Abstract

Scholarly attention has focused on the Aristotelian candidates for substance; this thesis suggests that Aristotle's discussion of these candidates might make more sense to us if we understand better the criteria of adequacy, the standards by which competing claims to the title 'substance' are judged. Since there are several Aristotelian criteria of substance, one may also pose the question "What holds these criteria together?" The "Introduction" answers this question with the following hypothesis: to be a criterion of substance is to be one of the ways for something to be a first principle or cause. A corollary to this is that to be a first principle or cause is just exactly what it is to be a substance. The thesis examines three of the Aristotelian criteria of substance: unity, definability, and separation, devoting a chapter to each. A detailed analysis of each concept is given, looking closely at the relevant texts, and an attempt made to show how each of them is a way of being a first principle or cause. An appendix to the chapter on separation contains an extended argument that choristos in Aristotle always means 'separation', and never 'separable', as well as exhaustive indices to the occurrences of the -choris- stem in Aristotle