pretty close to most modern materialists in terms of thinking existing states being exhausted to existing, their empirical relations and non-empirical relations (together, those modes under the attribute of extension); there are no "supernatural", no transcendent forces or "mystery" causes in Spinoza's account of existing states and their causal influence.
Substance is very different for Spinoza though, it's not a reference "material substance" in the sense of a modern materialist (or even an older one for that matter, in terms of a materiel or idea dichotomy). Spinoza realised that those trying to form a substance dichotomy made an error. They mistook something that belonged of all, the one absolutely infinite Substance, for that which be confined only to the material or idea. To correct this error, Spinoza posits a very different substance. One that is not constrained or limited to one sort of thing (e.g. the material or idea), but one that is equally true of all things.
In this respect, he is very different from a lot of modern materialists. While Spinoza is in large agreement with most of them (no supernatural, transcendent forces or "mystery" causes), and whole agreement about existing states with some (non-reductive materialists), he does differ in having a more metaphysically rich reality than most of them. He understands the world to possess more sorts of things than just the material.
Reality doesn't just have material things or relations of material things as a most modern materialists would say. It also has other aspects, such as Substance, the attribute of thought, modes under the attribute of thought, and the infinite number of (for Spinoza at least) unknown attributes, which are not the existing/material states of reality. .
Quoting Wayfarer
What did I miss?
Extension and cognition are different in any case. The former is a sort of thing that exists (i.e. when something is present or true by existing), while the latter is a sort of thing in terms of how it appears in thought (i.e. a meaning, a concept, a logical distinction) and isn't true by something existing or not.
For "material substance" to have extension and cognition doesn't make sense. If you are talking about existing states, all of them are necessarily modes under the attribute of extension, for their presence depends on what exist or not. Material states in this sense cannot be cognition. A materiel state is given by that it exists (mode of extension), never by how it appears in cognition.
Substance is neither the attribute of extension nor cognition, but an entirely different thing that occurs in parallel to them. In this respect, Spinoza has no "materiel substance", He has a Substance given with material states (modes under the attribute of extension), if we are to describe the relation of Substance to material states. .
'Can be read as' does not equate to 'used the term'. I already explained that I am not claiming that Spinoza thought precisely in modern materialist terms, but that his philosophy is not inconsistent with modern materialism.
Materialism in the form I favour is the position that there is nothing beyond the material universe we find ourselves inhabiting and that the mind and body are not separate things. Spinoza said: "The mind is the idea of the body" and he saw mind and the body as one and the same thing conceived in two different ways: under the attribute of thought and under the attribute of extension.
Spinoza equated God with the Universe, the whole of Nature and thought God was the one and only substance, infinite, eternal and self-causing. The same could be said of matter, so his view is consistent with materialism. He denied there was any afterlife, or anything transcendent of the Universe. That is also obviously consistent with materialism.
I'm not responding to you again if you fail to address the actual points I've made or try to dismiss what I say by labelling it as this or that.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Material states can be extended and/ or they can be cognitive. The body is a material state, or preferably process, and it is cognitive, so...
They are extended, they are never cognitive..
If you speak about a state/mode under the attribute of cognition, you are not longer talking about in material terms. You've switched to talking about how the state/mode appears to thought. No longer are you describing the fact something exists, but rather that a state/mode has a certain meaning of logical distinction.This is not an existing state.
Let's say we take the mode of an atom. If I describe it under the attribute cognition, I'm talking about its meaning that has nothing to do with existing- the fact this atom is logically distinct, has meaning in language and thought, etc.-, aspects of this atom which are true no matter what exists.
Heh, I got in before the edit.
An existing body state is not cognition here. Spinoza's attribute of cognition is not referring to the existence of our minds, experiences or their causes.
Being existing states, this sense of the modes of our mind, experiences and their causes are under the attribute extension:: they are all material states.
YouTube dialog on the book between the author and John Vervaeke